Gang Related?

Judge rules to allow gang-related claims

By Michelle Bradford

Saturday, June 7, 2008

BENTONVILLE - A judge ruled Friday that jurors will be allowed to hear evidence at a capital-murder trial next month that alleges the 2006 slaying of a motorist in Lowell was a gang initiation.

Benton County Judge Tom Keith also ruled that defendants Manuel Enrique Camacho and Serafin Sandoval-Vega will stand trial together July 8, despite objections from defense attorneys.

“I wrestled with this decision, but I’m denying the motion to sever the cases,” Keith said. “Keep in mind we can separate the cases in the middle of the trial, or even at the end if necessary. But I’m confident that neither defendant will be unfairly prejudiced by the other.”

Sandoval-Vega, 20, Camacho, 27, and Roxana Hernandez, 22, are charged in the May 6, 2006, shooting death of Daniel Ray Francis of Little Flock. The 32-year-old father of four was shot while riding in a friend’s car onU.S. 71B, prosecutors said.

Sandoval-Vega, who prosecutors say pulled the trigger, is charged with capital murder, while Camacho, the driver, and Hernandez, the front-seat passenger, are charged with being accomplices to capital murder.

Prosecutors are seeking the death penalty against Sandoval-Vega and Camacho. Hernandez, if convicted, faces up to life in prison. Her trial date is pending.

Next month’s trial for Camacho and Sandoval-Vega is expected to take up to six weeks. Jury selection could take a week, given the possibility the jury could have to decide on the death penalty for two people.

After Friday’s hearing, attorneys for Camacho and Sandoval-Vega talked to the defendants’ families who remained in the courtroom.

“We’re in crunch time now,” said Joel Huggins, a Springdale attorney for Sandoval-Vega. “We’ll be calling all of you into the office for interviews in the next week or two, and we’re optimistic there’ll be a fair trial.”

Fayetteville attorney Kent McLemore spoke through an interpreter to Camacho’s family, who declined to talk to a reporter.

“They’re scared to death,” McLemore said of the family. “[Camacho] is a husband, a father and a son, and his family loves and cares about him.

“They’re very worried what might happen,” he said.

Prosecutors said Francis was shot while riding with Tracy Stith, a co-worker at J.B. Hunt Transport Services Inc.

Stith told police that he and Francis had been in a roadway dispute with the three defendants and that both cars took turns cutting in front of the other and slamming on the brakes. After about 15 minutes, Sandoval-Vega stuck a gun out of the back-seat window of Camacho’s Honda Civic and fired, prosecutors said.

Sandoval-Vega, Camacho and Hernandez were arrested that night at a Bentonville convenience store parking lot where they had a pistol and a box of ammunition in the car, police said.

Al Valdez, a retired California gang investigator and an expert witness for prosecutors, testified at an April hearing that the killing was a gang initiation.

Valdez said Camacho seized an opportunity in a dispute with strangers to let Sandoval-Vega commit a crime to get into a gang.

Valdez, a regular guest on the History Channel TV series Gangland, said he made his determination in the case based on gang tattoos on Camacho’s body, on Camacho’s deep involvement with gang crime while he lived in California, and on statements that he and others made after their arrests in Benton County.

But an expert witness for the defense, Brian Contreras, who runs the nonprofit youth program Second Chance in Salinas, Calif., testified that the shooting lacks the characteristics of a true gang shooting. He said most gang crime is “gang-on-gang” and that most gang members won’t target an innocent person for an initiation.

Tim Buckley, an attorney for Camacho, said Friday that it’s been hard coordinating witness schedules and finding Spanishspeaking experts who are qualified to work on death-penalty murder cases.

“We’d had to work with the Mexican consulate to get some witnesses here,” Buckley told Keith at the hearing. “It’s been a complicated process, but we’re getting there.”

Keith denied a request by Buckley for a 60-day continuance to fine-tune the case and accommodate an expert psychiatrist in North Carolina.

“There will always be those moments of [adjusting] trial strategy up to the last minute,” Keith said. “We’ll adjust as we go along.”

Arkansas, Pages 14 on 06/07/2008