San Jose man exonerated after 17 years behind bars sues for wrongful conviction

Lionel Rubalcava has spent the past year making up for a lot of lost time. Seventeen years, to be exact: The period he spent jailed or imprisoned until he was exonerated for a shooting he was miles away from.

He has worked to reconnect with his family, including his adult son, who became a man while Rubalcava was behind bars. He has worked to rebuild his life, buoyed by a job with a concrete company.

He’s now setting his sights on getting something back, and leveraging his experience to compel changes in the system that wrongfully convicted him.

“I missed out on building a whole life for myself, I missed out on the chance of raising my son, getting an education, or getting into a line of work,” Rubalcava, 42, said in an interview Friday. “All that was taken from me. I had to go through a lot of pain and suffering, and they definitely owe me.”

Last week, the New York-based civil-rights law firm Neufeld Scheck & Brustin filed a federal lawsuit in San Jose alleging that Rubalcava’s civil and due-process rights were repeatedly violated by San Jose police detectives and Santa Clara County District Attorney investigators nearly two decades ago.

The filing contends that investigators ignored ample evidence that Rubalcava was not the shooter in the April 2, 2002 attack on Mastic Street, where a group of Sureño gang members pulled up to a home in a stolen Toyota 4Runner and shot a Norteño rival in front of his younger brother. The wounded man was paralyzed from the waist down.

Investigators propped up shaky witness identifications of Rubalcava as the culprit through coercion and secret payments they hid from the trial prosecutor so they couldn’t be disclosed to the defense, the lawsuit states. Rubalcava’s attorneys further contend that in authorities’ pursuit of him, they ignored evidence about another suspect, and dismissed cell-phone location data indicating Rubalcava was on a date 45 miles away in Hollister when the victim was shot.

“The breadth and scope of misconduct that caused an innocent Lionel Rubalcava to spend 17 years in prison is staggering,” said plaintiff attorney Nick Brustin. “Through this civil rights lawsuit, we will prove that San Jose police officers and detectives violated Mr. Rubalcava’s constitutional rights at every step of the investigation.”

The lawsuit focuses particular attention on former detective Joseph Perez as continuing the case against Rubalcava even as witnesses lost resolve in their implication of him.

Also named as a defendant is current San Jose Police Chief Eddie Garcia, who at the time was an officer who oversaw a neighborhood canvass after the shooting and was part of a police interview in which the victim made a key claim that he was shot by Sureños.

San Jose police referred requests for comment to the City Attorney’s Office. In an email, City Attorney Rick Doyle declined immediate comment on the lawsuit and wrote, “Since the matter was just filed we will need time to review.” The city of San Jose and Santa Clara County headline the dozen other defendants in the suit.

Rubalcava ended up on police’s radar because two days after the shooting, he happened to be driving his truck in the neighborhood and stopped to talk to a woman in front of the shooting site. It was the victim’s sister, and she reported the encounter to police, and Rubalcava was later arrested.

On the strength of the victim’s testimony, Rubalcava was convicted of attempted murder. This was in spite of the fact that Rubalcava had a credible alibi, his vehicle was not a 4Runner, and during trial, eyewitnesses walked back their claims he was at the shooting scene.

And while Rubalcava once associated with a gang in his teen years, it was as a Norteño. The lawsuit asserts that detectives, when faced with reconciling Rubalcava and the victim not being rivals, “fabricated” a theory that the shooting had been part of an intra-gang conflict.

Two years after his conviction, the lawsuit states, the shooting victim recanted his identification of Rubalcava as his shooter. Two years after that, Rubalcava petitioned unsuccessfully to challenge his conviction in both state and federal court. The Northern California Innocence Project, based at Santa Clara University, spent many of the ensuing years scrutinizing Rubalcava’s case and in 2018 filed their own petition on his behalf.

That led to the District Attorney’s Office ordering its conviction integrity unit to re-examine the case. That included a new interview of the shooting victim, who told prosecutors he was not confident about his identification of Rubalcava, and that he only caught a glimpse of the shooter’s face. The D.A.’s office compelled the Superior Court to vacate his conviction then formally dismissed the charge, and in May 2019 Rubalcava was freed.

“Seventeen years is not 20 days. It felt like half my life,” he said. “Since I was young, I never believed that something like this could happen to people. And that if you’re innocent, even if you got charged, things would get clarified. That’s obviously not the case.”

“My goal is to go in front of a court, and hold them accountable,” he added. “They’re sworn to protect us, to serve us. For them to turn around and do something like this, it’s crazy.”

Assistant District Attorney David Angel, one of the prosecutors who re-examined the case and recommended its dismissal, said his office views Rubalcava as a victim and did not voice any objection to the lawsuit.“Whatever he thinks is right to be made whole, we would wish him the best,” Angel said. “He did not deserve what happened to him.”

Innocence Project attorney Paige Kaneb, who led the decisive push to overturn Rubalcava’s conviction, credits prosecutors for taking an earnest second look at the case. But she also believes the lawsuit is a necessary step to give Rubalcava closure.

“One of the things we’re seeing all over the country is reckoning with the truth,” Kaneb said. “Lionel was always innocent and it took time for the system to recognize that. He’s owed in all sorts of ways we’ll never be able to pay, and money is the least we can do.”

The lawsuit seeks unspecified compensation for Rubalcava. But Brustin is known for securing high-dollar settlements, highlighted by a massive $13.1 million payout in 2019 from the city of San Francisco to Jamal Trulove, who a federal civil jury determined was framed by SFPD in the murder of his friend and served seven years in prison before his conviction was overturned.

Lara Bazelon, a University of San Francisco law professor and co-counsel for Rubalcava in the lawsuit, said the filing sends a strong message that “unless you start reforming policies in a very profound way and punish these bad actors, you’re going to have to keep paying and paying and paying.”