California city to pay $19M over 1990 wrongful conviction

LOS ANGELES (CN) — The city of Baldwin Park, California, agreed to pay $19.1 million to settle a lawsuit by a man who spent 33 years in prison after police detectives used fabricated evidence to frame him for a 1989 shooting in which two teenagers were injured.

Daniel Saldaña sued the Baldwin Park Police Department in 2024 after he had been exonerated and released from prison.

“Mr. Saldaña’s wrongful conviction resulted from the egregious misconduct of a Baldwin Park detective who systematically fabricated evidence and pressured witnesses throughout a fundamentally flawed investigation,” said Amelia Green, an attorney with Neufeld Scheck Brustin Hoffmann & Freudenberger, in a statement Friday.

Saldaña’s conviction stems from a shooting in the city east of downtown Los Angeles on a Friday evening when members of the East Side Bolen street gang confronted a car with six teenager who were coming back from a high school football game. Shortly after the shooting, Baldwin Park police tracked the Datsun B210 in which the gang members had been driving and arrested the driver April Gallegos, the girlfriend of Raul Vidal, one the shooters.

She denied any knowledge of the shooting and the police investigation went nowhere for the next two months, according to Saldaña in his wrongful conviction lawsuit.

The detectives then brought Gallegos back in and threatened the 22-year-old single mother that she’d never see her child again if she didn’t identify the two gang members who had fired the shots. Under pressure, she pointed out a photo of Saldaña, who was also a member of the East Side Bolen gang, among the photos of gang members that the detectives had shown her.

Saldaña, however, hadn’t been anywhere near the shooting.

Likewise, he said in his suit, the detectives prompted the teenage victims to point out Saldaña from photo lineups and lied that the teenagers had identified him spontaneously without any suggestion.

Saldaña, who was 22 years old at the time, was arrested and put on trial together with Vidal and Gallegos.

He was convicted in 1990 of attempted murder and sentenced to 45 years in prison even though none of the victims could positively identify him as one of the shooters beyond the tentative admission by one of the teenagers that Saldaña might have been the second shooter at the preliminary hearing.

At the trial, this witness testified that he could not identify Saldaña as the second person who had come out of the car or otherwise identify Saldaña as being involved in the shooting, he said in his complaint.

In 2017, Vidal testified under oath at a parole hearing that Saldaña hadn’t been involved in the 1989 shooting and that another gang member had been the second shooter.

Yet, it took another six years before he was released because the parole board and the district attorney’s office didn’t share this new, exculpatory evidence with Saldaña, his attorneys or the court.

Then-LA District Attorney George Gascón, an advocate of criminal justice reform, announced Saldaña exoneration and release in May 2023. According to the district attorney’s statement at the time, that it wasn’t until February of that year that his office received a copy of the 2017 hearing transcript that prompted an investigation in Saldaña’s conviction.

Saldaña’s claims against two parole board commissioners remain pending.

Baldwin Park said in a statement issued Monday that its city council unanimously approved the settlement in closed session on Nov. 5 and that the first installment of $16.1 million will be paid within 60 days. About half of the settlement, $9.75 million, will be paid by the city’s liability insurance. The remaining amount will come from its general funds reserves.

“The city sincerely hopes Mr. Saldana can now move forward in his new life,” according to the statement.

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