He spent 30 years in prison, where he was beaten. But was he innocent?

Humberto Duran was sentenced to life in prison after an eyewitness implicated him in a 1993 gang killing. The witness has since repeatedly recanted her account, saying sheriff’s deputies pressured her to lie when she was a teenager.

(Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times)

By Keri BlakingerStaff Writer

Nov. 4, 2024 4 AM PT

Humberto Duran closed his eyes and told his mother what he’d told her so many times before: He was going to die in prison. After all these years, he was sure of it.

“No,” she said, from across the visiting room table. “Have faith.”

After spending his whole adult life behind bars, by 2010 Duran had finally lost hope. Since entering California prisons, he’d been shot, stabbed and beaten. He had to get a permanent catheter, developed a seizure disorder and began using a wheelchair.

He’d survived riots, fights and years in solitary confinement. He was no longer the feisty teen he’d been in 1993, when he was arrested on suspicion of an East Los Angeles gang murder he insisted he did not commit.

“Time is going by,” he remembered telling his mother that day in the prison visiting room.

Two years later, Monica Rivera, the only eyewitness to the crime, recanted in a tearful phone call with Duran’s family. Over the next decade, she recanted to more than a dozen people, saying she’d lied in court, that Duran did not shoot 17-year-old Albert Gonzalez.

Eventually, Rivera wrote in a sworn declaration that she’d made up her story under pressure from Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputies. This year, Duran’s lawyers at California Innocence Advocates filed a petition asking a Los Angeles County Superior Court judge to overturn the conviction.

In their 147-page filing, attorneys Megan Baca and Arianna Price said deputies — one of whom they described as Rivera’s cousin — “framed” Duran, targeting him for prosecution. They said there was no other evidence implicating Duran, and he had an alibi: He’d been with his girlfriend and her mother. When detectives got a tip that another man had confessed to the killing, the petition says, they failed to seriously investigate, instead threatening the tipster with perjury charges and scaring him into leaving town.

Still, based on the now-recanted words of a teenage girl, Duran was sentenced to life in prison in 1995, after his lawyer dozed off repeatedly during trial and called only one witness in his client’s defense, according to the petition. When The Times called the former attorney for comment, he defended his work, denied falling asleep in court and said he thought the witness against his client had seemed “pretty credible” during trial.

The lead detective on the case could not be found, and his former partner did not respond to an emailed request for comment. Meanwhile, Danny Batanero, the former deputy identified as Rivera’s cousin, said the girl seemed credible at the time and that it was common for witnesses to change their stories. He also said he’d since learned he and Rivera were not related.

“All of the allegations of misconduct or criminal conduct contained in the petition attributed to me are nothing more than an obvious and nefarious attempt... to discredit me and the fact that Monica on her own identified and implicated the petitioner in this gang-related murder,” he wrote in an email.

The Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department said in a written statement that it “respects the judicial process” and that, in light of the court’s decision, homicide investigators would review the case.

“To this day, I still can’t believe I got convicted,” Duran told The Times in an interview this year, with a calm belying the weight of his words.

Baca is less reserved. While reexamining the case, she collected more than two dozen sworn statements that are now part of the court record, including one from the witness who recanted; two from jurors who said that recantation would have changed their votes; one from an alibi witness who was with Duran the night of the crime; several from residents who alleged East L.A. deputies routinely harassed and framed teens; and more than half a dozen from former members of an East L.A. gang who said Duran wasn’t in their group and wouldn’t have been allowed to take part in a gang killing. The Times reviewed those statements, along with hundreds of pages of the police and court records.

Megan Baca of California Innocence Advocates said her client’s case is a “stark reminder of the deep flaws in our criminal legal system.”

(Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times)

“The criminal legal system failed Beto at every single phase,” Baca said. “His case is not just a personal tragedy — it is a stark reminder of the deep flaws in our criminal legal system.”

But by her reckoning, the system has — belatedly — gotten a few things right: Last year, after reviewing a copy of the recantation, the state released Duran on parole. Though prosecutors have not addressed the claims of police misconduct, last month the Los Angeles County district attorney’s office conceded in a 10-page letter that there was evidence of “actual innocence.” A day later, L.A. County Superior Court Judge H. Clay Jacke overturned Duran’s conviction.

“Congratulations,” Jacke told him, “your case is dismissed.”

The son of Mexican immigrants, Duran was born in California. His mother worked in a fish canning factory, and his father did construction. Together they saved enough money to buy a modest home in East L.A. where they raised their four children.

Duran, the oldest, went by Beto. He liked baseball and heavy metal music and dreamed of joining the Marines.

A portrait of Humberto Duran from his youth

But by 17, he’d started having regular run-ins with sheriff’s deputies. Sometimes they picked him up for things he admits he did, such as driving infractions and other low-level charges. His most serious case — evading police while driving without a license — landed him on probation for a year.

Sometimes, he said, they accused him of things he didn’t do — like stealing his own bicycle. Eventually, at the advice of his public defender, he stopped going out alone so much, hoping to avoid deputies he said he feared might harass him.

“Police misconduct was simply the standard operating procedure for the Los Angeles Sheriff’s deputies in the 1990s in East L.A.,” longtime resident Guadalupe Andrade wrote last year in a sworn declaration cited in Duran’s petition. “The deputies had their own gangs that were just as criminal and dangerous as the street gangs from the projects.”

Members of the secretive, tattooed deputy groups have been linked to a number of controversies, including an off-duty brawl outside the Kennedy Hall event space in East L.A. The 2018 incident led to a sprawling, $80-million lawsuit filed by several deputies who said they were beaten by members of the Banditos.

According to that lawsuit, one of the group’s founding members was Batanero. Known to locals as “Batman,” Batanero had a history of alleged misconduct, according to Duran’s petition, including “threatening to falsely accuse innocent people of crimes, beating and harassing teenagers, and even forcing people to testify at trial against their will.”

In sworn declarations and interviews, former East L.A. residents alleged a pattern of bad behavior by Batanero and other East L.A. deputies dating to before Duran’s arrest. Primavera Baltazar, who is incarcerated in Texas for an unrelated case, alleged that in the early 1990s Batanero and another deputy — former Sheriff Alex Villanueva — pulled up on a group of teens in Belvedere Park and assaulted them for loitering, one of them allegedly kicking a pregnant teen in the process.

This month, Batanero told The Times none of that was true. He said he was never in the Banditos, and provided a signed letter from a doctor verifying that he had no tattoos as of two years ago. He also said he’d never had an unjustified use of force, and was not involved in the incident Baltazar described.

“I have never framed, harassed, beat or threatened adults or teenagers in the Maravilla Projects, East Los Angeles, Los Angeles County or anywhere else,” he wrote in an email.

In a short emailed comment to The Times, Villanueva said Baltazar had been arrested for burglary and not loitering, and that the allegations against him were “demonstrably false, defamatory” claims relying on “false allegations made recently regarding events from thirty years ago that will never see the light of day in a courtroom.”

A week before Christmas 1993, Duran — then 19 — went to his girlfriend’s house on Fraser Avenue in East L.A., not far from the local high school. Her mother joined them later that evening. By Duran’s account, they watched TV together at home and made a quick trip to Taco Bell. Around 1:30 a.m., Duran said, he left after Charles Baty, an older friend from the neighborhood, came over to walk him home.

When Duran got back to his parents’ house, his sister opened the door and told him the news: A kid he knew growing up — Albert Gonzalez — had been shot.

“I was surprised,” Duran told The Times in a recent interview. “I wasn’t even aware that he had any problems with anybody as to why they would go kill him.”

Humberto Duran, now 50, holds a photo of himself when he was 18.

(Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times)

When East L.A. deputies arrived at the scene of the crime, they found two spent bullets, six .380-caliber shell casings and one eyewitness ready to talk to them: 17-year-old Monica Rivera.

According to the deputies’ report from that evening, Rivera told them she and Gonzalez had been in a back room of his family’s home when they heard someone outside shouting for his older brother, Vidal.

It was dark and raining, but the teens went out to the driveway and saw a young man in a dark hoodie, who allegedly told Gonzalez that someone named “Beto” did not like him, according to the department’s case file.

Then, the young man pulled out a gun and repeatedly shot the teen, walking closer as he fired. Afterward, Rivera told the deputies, the shooter climbed in the passenger side of a Cadillac that was waiting in a nearby alley and left.

A few hours later, Gonzalez died at the hospital.

At first, Rivera told deputies she didn’t know the names of either suspect — the shooter and the driver — but that she knew they were members of the Rascals street gang.

The first time Duran’s name came up was two days later when, according to Baca’s petition, the slain boy’s brother told detectives he knew a guy who went by “Beto” — Humberto Duran.

But by then, the petition alleges, investigators had already “set their sights on” Duran, running his full name through a law enforcement database nearly an hour before Gonzalez’s brother first mentioned him.

The first time detectives formally interviewed Rivera was three days after the killing. Just as she’d done at the crime scene, she only mentioned one shooter — now, however, she added that there were two men in the back of the killer’s Cadillac.

But when a detective pulled out a photo of Duran that he’d brought along to the interview, Rivera said she hadn’t seen him that night and that he was not the killer, according to a transcript of the interview cited in Baca’s petition.

That evening, according to the petition, one of the detectives — Sgt. Robert Perry — briefed Batanero, a patrol deputy, on the case and said Duran may have been a suspect, even though Rivera had excluded him just that morning.

Afterward, Batanero visited Rivera at her family’s home. He told The Times last month that he went there out of concern and only after getting permission from detectives.

He didn’t record the conversation, but later wrote in his report that Rivera said there were two shooters and the second was someone she “personally knew as ‘Beto.’”

Near midnight, the petition says, Batanero brought Rivera back to the sheriff’s station for a third interview with Perry and his partner, Ruben Bejarano. (Bejarano, who Sheriff’s Department records show is still a homicide detective, did not respond to a request for comment.)

During that middle-of-the-night questioning, Rivera repeated the version of events she’d told Batanero: After the first man shot Gonzalez in the face, Duran allegedly jumped out of the back of the Cadillac and shot him in the leg, then pointed his weapon at Rivera. When the gun didn’t go off, he cursed, threatened her and fled, Rivera told detectives.

Deputies arrested Duran the day after Christmas. But as word of his arrest got around, other people came forward with tips. Peter “Rocky” Paez told investigators that a fellow Rascals gang member who went by “Spooky” had confessed when he showed up to a party a few hours later covered in blood.

When investigators interviewed Spooky, they told him Paez had blamed him for the killing. Word got out that Paez had snitched, and he skipped town.

On the first day of Duran’s December 1994 trial, Rivera didn’t show up. When Batanero finally brought her in, she testified that 17-year-old Eddie Vargas had been the first shooter. Duran, she said, had been the second.

When Batanero and Perry took the stand, they both said they thought they’d learned from the other that Duran might have been involved in the crime.

Meanwhile, Duran’s lawyer — who State Bar of California records show was later disbarred for unrelated “acts of moral turpitude” — put on what Baca described as a “grossly ineffective” defense. He didn’t offer proof to back up Duran’s alibi, Baca wrote, and during trial he showed up late so many times the judge held him in contempt, according to court minutes and a payment receipt. When reached for comment, the former attorney, Donald Ainslie, said “some of the allegations” against him were “absolutely fabrications” and that he was not held in contempt.

The one witness he called to testify, Yvette Zamora, said Rivera and Duran had previously dated, then broken up when Duran started dating another woman.

After a weeklong trial, Vargas was convicted of murder, and Duran of both murder and attempted murder. The judge gave him two life sentences.

Duran’s time in prison was tough from the start. According to parole records, in 1996, he was shot by a guard during a riot at New Folsom State Prison. One of the bullets brushed his spine and another pierced his bladder, leaving him with a permanent catheter. He developed brain damage and a seizure disorder, and eventually a psychiatric evaluation labeled him “cognitively and physically disabled.”

In the early years, he said, he acted up, raking up disciplinary infractions that landed him in solitary confinement.

“In prison, you have to prove yourself and you have to make your bones,” he told The Times in an interview. “I just wanted to be like everybody else.”

But he eventually started attending self-help groups, recovery meetings and anger management classes. He learned upholstery and worked as a mental health technician. Even though he largely relied on a wheelchair at the time, he managed to do some custodial work and get his life on a better path.

For many years, nothing seemed to change. Then, in 2017, his case landed on Baca’s desk. At the time, she was working as an investigator at Loyola Law School Innocence Project.

After reading up on the case, Baca sent Rivera a Facebook message. The two got on the phone, and Rivera tearfully confessed she’d lied. Eventually, she signed a sworn declaration formally recanting.

“I know Beto is innocent,” she wrote in her 2021 declaration. “I didn’t tell the truth when I testified at his trial and said that he was involved in Albert’s killing. My role in sending an innocent man to prison has haunted me for the past 27 years.”

She admitted she’d known Duran was not in the Rascals, and that she’d lied at trial when she said they didn’t know each other well; they’d actually slept together.

She also swore there were two shooters and that the second wasn’t Duran but rather a dangerous gang member she could have identified if deputies hadn’t “insisted” she name Duran, she said.

During one interview, she wrote, detectives repeatedly stopped the tape recorder to remind her what to say, sometimes yelling or making threats. (A forensic audio expert has since confirmed the tape was stopped and started during Rivera’s “most crucial” questioning, according to Baca’s petition.)

“After being pressured for hours by the two detectives, I finally said what they wanted me to say: that Beto Duran was there in the Cadillac the night that Albert was shot,” she wrote. “But that was not true.”

But Rivera never changed her testimony about Vargas. He, too, had long insisted he was innocent. According to Baca, he didn’t make parole and died in prison.

In summer 2022, it was Duran’s turn for a parole hearing. Baca compiled expert evaluations, evidence of his accomplishments behind bars and Rivera’s declaration. And in January 2023, Duran walked out of prison a free man.

When Duran stepped through the door of his parents’ home after three decades away, he was greeted by a sea of boxes. They were stacked in teetering towers, jumbled in messy piles. They were big and little, old and new. And even though the holidays were over, they were all neatly wrapped in Christmas paper.

Every year since he left, his mother had bought her oldest son the presents he would have wanted: Air Jordans, baseball caps, a Buffalo Bills sweater, jackets, Dodgers gear. For 30 years, she’d saved them all for the day he would come home.

Now 50, Duran is trying to build a new life for himself. He went to vocational college to become an electrician, but Baca said the frequent seizures have made it hard to work. And he’s still grieving the years he lost.

“Who knows what I would have been,” he texted his lawyer earlier this month recalling how badly he’d wanted to be a Marine. “They took my dream.”

Last month, the D.A.’s office announced it would not try to re-prosecute the case. And last week, Baca filed a motion request a finding of factual innocence, a move that could ease the path to financial compensation for the decades Duran spent behind bars. In response, prosecutors asked for two months to re-investigate the case and respond.

The outcome is uncertain. But for now, he’s trying to do what his mother told him in prison: Have faith.