FEATURE
“Reversal of conviction” New evidence reverses 2010 attempted murder conviction
by Kimberly Rivers
O
kimberly@vcreporter.com
n April 12, 2021, a hearing will take place in Ventura County Superior Court at which the Ventura County District Attorney will support Ignacio Ixta Junior’s request that the court throw out the guilty verdict against him as a result of exculpatory evidence. Ixta had just turned 21 in 2010 when he was found guilty of attempted murder by a jury in Ventura County Superior Court. He was sentenced to 35 years for the Dec. 3, 2009 shooting of Miguel Cortez in Oxnard. Cortez survived and fully recovered from the shooting. Ixta has served 10 years at the maximum security Pelican Bay State Prison in Crescent City, California. A pro bono legal defense team, however, has uncovered new evidence implicating the prosecution in a Brady Violation for withholding evidence from the defense, and persevering through denials of appeals and writs of habeas corpus. The April 12 hearing is the result of an intrepid and dedicated father who never faltered in seeking the truth of his son’s innocence.
Mario’s Story
The formation of Ixta’s pro bono team came about, initially, through the viewing of a film. Ignacio Ixta Senior and his wife, Alma Ixta, knew their son was innocent. But they did not know where to turn. They left their home in Arizona and moved to Fillmore to be able to visit their son and work for his exoneration. After the couple spent their retirement savings on attorneys they say didn’t help much, a family member told Ixta Senior to watch Mario’s Story, a 2007 documentary by Jeff Werner about Mario Rocha, who was wrongfully convicted of murder in Los Angeles County and ultimately exonerated after a nun investigated his case and uncovered new evidence. After watching the film, Ixta Senior said that, “The same thing happened to Junior. I told my wife you need to watch this.” She reluctantly watched the film and said she cried the entire time, knowing her son was experiencing the same things: Rocha was convicted even though he didn’t fit the description given by eyewitnesses of the shooter. The film inspired Ixta Senior and gave him a pathway forward. “I decided I’m going to find every single person that helped this guy get out of prison and you know what? After a few months I found every single one of them.” After becoming connected to people in the Los Angeles area, “ everything started...I learned what to do and how to do it.” “It didn’t make sense to me,” Alma admitted. “My husband really had his mind made up...Thank God for his craziness. In my eyes, all of this has been able to happen... My baby is coming home thanks to him, my husband.”
A vital connection
Investigative reporter Natalie Cherot, PhD. Photo submitted 10 —
Ixta Senior also began his own investigation, eventually making contact with Natalie Cherot, a resident of Ventura and longtime investigative reporter. In September 2015, Cherot skeptically agreed to meet the Ixtas for coffee at Starbucks. She said they seemed like really nice people, and they clearly loved their son, but that didn’t mean he was innocent. Ixta Senior convinced Cherot to take the
Ignacio Ixta Junior (center) with parents Alma and Ignacio Senior at Pelican Bay State Prison. Photo courtesy of the Ixta family
case file home to read, although she made no promises. In the file, Cherot zeroed in on the eyewitnesses to the shooting, all of whom gave the same descriptions. There were three men. One, the shooter, was slender, short and dark with a thin face. The second man was very tall and very overweight. None of the eyewitnesses got a good look at the third man, but all said he had light hair and was short. Cherot asked for photographs of Ixta from different time periods. She wanted to see if he could possibly have matched the description of the shooter. She considered whether narcotics were involved (they often alter someone’s appearance), even though Ixta Junior had no history of drug use. But in viewing the various photos, Cherot said that Ixta Junior “never got tan, he was pale, or he was sunburned.” He was tall but not over 6 feet, and he was not thin; strong looking but “not chubby.” “This is really weird. But I don’t know what I’m going to do about this,” Cherot recalled thinking. “Finally the deacon said ‘Come with me to the house, talk to people there where the shooting occured.’” (Cherot calls Ixta Senior “deacon,” in reference to his being an ordained deacon in the Catholic Church.)
Only one of three witnesses asked to testify
In July 2016, she went with Ixta Senior to the site of the shooting and they spoke to an eyewitness, who was also the victim’s brother-in-law. “I showed him a photo of [Junior], ‘Did this guy do it? Is he the shooter?’ ‘No,’ he said. He said the guy who ‘came in and shot my brother-in-law was short, had a thin face and was dark.’” Ixta is 5’ 11” and weighs about 180 pounds. Cherot described him as having “high cheekbones, a roundish face, is not overweight and is not dark...he’s pale.” And here was a family member of the victim, one of the eyewitnesses, adamant that the shooter could not be Ixta Junior. In addition, the brother-in-law told Cherot that he told the police, after looking at a pack of photos, “The shooter was not in the headshots. He told the police that. ‘Your guy didn’t do it.’ It was a major red flag that something wrong was going on.” Something else bothered Cherot: Only the brother-in-law testified at the trial. (He claimed that he told the jury the same thing — that Ixta Junior could not have been the shooter.) As for the other witnesses, “they disappeared,” or the prosecution didn’t call them at trial. “All the people interviewed, all the witnesses, never made it to the trial,” Cherot explained. “They were never called to be witnesses. Why the heck would the witnesses to an actual attempted murder not be called to the trial? Why are they missing? They should be there. They saw it!” As Cherot dug into the case records, she read that the second
eyewitness “supposedly moved to Mexico. But he was living three blocks away. Seriously, two minutes away. He told me that he never even knew anyone was looking for him. The defense attorney didn’t try to find him. The DA didn’t try to find him.” The third witness was a neighbor who lived 300 yards away from the site of the shooting. “Everybody interviewed her that night,” Cherot said. “I interviewed her three times. She never moved from that house. She never made it to trial, either. She had a very vivid description of what the people looked like. She remembered everything.” “And something funny caught my attention that the victim’s brother-in-law said,” Cherot continued. “He said ‘Ignacio didn’t do this. Miguel [Cortez] needs to come back to Oxnard and straighten this out.’” Cherot did talk with Cortez, who now lives out of state. He said they convicted the right person. But on the night he was shot, he told police he didn’t know who shot him, and a few days later, when shown photographs of Ixta Junior, he said, “I think so,” when asked if he was the shooter. “It took me a while to believe that Ignacio was innocent, to really believe it,” the seasoned reporter admitted. “But when I heard from the first witness and he said this guy did not do the shooting,” and took everything else she had learned into consideration, she became convinced that the wrong man had been convicted.
Blind justice?
On the night of Dec. 3, 2009, Cortez was shot in the front yard of his residence in the Lemonwood neighborhood in Oxnard. Three eyewitnesses described three men to police that night. None of the eyewitness descriptions matched Ignacio Ixta Junior. Cortez told police that night he didn’t know who shot him and that it was too dark to see. A few days later he identified Ixta Junior from a “six pack” of photographs provided by police investigators. Ixta Junior turned himself in to police on Dec. 22, 2009. He pleaded innocent at trial and has maintained his innocence. At trial, Oxnard Police Department Detective Alex Arnett (now a commander) stated that he included Ixta Junior’s photo in the packet shown to Cortez because he “conducted a background check on Erik Ixta,” who lived across the street from where Cortez was shot, and who was believed to have ties to local gangs, “and found some individuals that he associated with. One of them was — and I don’t know how they’re related, whether they’re brothers or cousins — but I found Ignacio Ixta, as well as the other individuals, that I ultimately included in photo lineups...that’s how I ended up putting the defendant in the photo lineup.” (1) On Dec. 15, Detective Edward Baldwin interviewed Cortez
— April 8, 2021
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