 Larry Roberts, center, with attorney Brian Abbington, left, and investigator Carlos Escobedo. (Photo: Death Penalty Information Center)
Gardner was bleeding profusely, but he picked up a knife left by his assailant and appeared to pursue his attacker up the stairs to the second floor, where he encountered Albert Patch, a prison guard. Gardner then stabbed Patch in the chest. Both men died within hours.
Archie Menefield, who had been seen running from Gardner and throwing a knife out the window, was quickly arrested. He was questioned by investigators and said he had been present when Gardner was stabbed but had not taken part in the attack. He then asserted his Miranda rights to not answer any more questions.
Both Gardner and Menefield were affiliated with the Black Guerilla Family (BGF), a gang that sprawled across the California prison system. Believing that the attack was gang-related, prison officials placed known BGF members in a separate wing, isolating the men from the rest of the inmate population.
The initial interviews with inmates and guards suggested that two men had attacked Gardner, and officers with the corrections department’s Security and Investigations Unit (S&I) reviewed prison files for clues on Menefield’s friends at CMF. The list included 27-year-old Larry Roberts, who was serving a sentence of seven years to life after being convicted in 1970 for a murder that occurred when he was 17 years old. (Roberts was at CMF for a required medical/psychological evaluation prior to an appearance before the parole board.)
On August 19, investigators interviewed Raybon Long, who said that Gardner had been killed by Menefield and Roberts as part of a BGF power struggle at the Vacaville prison. Two weeks later, Long gave another statement to investigators and said that Roberts stabbed Gardner, and Menefield, although present, did not actively participate. He also said the stabbing was not BGF-related but was over “punk business,” a reference to coerced sex within the prison. Long said that Roberts used a white-handled knife, although the knife recovered by investigators had a brown handle.
S&I Investigators re-interviewed Menefield, who drew a diagram of the Gardner stabbing scene, writing the word “assailant” in one section and “Terry” in another, an apparent reference to Ryland Terry Cade. (An investigator would later say that Menefield also indicated Roberts was the assailant.)
Cade’s first interview took place on August 25. He said he had no idea why investigators wanted to talk to him; he was down the hall and around the corner at the chapel when Gardner was stabbed. “I was not there,” he said repeatedly. The investigators pushed him, with one officer telling Cade: “I don’t think you want to get caught up in this either,” and “I don’t think you want us to put you in it either, do you?”
Cade then said that he had seen Menefield and another inmate named Bill Stevens a few minutes before the stabbing. Later that day, Cade looked at a small group of photographs and selected Roberts as one of the men he saw stab Gardner.
Investigators had first interviewed Roberts on August 18. There is no recording of the interview, although other records indicate it might have been taped. According to an investigator’s notes, Roberts said that he and Gardner didn’t get along, but he had no role in the stabbing and was on the third floor at the time of the incident. Roberts gave investigators the name of a guard who could vouch for his whereabouts at the time the alarm sounded and the prison went into lockdown.
Roberts spoke again with investigators on October 28. In this interview, which was recorded, Roberts complained about being confined to the segregation unit, unable to locate inmates and others who could help him assert his claims of innocence.
Separately, prison officials asked Roberts to provide a blood sample. He declined, fearful that investigators would plant evidence against him. Later, Roberts received a court order to provide a sample. His blood was never connected to biological material found on Gardner, Patch, or at the crime scene.
On June 3, 1981, Roberts and Menefield were charged with murder in the deaths of Gardner and Patch. They were also charged with assault, conspiracy to commit murder, and possession of a weapon by an inmate.
Prosecutors sought the death penalty for both men.
Richard Urquhart, a former deputy district attorney in Solano County, was appointed to represent Roberts. He had been in private practice for two to three years and had never handled a homicide trial, much less a capital case. The state’s lead prosecutor was Deputy Attorney General Charles Kirk. A year earlier, the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals had reversed Kirk’s conviction for contempt of court, based on charges that he misled a federal judge. The dissenting opinion said that “Kirk’s pervasive lack of candor amounts to a contumacious obstruction of the administration of justice.”
A preliminary hearing before a magistrate was held in Solano County Municipal Court in August 1981. Prosecutors said that the only witnesses to Gardner’s stabbing were other inmates, and they also explained to the court that Roberts and Menefield were responsible for Patch’s death because Gardner had gone into hypovolemic shock after he was stabbed, rendering him an “unconscious agent” of Roberts and Menefield.
Dr. Boyd Stephens, the San Francisco County coroner, testified about Gardner’s state of mind after being stabbed but said his testimony was speculative. Prosecutors also said that Roberts and Menefield could be “vicariously liable” for Patch’s death.
Magistrate Curtis Singleton made a factual finding that there was not probable cause to charge Menefield and Roberts with Patch’s death. “It is equally believable that the death of Mr. Patch could have either been caused at that time by unconsciousness or insanity of the decedent Charles Gardner and it is equally believable that he was so intent on attempting to dispatch with [Mr. Roberts] and Mr. Menefield that he took Mr. Patch’s life because he was between he and one of the fleeing defendants,” Singleton said.
On October 9, 1981, after prosecutors objected to Singleton’s ruling, Judge Michael McMinnis of Solano County Superior Court reinstated the charges related to Patch’s death. Roberts appealed the decision, but the California Court of Appeals, Third District affirmed the lower court ruling.
Roberts and Menefield were tried together in Solano County Superior Court. Prior to the trial’s start, Roberts had moved for severance, arguing that Menefield had made inculpatory statements about Roberts to investigators. Judge Randall Ellis denied the motion on May 21, 1982.
The trial began on October 4, 1982. Three inmates testified that they saw Roberts stab Gardner.
Cade testified that Menefield held Gardner down, and Roberts stabbed him with a “shank,” then dropped the knife and ran upstairs. After the stabbing, Cade said, he and Roberts were both in the prison’s segregation wing, and Roberts confessed to stabbing Gardner because Gardner wanted to leave the BGF and was said to be contemplating an attack on another inmate.
During cross-examination, Cade said he had testified falsely at a preliminary hearing about Long’s location at the time of the stabbing. He also said he disliked Roberts. In addition, Cade said he had asked for an accelerated parole date but was told that wasn’t possible. He also said he had received $40 from the state.
Long testified he saw Roberts stab Gardner with a knife with “a white handle on it like hospital kind of tape.” He also said that prior to the stabbing, he heard Roberts argue with Ruben Williams about control of the BGF at Vacaville. He said Roberts threatened Gardner, who supported Williams, telling him, “Well, if you gonna ride with him, you gonna die with him.”
Long said that on the morning of the stabbing, Roberts woke up Menefield and told him to hurry up because Williams was on the first floor. He said Roberts also asked for someone to collect the knives after the attack. Long said he saw Roberts run to the third floor after the stabbing. He said on cross-examination that he lied at a preliminary hearing about Roberts’s actions after the stabbing. He also said he had received $30 to $40 in his prison account and that he might receive a reduced sentence in exchange for his testimony.
Leslie Rooks testified that Gardner had cursed at Roberts the day before the incident. Roberts, Rooks said, asked Rooks for a knife and said he was going to kill Gardner and Williams. Rooks also said he was on the third floor when the alarm sounded and that he went to Roberts’s cell and found him, wearing his underwear and maybe a bathrobe.
Rooks also testified that the prosecution had written to the parole board on his behalf, paid $30 into his prison account, and taken steps to ensure his safety. After Urquhart’s cross-examination, Rooks testified that Roberts had issued an order to kill him.
Robert Hayes testified that he and Roberts were working in a medical clinic on the morning of August 17. He said Roberts asked him whether alcohol could remove fingerprints and if another substance could remove blood. He said Roberts tried to call Menefield. Later, Hayes said, Roberts found some thin tape and began wrapping a prison-made knife. Hayes said he asked Roberts about his beef with Gardner, which Hayes thought had been settled. Roberts said it wasn’t, Hayes said, and that Gardner was still disrespecting him.
Hayes testified he looked into the hallway from the window of the clinic and saw Roberts stab Gardner. Hayes said he and the state’s other inmate witnesses did not discuss the case when they were housed together at the state prison in Chino or in the Contra Costa County Jail before the trial.
An inmate named Richard Yacotis had agreed to testify for Roberts, after signing a letter on August 12, 1982, that said he overheard Long and David Calvin discuss “lying for their freedom” in a murder trial and sending “some other inmates to the gas chamber.” (Calvin and several other witnesses testified at the trial that they saw Menefield stab Gardner but couldn’t identify the second assailant.)
Prior to his testimony, Yacotis met with prosecutors and then refused to testify for Roberts. Instead, he testified as a state’s witness. He said that after the stabbing, he heard Roberts ask Menefield why Menefield didn’t pick up the knife. Menefield responded that he was running after Gardner. Yacotis also said that he heard Menefield tell Roberts, “If push comes to shove, I will take the rap.”
Yacotis also testified that he overheard some of the state’s other inmate witnesses discussing the case. He also said that he didn’t read the letter he signed on behalf of Roberts because he couldn’t read very well.
The prosecution also introduced several out-of-court statements that several witnesses said had been made by Menefield. Judge Randall would tell the jury that because Menefield didn’t testify, they couldn’t be used against Roberts. In addition, an S&I investigator testified about the diagram Menefield drew of where he and others were at the time of the stabbing.
Robert Rudolph, a guard, testified that he was working on the third floor, manning the east gate, and saw Roberts and Menefield talking. He said the east gate was often left open, but he couldn’t recall if that was the case on August 17. After the alarm sounded, Rudolph went down to the second floor. He said he couldn’t recall whether he locked the gate. He also said he didn’t recall seeing Roberts pass through the gate in the minutes before the alarm sounded.
In an earlier statement, Rudolph had given a different account, indicating to Kirk and other state officials that he locked the gate when he left the third floor. This would have helped corroborate Roberts’s alibi that he was on the third floor.
During cross-examination, Urquhart asked Rudolph about that account. Rudolph said he never told Kirk he locked the gate. Later in the trial, Urquhart called Kirk as a witness. Kirk said his notes from the Rudolph interview actually included statements from another guard, who had said Rudolph locked the gate.
The state also presented evidence and testimony to support its contention that Gardner was not a violent man; his attack on Patch could only have been the result of the tremendous loss of blood and hypovolemic shock that caused him to lose control of his actions. A defense expert said it was impossible to say that Gardner had experienced hypovolemic shock.
A corrections officer testified that Gardner had not received a disciplinary write-up in the three years prior to his death.
Gardner’s attorney testified about Gardner’s positive attributes. A psychiatrist at CMF testified that Gardner had said he wanted to turn his life around. On cross-examination, the psychiatrist acknowledged that Gardner was delusional, that he had been in the facility’s psychiatric lockup as recently as June 1980, and that a report from March 1980 expressed concerns that his “aggressive activity” might return.
Roberts did not testify, but he mounted a vigorous defense aimed at discrediting the state’s witnesses and trying to show that he was two floors away when Gardner was stabbed.
Ray LaPointe, a civilian employee of the CDC, testified that Hayes was the only inmate in the clinic on the morning of August 17. LaPointe said he was very familiar with Roberts and that all the tape in the clinic was kept in one drawer within his sight.
Three inmates—James Lindsey, Richard Caton, and Benito Morales—testified that they saw Roberts inside the third-floor wing at the time the alarm sounded.
John Warren, a parolee, and Arthur Givens, each testified that they had been incarcerated at Chino with the state’s witnesses. Each said Long had told him that he didn’t know anything about the stabbing but was going along with prosecutors to earn favorable treatment.
After the stabbing, an alarm was sounded, and the prison went into lockdown. Although Roberts was found by officers inside the gate on the third floor, prosecutors presented evidence to undermine his alibi. Harland Ritz, a corrections officer, testified that he had done a timed test of how long it took to get to the third floor from the first-floor location where Gardner was stabbed. Ritz said Roberts could have made the trip in less than a minute and been unseen.
Two corrections officers testified as experts about BGF and its dangerous activities inside and outside the state’s prison system. One officer said: “It’s a prison gang that originated or began in ’51. Presently it’s in every institution within the Department of Corrections. They are specialists in terrorism. They started as a political organization. Outside now they are involved in prostitution and narcotics. Recently, when several of the generals had either been killed or died by one form or another, they had a power struggle, and several other killings took place.”
During his closing argument, Kirk reminded the jurors of Menefield’s statements to other inmates and to investigators. He said the lack of blood found on Roberts in the minutes after the attack could be explained by Roberts discarding his jacket in a laundry basket (No jacket was found, and there was no testimony that the assailant removed his jacket.) In addition, Kirk said that Roberts’s refusal to consent to a blood test without a court order showed consciousness of guilt. Urquhart had unsuccessfully objected to this part of Kirk’s closing argument, and Judge Randall told jurors they could consider this evidence during deliberations.
On April 14, 1983, the jury convicted Roberts of two counts of first-degree murder, conspiracy to commit murder, assault, and weapons possession by an inmate. Menefield was convicted on similar charges. At sentencing, the jury found special circumstances, including Roberts’s previous conviction on first-degree murder, and he was sentenced to death on May 27, 1983. Menefield received a sentence of life without parole.
Roberts appealed. His attorneys said that Judge Ellis had made numerous errors that hamstrung Roberts’s defense.
These included: allowing the corrections officers to testify as expert witnesses about BGF; preventing the jury from hearing that the state had paid for Cade’s tattoo removal; allowing prosecutors to not disclose the entire “rap sheets” of the inmate witnesses testifying against Roberts.
The appeal also said that Judge Ellis erred in not severing the trials, because the statements Menefield allegedly made to other inmates inculpated Roberts. Under federal law, a hearsay statement at a joint trial attributed to one co-defendant that incriminates the other is not admissible because it violates the second defendant’s right to confront a witness.
The appeal also challenged Roberts’s conviction for Patch’s murder, saying there was insufficient evidence and the jury was given flawed instructions.
On March 23, 1992, the California Supreme Court reversed Roberts’s first-degree murder conviction in Patch’s death. There was no evidence of premeditation or deliberation, the court said. It also said that Judge Ellis’s jury instructions incorrectly explained the law of proximate cause. It wasn’t just that Gardner’s stabbing set in motion a chain of events that led to Patch’s death. The death had to be foreseeable.
The court affirmed the other convictions and Roberts’s death sentence. It said that Ellis had made several improper rulings—on the tattoo removal, the rap sheets, and the motion to sever the trials, among others, but that these errors were harmless.
On April 24, 1995, Roberts filed a petition for a writ of habeas corpus in U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of California. The petition was then stayed, because Roberts had not exhausted his claims in state court. On July 7, 1998, Roberts filed a habeas petition in state court.
Also in 1995, three witnesses recanted their trial testimony.
Long said: “I lied on the witness stand at the trial about nearly everything I testified to regarding Larry Roberts. The prosecution’s investigators who questioned me made it clear to me that Roberts and Menefield were their targets and that they wanted me to say that Roberts wanted to kill Gardner and Ruben Williams, that he stabbed Gardner, and that he ran to the third floor. That is eventually what I testified to, and it was false.”
Long also said that he and the state’s other witness inmates were encouraged by prosecutors to coach each other “to ‘get the story straight,’ and we did try to do that. But the story was so basically untrue that we had a difficult time getting the facts together.”
Long recanted this recantation in 1999, saying he had signed the first declaration because he thought Roberts had been removed from death row and might harm him.
Rooks said in his declaration that he never saw Roberts with a knife and that he was with him on the third floor when the alarm sounded. He also said he never saw Gardner and Roberts argue the day before the stabbing.
Yacotis also recanted part of his testimony. He said he had been in Chino with Long and Calvin, where the two men discussed the deals the prosecution was giving them.
He said that prosecutors persuaded him to testify for the state. One official told him, “We can make it easy for you or hard for you.” Later, Yacotis said, officials, including Kirk, asked him to say that “when I was in [the segregation wing] in 1981 ... I overheard Roberts say to Menefield, ‘Why didn't you pick up the knife?’ This was false, and I made it clear to them that it was false, but they did not care.” Yacotis said that it wouldn’t have been possible for Roberts and Menefield to discuss the stabbing while they were in the segregation wing because they were suspected crime partners and kept on separate floors.
The state habeas petition said that prosecutors had knowingly offered perjured testimony. It also said that Urquhart had been ineffective for failing to present evidence from a guard named Peter DuQuesney, who had testified that he locked the third floor gate when the alarm sounded but couldn’t remember if it was locked beforehand. He had told a defense investigator in 1982 that the gate was kept locked; the procedure was to unlock the gate and then quickly relock it.
“I would definitely have cross-examined DuQuesney using this prior statement to [the investigator] had I been aware of the statement,” Urquhart said. “The locked condition of the East gate was the most important fact in the entire case.”
The California Supreme Court appointed Franklin Taft of Solano County Superior Court to hold an evidentiary hearing and issue findings. The hearings were held in 2000 and 2001. Long asserted his Fifth Amendment rights and did not testify. Cade testified consistent with his trial testimony, but Roberts’s attorneys were able to introduce new evidence about Cade’s mental health. He had stopped taking his antipsychotic medication a week before the stabbing, and a forensic psychiatrist who treated Cade said that Cade’s ability to “perceive, recall, remember, and relate events” was somewhat impaired without the medication Cade took to control aural and visual delusions.
Judge Taft issued his findings on May 23, 2001. He said that Long’s trial testimony “should not be treated as believable.” He also found that Cade’s “trial testimony was not truthful and varied from what he actually heard and saw,” and that Yacotis’s testimony at the evidentiary hearing was believable. Judge Taft also said that Urquhart had not been ineffective in his representation of Roberts and “that there was no believable evidence that there was an attempt by Kirk or the investigators to induce false testimony.”
The California Supreme Court denied Roberts’s habeas petition on January 2, 2003. It said that Cade’s credibility issues were for a jury to decide and that Long’s flip-flops made it hard to assess his truthfulness. Yacotis, the court said, was an ancillary witness. His account didn’t undermine the court’s confidence in the verdict.
In a dissent, Associate Justice Joyce Kennard wrote: “The majority misses the point. True, there was no new evidence from Cade. Instead, there was evidence that Cade may have been delusional at the time of Gardner’s stabbing, that he was anxious to tailor his story to suit the investigators, and that he was especially susceptible to having his perception of events altered by details of the crime learned from others. The jury at petitioner’s capital trial, however, never heard testimony about Cade’s mental health. The referee, who did, was in a better position to evaluate Cade's credibility. In my view, there is substantial evidence to support the referee’s finding that inmate Cade falsely testified at petitioner’s capital trial that he saw petitioner stab inmate Gardner.” Chief Justice Ronald George concurred in the dissent.
On July 15, 2003, attorneys Robert Bloom and Claudia Robinson filed an amended federal petition for a writ of habeas corpus challenging Roberts’s conviction and his sentence. Building on the evidentiary hearing in state court, the 400-page petition said Roberts’s conviction was the result of perjury and prosecutorial misconduct. It said the state had failed to disclose issues related to Cade’s mental health and the extent of benefits offered to the inmate witnesses. It also said the state had failed to disclose the full rap sheets of these witnesses, evidence that could have been used to undermine their credibility. In addition, the petition said the inmate witnesses, including Long and Yacotis, had testified falsely, and that prosecutors had allowed this perjury to go uncorrected.
Hayes’s rap sheet, for instance, omitted a series of burglary convictions between the time of Gardner’s death and the trial.
Cade’s original rap sheet, for example, contained the words “INSANE and CAHO PATTON” (a reference to a commitment at Patton State Hospital), but Kirk had removed these words from the document he gave to Judge Ellis for inspection. Kirk would later say he did not think they were part of the official record. The petition also noted that Urquhart had no knowledge of the extent of Cade’s mental health issues.
In addition, several of the witnesses had falsely testified that they hadn’t discussed the case amongst themselves, the petition said. Roberts’s appellate team had found a letter Cade wrote to state investigators on behalf of himself and Long, asking for assurances that they would be released from prison. They also discovered a letter Kirk wrote to a prison superintendent after the trial, where he praised Hayes for “placat[ing]” his fellow inmates and “maintaining morale.”
The federal habeas petition also asserted that Urquhart was ineffective for failing to adequately cross-examine Cade about the benefits he received and hoped to receive and for not presenting expert testimony that the small monetary benefits the inmates received in exchange for their testimony were actually quite significant within the prison system.
The petition also included broad claims that Roberts’s constitutional rights to a fair trial were violated in several ways, including problems with jury selection, courtroom security, and Judge Ellis’s ruling to try Roberts and Menefield together.
Seven years after filing the amended petition, Roberts’s attorneys moved to expand the evidentiary record, and the request was granted in early 2013. In January 2014, Judge Dale Drozd held a series of evidentiary hearings. Roberts was now represented by Bloom, Brian Abbington and Harry Simon, both in the Federal Public Defender’s Office in Sacramento.
At the hearing, Kirk testified that he was aware that some of Long’s trial testimony was untrue, but Kirk said he believed that Long “felt” he was being truthful.
More than eight years later, on October 28, 2022, Judge Drozd conditionally granted Roberts’s petition based on prosecutorial misconduct and ineffective assistance of counsel and said that Roberts’s conviction would be vacated unless the state commenced a retrial in a reasonable time. In a lengthy footnote, Judge Drozd apologized for the delay, which he attributed to the “long-standing lack of judicial resources in this district” that “long ago reached crisis proportions.”
In his 200-page ruling, Judge Drozd said that Kirk and other prosecutors had failed to turn over critical evidence—of Cade’s mental health, of benefits the witnesses received, and of their criminal records—that would have undermined the credibility of the state’s witnesses. He said that prosecutors had hid behind state discovery laws to avoid turning over important exculpatory evidence.
He also said that Kirk appeared to have known that Cade and Yacotis testified falsely.
In Cade’s case, Judge Drozd wrote: “This court does find that the evidence regarding Cade establishes that Kirk had constructive knowledge that at least some of Cade’s trial testimony was false. The prosecutor has a duty to correct false testimony. Kirk did not carry out that duty.”
Later in the ruling, he wrote: “The prosecutor committed significant misconduct when he failed to provide the defense with information that was unquestionably material to the credibility of the most important inmate witnesses. And, it cannot be ignored that many actions of the prosecution team, while perhaps not individually rising to the level of prosecutorial misconduct, affected the outcome of petitioner’s trial … Even if those actions were not misconduct, they contribute to this court’s finding that petitioner’s guilt phase conviction rested on extremely shaky ground. Those unfair prosecutorial actions aside, this court finds that the errors of constitutional magnitude that took place in connection with petitioner’s trial undoubtedly rendered his trial fundamentally unfair and affected the jury’s verdict."
Judge Drozd also said that Urquhart’s errors “contributed” to his conclusion that the “guilt phase of petitioner’s trial was so laced with error that the verdict finding petitioner guilty cannot stand.” His ruling either rejected Roberts’s other claims or found them moot.
After the decision, the state reviewed the case to determine whether a retrial was possible. On June 21, 2024, it asked Judge Drozd to grant the writ.
The state said: “As a part of that review it was determined that a number of witnesses were deceased, or of sufficiently advanced age that they would be unavailable to provide testimony at a new trial. Based on the extensive review, the California Attorney General has now determined that a retrial is not reasonably feasible.”
Judge Drozd granted the writ on June 29, 2024. Roberts remained in custody on the 1970 murder conviction. He is eligible for parole, both as a youthful offender, based on his age at the time of that crime, and as an elderly offender, as he turned 71 years old in March 2024.
– Ken Otterbourg
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