Amy Kimpel, executive director of the Innocence and Justice Clinic
A Long Beach man who was incarcerated for two decades for a murder he did not commit will receive a $14 million settlement to resolve his civil rights lawsuit against the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, the county Board of Supervisors has decided.
The board unanimously approved the legal settlement on July 15 for Alexander Torres, 45, who was sentenced to 40 years in prison for the Dec. 31, 2000, slaying of Martin Guitron in the city of Paramount. Torres had been convicted of second-degree murder after sheriff’s personnel manufactured evidence and suppressed the existence of exculpatory evidence and alternate suspects, according to Torres’ 2022 civil rights lawsuit.
The gang-related slaying produced no eyewitnesses who could identify the shooter, the complaint states, but sheriff’s deputies and officers conspired to prosecute Torres, even though he had an alibi that was confirmed by family members, according to the Loevy + Loevy law firm, which represented Torres.
“Alex lost the foundational years of his life, two decades he should have spent building a career and building a family,” Loevy + Loevy attorney Elizabeth Wang said in a prepared statement “There is nothing that can make up for that, but this settlement is a long overdue acknowledgement of the injustice done to him, and a gesture of restitution that will help him move on with the rest of his life.”
Amy Kimpel, executive director of the Innocence and Justice Clinic at the California Western School of Law in San Diego, said she was pleased to hear that Torres succeeded in his civil rights claim.
“Mr. Torres was locked up for the entirety of his 20s and 30s – years most of us devote to building a career and a family,” Kimpel said in an email to the Southern California Record. “Money can’t give that time back to Mr. Torres, but it can ease the struggles associated with re-entering society and mitigate the harm caused to Mr. Torres by 20 years of wrongful incarceration.”
She added that the legal victory affirms efforts by the justice clinic, formerly called the California Innocence Project, to fight to overturn wrongful incarcerations. But Kimpel is less optimistic that such legal actions and settlements will encourage the justice system to avoid such mistakes in the future.
“Because there’s such a lag between the misconduct and the penalty, system actors are less likely to learn from their mistakes,” she said. “It’s like telling your child they can’t have any screen time this weekend because they didn’t do their homework three years ago.”
With the help of the California Innocence Project and the county District Attorney’s Office’s Conviction Integrity Unit, Torres’ conviction was overturned in October 2021. And the following year, a county Superior Court judge cleared his record and found him factually innocent of the slaying.
Torres’ lawsuit also alleged that “deputy gangs” actively promoted injustice within the Sheriff’s Department by closing cases by any means necessary, leading to corruption and abuses.
“Mr. Torres is proof of the human toll of a system that has tolerated and empowered police misconduct for far too long,” another Loevy + Loevy attorney, Steve Art, said. “This settlement is a welcome act of contrition on the part of L.A. County, a gesture of reparation for Alex, and a small step towards holding the system accountable.”
Torres said in a statement that his ultimate goal was to gain acknowledgment of the wrongs that were done to him.
“This will never replace all the years lost, but I’m looking forward to moving on from this nightmare,” he said.
