LESSONS ELUSIVE IN SLAYING

Justice system: It failed to keep suspect in Tracey Biletnikoff's slaying
off the street.

When Mohammed Haroon Ali walked from Judge John Schwartz's Redwood City
courtroom in 1995, the 19-year-old Fiji native left with something a
dwindling number of California criminals ever get.

``Mr. Ali, I'm going to take a big chance on you,'' the Superior Court
judge told Ali, sparing him nine years in state prison for kidnapping his
girlfriend at knifepoint. Ali was sentenced to a year in jail and five
years' probation.

Today, Ali stands accused of strangling to death his latest girlfriend,
Tracey Biletnikoff, in a crime that has raised questions about why a
convicted kidnapper was on the streets instead of behind bars.

For more than three years, Ali seemed to skate through the system, avoiding
prison and then deportation as a series of judges, probation officers, drug
counselors and even the city of San Mateo took chances on him.

Some critics of the courts are now demanding that laws be tightened to
ensure that judges have no choice except to send violent felons like Ali to
state prison. It's a familiar refrain in a state that has spent the past
two decades filling its prisons to record levels.

But many in the local criminal justice community are cautioning that Ali's
story provides few clear lessons for ``fixing'' the system. They warn that
the efforts to help Ali may have fallen victim simply and tragically to the
unpredictability of human behavior.

State leaders have tried to control that unpredictability by sending
criminals like Ali to prison. Legislators backed by prosecutors and victims
rights groups have stiffened the penalties for felons who use deadly
weapons while breaking the law.

And they have dramatically limited who is eligible for probation, passing a
series of laws that require judges to send to prison felons convicted of
everything from murder and kidnapping to theft of public money.

But Ali avoided the penal juggernaut when Judge Schwartz took advantage of
a loophole in the mandatory sentencing laws that still gives judges some
discretion. Ali was what the law calls an ``unusual case,'' a young man
without a violent history who committed the crime under great stress and
who appeared likely to benefit from treatment.

An independent psychiatrist who examined Ali before his sentencing in
August 1995 reported that Ali had tested as ``impulsive and
short-tempered'' but had no strange obsessions and no problems with drugs
or alcohol.

``If placed on intensive probation with restrictions, (Ali) poses no undue
risk to the community and is eminently amenable to probation,'' Dr. George
Wilkinson wrote in his report to the court.

The probation department originally recommended that Ali be sent to prison,
noting the seriousness of the crime. But two months later, after reviewing
Wilkinson's report, the department backpedaled, according to probation
reports, suggesting instead that Ali could be placed on probation if
required to get counseling.

``From all appearances, the defendant appeared to be a law-abiding citizen,
a good student with plans to go to college prior to his involvement in the
present offense,'' deputy probation officer Gail Coghlan wrote in her
initial report.

Even the man whose daughter had been kidnapped and badly beaten by Ali told
Schwartz not to send Ali to prison. ``As long as he stays away from my
daughter, I think everything will be OK,'' the father told the judge,
according to the transcript of the August hearing.

Judge was moved

Only the veteran South San Francisco detective who investigated the case
and the prosecutor, deputy district attorney James Wade, asked the court to
send Ali to prison. But Wade even acknowledged at the hearing that Ali
``had a lot of things that are in his corner.''

Schwartz, a nine-year veteran of the bench, said he was moved by the
victim's father. And, after issuing a stern warning to Ali to stay away
from his victim, Schwartz suspended Ali's prison sentence.

Ali was back in court 14 months later when he failed two drug tests, one
for cocaine. But at a November 1996 hearing, Judge Margaret Kemp again
suspended Ali's prison sentence and sent him to county jail for six months.
She extended his probation and required he enroll in Project 90, a San
Mateo residential drug treatment program for addicted men.

That same month, the Immigration and Naturalization Service caught up with
Ali and began deportation proceedings. Though a legal immigrant, Ali became
deportable because of his conviction for a violent felony.

In February 1997, the INS recommended Ali be held until an immigration
judge decided his case. According to documents in his immigration file, Ali
said he feared harm if he returned to Fiji, however. On Feb. 20, an
immigration judge released him from custody on $5,000 bond.

Ali's case, not unlike thousands of similar deportation cases, appeared to
lose any urgency after that. Over the next two years, at least six hearings
were scheduled and rescheduled as INS prosecutors and immigration judges
granted Ali more time to challenge his deportation.

Ali, meanwhile, completed his rehabilitation at Project 90. He began
working with other young addicts in a mentoring group. And the drug
treatment program hired him in January of this year.

Ali took classes at the College of San Mateo with the help of a program
organized in part by the San Mateo Police Department to provide job
training to troubled young people. He was, according to police Sgt. Pat
Prudhel, one of the program's success stories.

``These things that I'm doing today are necessary for me because I've found
that I must give back to the community the good things that I've
received,'' Ali wrote an immigration judge in May 1998 requesting a hearing
extension.

Nine months later, Ali allegedly strangled Biletnikoff to death at Project
90 and then used a Project 90 van to dispose of her body. Biletnikoff's
body was discovered Feb. 16 near a parking lot at Can~ada College in the
hills above Redwood City. Ali is scheduled to enter a plea Thursday .

Indictment of system

To victims rights advocate Jan Miller, the record of decision-making is a
clear indictment of a system that allows judges and others to give violent
criminals a second chance.

``There are too many judges that think we shouldn't have prisons and that
these crimes are not the fault of the criminal,'' said Miller, who heads
San Francisco-based Citizens Against Homicide and chairs the board of the
Doris Tate Crime Victims Bureau, a victims rights group which lobbies the
Legislature for tougher sentencing laws.