PRESUMPTION OF GUILT

In Mexico's Dysfunctional Legal System, an Arrest Most Often Leads to
a Conviction. How One Street Vendor, Wrongly Convicted of Murder, Won
His Freedom.

Mexico City - Antonio Zuniga's life changed when he went for a walk
on Dec. 12, 2005. As he crossed a busy Mexico City avenue, two burly
cops grabbed him from behind and shoved him into a patrol car.

So began a nightmarish journey into Mexico's legal system that seems
lifted from the pages of Franz Kafka. For nearly two days, the street
vendor was held incommunicado and not told why he was arrested. His
questions met with hostile stares from detectives, who would say "You
know what you did." He says in an interview that he only learned of
the charges after walking into a holding cell and being asked by a
prisoner: "Are you the guy accused of murder?"

Mr. Zuniga, then 26, was charged in the shooting death of a gang
member from his neighborhood. Ballistic tests showed Mr. Zuniga
hadn't fired a gun. Dozens of witnesses saw him working at his market
stall during the time of the murder, which took place several miles
away. And he had never met the victim. Still, he was found guilty by
a judge at trial and sentenced to 20 years in prison.

Mr. Zuniga's case is not unusual in Mexico. Crooked cops regularly
solve cases by grabbing the first person they find, often along with
a cooked-up story from someone claiming to be an eyewitness.
Prosecutors and judges play along, eager to calm a growing public
outcry over high crime rates and rising violence from Mexico's war on
illicit drug gangs. In practice, suspects are often presumed guilty.
More than 85% of those charged with a crime are sentenced, according
to Mexico's top think tank, the Center for Investigation and
Development, or CIDE.

Mr. Zuniga's story has a twist. His plight attracted the attention of
Roberto Hernandez and Layda Negrete, a married pair of lawyers who
are also graduate students at the University of California at
Berkeley. The couple took on his case, won a retrial, and in a stroke
of luck, convinced a Mexican official to let them film the ensuing
trial, which lasted for more than a year.

The result is a 90-minute documentary called "Presumed Guilty" that
offers a rare--and chilling--glimpse of Mexico's dysfunctional legal
system. The film was an official selection at the prestigious Toronto
Film Festival, and won top documentary honors at Mexico's Morelia
Film Festival. Festival organizers decided to screen it in the city's
central plaza, where 2,000 people turned up to watch. At a screening
in Mexico City on Thursday night, the audience gave a standing
ovation. Many were in tears.

Unlike the U.S., Mexico's legal system has no jury trials. In the
majority of cases, there are also no oral arguments, meaning lawyers
don't stand in front of a judge to plead their client's case. Judges
usually never meet the accused. Everything is done via paperwork.
Judges are subject to a Napoleonic code of justice, meaning laws are
strictly codified, leaving them little room for judgment.

Most Mexicans have no idea what happens in a courtroom. Only specific
parts of a trial are open to family members and others. The rest,
including evidence for or against the accused, is sealed to the
public until the case is closed.

The film offers viewers a front row seat to an ordinary case. The
result is not pretty. When asked by one of Mr. Zuniga's defense
lawyers what evidence he has against Mr. Zuniga, the detective in
charge of the case says: "He's here (in prison), right? He must have
done something." Asked by the lawyer why she was prosecuting an
innocent man, the prosecutor says with a weak smile: "It's my job."

Mr. Zuniga lost the retrial. The footage of the proceedings from the
documentary, however, was so shocking that a panel of judges on an
appeals court freed Mr. Zuniga. The prosecutor did not respond to
requests for comment.

Both Mexico City's police department and the Supreme Court said they
could not comment on Mr. Zuniga's case or judicial matters in general.

For Mr. Hernandez and Ms. Negrete, this is the second time they have
led to the release of an innocent man. In 2005, they filmed a
14-minute video about the legal system that featured a young man
wrongly accused of stealing a car. He was released soon after.

"It's an expensive way to fix injustice in Mexico," says Mr.
Hernandez, 34. The pair hope to pass a law allowing every criminal
trial to be filmed. They have a Facebook page called Lawyers With Cameras.

Someone committing a crime in Mexico has only a two in 100 chance of
getting caught and punished, according to Guillermo Zepeda, a CIDE
scholar. A big reason is that just 12% of crimes are reported to the
police, Mr. Zepeda says. In a big deterrent, police ask many people
who report crimes for money to solve the case or become suspects
themselves, Mr. Zepeda says.

According to a survey of 400 criminal cases in Mexico City carried
out by National Center for State Courts, a U.S. nonprofit, in nine of
10 cases, suspects were found guilty without any scientific evidence
like fingerprints or DNA. In more than six of every 10 cases,
suspects were arrested within three hours of the crime, leaving
little time for serious detective work, according to a study from
CIDE, a top Mexican graduate school. Almost none were shown an arrest
warrant, the study said.

Mexican cops lack access to basic forensic equipment, and Mexico
lacks a comprehensive national fingerprint database. Most police
officers are judged on the number of arrests they make, not whether
they arrest the right person. The same goes for prosecutors. "You
want a good career? Accuse, Accuse, Accuse," one Mexico City prosecutor said.

Simply being accused is bad news. Because Mexico doesn't allow bail
for serious crimes, an estimated 42% of Mexico's inmates languish in
jail without having faced trial--some 90,000 people, according to a
study by the Open Society Institute, the New York based non-profit
funded by financier George Soros.

The medieval legal system is a major handicap for the country as it
tries to modernize and bring to heel powerful drug gangs that have
declared war on each other and the government. An estimated 13,500
people have died in the carnage since President Felipe Calderon took
power in December 2006. Mr. Calderon has won praise for deploying
45,000 army troops to press the war against the cartels. But analysts
say the offensive will stall without meaningful reform to police
forces and the court system.

Public Security Minister Genaro Garcia, Mexico's top cop, is
embarking on the first, with a goal of replacing virtually every cop
in the next 15 years with college-educated policemen. Last year,
Congress amended the Constitution to incorporate the presumption of
innocence into modern Mexican law, as well as allow oral trials in
most cases. The problem: Mexican states have until 2016 to implement
the changes.

As part of that reform, the Calderon government won a change allowing
police to detain suspects without an official warrant for up to 40
days, from just two days previously. The government argues it needs
to do this for the drug war. Having won that concession, however,
advocates say the Calderon government is now dragging its feet in
implementing the judicial reforms that might make cops and judges
more accountable.

"Right now, the government is going for security instead of justice.
But security and justice are linked," says Ernesto Canales, a
prominent commercial attorney, Mexico's leading crusader for judicial
reform and the man who sponsored "Presumed Guilty" together with the
William and Flora Hewlett Foundation and other donors. If ordinary
Mexicans can grow to trust police and the courts, they are much more
likely to work with authorities to catch drug gang members, he says.
And until Mexican cops learn how to investigate, they'll never be
able to penetrate drug cartels and dismantle them.

Mr. Calderon's office did not respond to requests for comment.

In Mr. Zuniga's case, he was accused of murder based on the testimony
of a single person and nothing else. That person, it turned out, was
the cousin of the gang member who had been killed and was arrested as
a suspect shortly after the shooting.

The suspect, Victor Daniel Reyes, initially told police in two
separate interviews that his cousin was shot by three other gang
members, nicknamed Luis, Ojitos (Little Eyes), and Crucitos (Little
Cross). He said Luis, the gang leader, fired the gun. He never
mentioned Mr. Zuniga, according to court testimony.

The day after the murder, police took Mr. Reyes to the neighborhood
to find the three gang members. After hours of searching, Mr. Reyes
pointed to Mr. Zuniga crossing the street. "He did it," said Mr.
Reyes, according to court documents.

Only in his third interview with police, after Mr. Zuniga was
arrested, did Mr. Reyes mention Mr. Zuniga by name as the assassin.
The three gang members originally described as the murderers were
never arrested by police, or questioned. The police released Mr.
Reyes after he named Mr. Zuniga. Mr. Reyes couldn't be located to comment.

"When they first grabbed me on the street, my first thought was 'I'm
being kidnapped,'" Mr.Zuniga said during an interview at a Mexico
City restaurant. "I didn't even know they were cops until I heard
voices on their scanner."

It was during his first police interrogation that Mr. Zuniga says he
missed his opportunity to get out of his predicament. After he
repeatedly insisted he was innocent, one of the police sidled up to
him and suggested he could make the whole thing go away by offering
them money, and lots of it. But Mr. Zuniga said no, in part out of
principle and in part because he didn't have much money. "You just
blew it," the cop said, according to Mr. Zuniga.

In the three months it took for Mr. Zuniga's case to come to trial,
he was sent to Mexico City's rough Reclusorio Oriente prison. He
shared a small cell with 20 inmates. He slept on the floor, under a
cabinet. Cockroaches climbed over his face at night.

His girlfriend, Eva Gutierrez, threw a party to raise money so that
Mr. Zuniga, who goes by his nickname Tono and left school in the 8th
grade, could buy food in prison--something most inmates have to buy.
A local man hired to help with the party turned out to be Marco
Antonio Arias, the man who won his freedom thanks to Mr. Hernandez's
first documentary. When Mr. Arias found out what the party was for
and heard Mr. Zuniga's story from Ms. Gutierrez, he put her in touch
with Mr. Hernandez and Ms. Negrete.

The couple didn't think they could free Mr. Zuniga, but hoped to
publicize the case by making a video. "The first thing they told me
when we spoke on the phone was 'you're screwed,'" says Mr. Zuniga.

Upon reviewing his case, the couple realized that his lawyer at the
trial was not even a lawyer; he had forged his legal identification.
That was enough to ask for a retrial. In Mexico, retrials go to the
same judge as the initial ones.

The documentary footage follows what happens next. The judge, Hector
Palomares dons his robe this time around and sits behind a makeshift
desk. Mr. Zuniga says Mr. Palomares never emerged from his office at
his first trial. Mr. Palomares declined to comment for this article.

At one point, the witness, Mr. Reyes, is asked by one of Mr. Zuniga's
defense lawyers to describe the three gang members whom he'd
originally accused. He describes each one. Asked to describe Mr.
Zuniga, the man he later accused, he can't.

The detectives who arrested the street vendor and handled his case
testified, but claimed they didn't remember anything. "We have a lot
of cases," says Jose Manuel Ortega, the lead detective, shrugging his
shoulders. "I can't remember all of them." Mr. Ortega declined to comment.

At the height of the retrial, Mr. Zuniga confronts his accuser
face-to-face. As the pair talk in stilted tones and pause so a
stenographer can transcribe each word, the drama builds. Finally, Mr.
Reyes admits he never saw who killed his cousin.

But Judge Palomares upheld his initial guilty sentence.

"It was like a kick in the stomach," said Mr. Zuniga in the
interview. "It was my life they were throwing away." He had been in
jail for nearly three years at that point.

Mr. Hernandez and Ms. Negrete took the case to the appeals court.
They showed the footage of the trial. After seeing the footage an
appeals court judge pushed hard to get him released. Mr. Zuniga was
freed on April 3 of last year. Other inmates were so amazed that they
kept asking him to see his release paper, to touch it.

He is not entirely free from his ordeal. A few months ago, he got a
text message on his cellphone: "Don't worry. We'll soon get you back
in here where you belong." He says he didn't want to the number back,
out of fear. He says he has gone into hiding, to protect Ms.
Gutierrez, who is now his wife, and their baby girl.

Judge Palomares is still on the bench in a Mexico City court.
Detective Ortega is still an active duty cop.