SAN JOSE — The case against three jail deputies accused of murdering a mentally ill inmate two years ago — leading to sweeping reforms of the county jails — is now in the hands of a jury who will decide whether the lawmen end up in the kind of place they were once tasked with guarding. They are free on $1.5 million bail each.
All three are charged with Tyree’s murder and assault under the color of authority against another inmate, Juan Villa. Lubrin is also charged with a similar assault charge involving Villa from a month earlier. If convicted, all three could be sentenced to life in prison.
In their remarks Wednesday, Odbert and Rodriguez’s attorney Matt Pavone revisited past defense-expert assertions that the evidence is shaky at best that Tyree was beaten to death and repeated assertions that Sheriff’s Office investigators lacked thoroughness in both examining the alleged crime scene and considering other explanations for how Tyree died.
Odbert continued her attack on the credibility of key witness and secondary assault victim Villa, another mentally ill inmate who claimed the deputies on trial beat him before moving on to Tyree during prescribed cell checks in the sixth-floor wing where both inmates were being held. She restated Villa’s own testimony containing fantastical claims like him being the Messiah, and that he routinely tells lies.
She also again showed photos of Villa that were taken after the alleged August 2015 assault, which showed no visible marks that he was struck. Odbert described it as one of several instances in which the investigation was skewed to a predetermined conclusion.
“The problem here is credibility compared to science,” Odbert said. “If you’re given a story to reiterate and you don’t get enough practice time … you can’t keep your lies straight.”
Pavone, besides contending that his client Rodriguez was not even in the cell when the alleged Villa assault occurred, echoed Odbert’s contention that Tyree’s injuries were consistent with a high fall rather than a beating. Both attorneys referenced Tyree’s ruptured spleen and bruising on his back they said match the edge of a metal sink in his cell. Scrawlings above his cell’s doorway, the attorneys argued, suggested that Tyree had climbed the sink to reach that area before.
Thus, they continued, Tyree likely died from a fall onto the sink or in a suicide attempt, buffering the latter theory with inmate testimony that Tyree had muttered suicidal statements in the past. Farris attorney Bill Rapoport piled onto his colleague’s critiques of the available evidence in the case — and the purported lack thereof.
“Not just inadequate, but a negligent crime scene investigation,” he said. “This is not a murder case. This is an unfortunate accident.”
The jury will have to sort out competing explanations for Tyree’s injuries, which in addition to the spleen injury entail a lacerated liver that the defense says was inflicted by imprecise CPR when he was found unresponsive in his cell amid his own feces and vomit. Braker presented defense experts who contended physical evidence shows Tyree was stomped on with a boot and hit with a small blunt weapon known as a Yawara stick. He also has argued that it’s not clear that the above-doorway scrawlings used to set up the sink-fall theory even belong to Tyree.
Prosecutors said that the three deputies, and particularly Lubrin, exhibited a pattern of abusive behavior and targeted the most defenseless inmates. In his closing Tuesday, Braker referenced unusual and suspicious behavior after Tyree’s death was discovered — including timely Google searches about the consequences of certain injuries — physical evidence on Tyree’s body, and text messages of purported abuse that have been argued as incriminating, “banter” or inconclusive.
Braker brushed back the defense’s portrayal of the criminal investigation and characterized it as a scattered attempt to distract jurors from the most logical conclusion of the evidence presented at trial.
“Speculation, that’s what the defense is asking you to do,” he said. “They can’t in their theory explain all the evidence. They can’t fit everything into this story. The evidence is that they went into that cell and physically beat him … because that’s what happened.”
