U.S. v. Gonzales
| Decision Date | 17 January 2006 |
| Docket Number | No. 04-20131.,04-20131. |
| Citation | 436 F.3d 560 |
| Parties | UNITED STATES of America, Plaintiff-Appellee, v. Richard GONZALES, Louis Gomez, Carlos Reyna, Defendants-Appellants. |
| Court | U.S. Court of Appeals — Fifth Circuit |
Gregory Bryan Friel (argued), Jessica Dunsay Silver, U.S. Dept. of Justice, Civ. Rights Div.-App. Section, Washington, DC, James Lee Turner, Asst. U.S. Atty., Houston, TX, for U.S.
Gerald H. Goldstein (argued), Cynthia Eva Hujar Orr, Goldstein, Goldstein & Hilley, San Antonio, TX, for Gonzales.
George McCall Secrest, Jr. (argued), Bennett & Secrest, Houston, TX, for Gomez.
J.W. Johnson (argued), Johnson Law Office, San Angelo, TX, for Reyna.
Appeals from the United States District Court for the Southern District of Texas.
Before GARWOOD, SMITH and DeMOSS, Circuit Judges.
Richard Gonzales, Louis Gomez and Carlos Reyna appeal their convictions and sentences for deprivation of civil rights in violation of 18 U.S.C. § 242. We affirm.
Defendants-appellants were charged in a five count indictment with the willful deprivation, on or about March 25, 2001, of the civil rights of Serafin Carrera while in their custody, resulting in bodily injury to him, contrary to 18 U.S.C. § 242. The indictment alleged that each defendant was a Deportation officer with the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) and was acting under color of law. Carlos Reyna was charged in count one with striking and using unreasonable force against Carrera and in count four with deliberate indifference to his serious medical needs. Richard Gonzales was charged in count two with use of unreasonable force against Carrera by pepper spraying him and in count three with deliberate indifference to his serious medical needs. Louis Gomez was charged in count five with deliberate indifference to Carrera's serious medical needs. Each defendant pled not guilty. Jury trial commenced May 12, 2003 and the jury returned its verdict June 9, 2003, finding Reyna not guilty on count one and guilty on count four, Gonzales guilty on counts two and three and Gomez guilty on count five. The district court sentenced Gonzales to concurrent terms of 78 months' imprisonment and three years' supervised release on each of counts two and three; Gomez was sentenced to 41 months imprisonment and three years' supervised release; and, Reyna was sentenced to 33 months' imprisonment and three years' supervised release. On appeal defendants assert divers challenges to their convictions and sentences.
Viewing the evidence in the light most reasonably favorable to the government the following factual context is reflected.1
The defendants, Gonzales, Gomez, and Reyna worked as deportation officers for the San Antonio division of the INS. They were members of the elite San Antonio Fugitive Unit, a group that specialized in tracking down and deporting illegal aliens with criminal records. Early in the morning of March 25, 2001, their unit, together with INS agents from Houston, prepared to raid a house in Bryan, Texas. They were advised to be alert. The night before, agents had encountered an armed 15-year-old near the house.
At 8:00 AM, the raid began. The San Antonio unit rushed in the front door while the Houston officers maintained a perimeter around the house. Minutes later, one of the house's occupants, Serafin Carrera, lay paralyzed on the kitchen floor.
The testimony is unclear about which officers took down Carrera, though Gonzales, Gomez, and Reyna were all involved. The prosecution did not charge the defendants with excessive force in taking Carrera down or with causing the broken neck which he suffered in that process. Instead, the defendants were convicted for their behavior thereafter.2
All three defendants had close contact with Carrera while he lay handcuffed on the floor. Carrera begged for help, screaming "they broke me . . . Tell them to kill me . . . Tell them to take me to a hospital." In response, Gomez taunted, "From here you're going to go to jail and you're never going to get out, you son of a fucking mother." Officer Gonzales called him "cabron"3 and invited his fellow officers to wipe their feet on him. The three defendants stood in the kitchen, with Carrera on the floor crying for help, trying to figure out how to get their paralyzed detainee into an INS van. Officer Gonzales, the San Antonio team leader, ordered a detention officer to pull the van closer to the house, saying "I don't want anybody to see what's going on." Next, Gonzales, Gomez, and two other officers dragged Carrera from the house, across the backyard and into the van. Carrera complained of pain, asking to be shot and put out of his misery, while Officer Gomez pulled him through the van door and onto the front seat. Gomez struggled to position Carrera's limp body on the seat, finally leaving him slumped on his side and handcuffed. As the van departed for the Brazos County Jail, Officer Reyna asked the driver to give Carrera a screen test—an unofficial maneuver in which the driver slams on the brake causing a handcuffed passenger to lurch forward and hit his face against the screen.
The nearby Brazos County Jail was not the final destination for Carrera or any of the other detainees. The INS Officers merely used its parking lot as a makeshift processing area for the illegal aliens. After processing, the aliens were to be sent by bus to New Braunfels, and then removed to Mexico.
After all the aliens were loaded into two vans, the officers returned to their cars and followed the vans to the Brazos County Jail for processing. At the jail, all three defendants dragged Carrera off the van, hitting his head against the door on the way out. They dragged him across the parking lot while taunting him and playing with his limp body. Gonzales ordered the bus driver to open the luggage compartment, and threatened, jokingly, to make Carrera ride below. INS officers testified that Gonzales said, "Let's Mace the fucker, see if he budges."
The three defendants dragged Carrera onto the bus. Because the bus had tinted windows, no one outside of it saw what happened next, but after a few minutes all three defendants ran off the bus choking and laughing. With a smirk, Gonzales claimed that he had an "accidental discharge" of pepper spray. A nurse was on duty at the Brazos County Jail, and a hospital just four miles away, but the defendants left Carrera by himself on the floor of the bus, handcuffed, eyes swollen shut, and foaming at the mouth. At around 11:30 AM, three hours after Carrera's neck was broken, the bus left for New Braunfels. Carrera rode on the floor of the bus for three more hours until he reached the Comal County Jail. Upon his arrival, the intake nurse refused to take custody of Carrera without a medical evaluation. He was taken by ambulance to a nearby hospital and then airlifted to a trauma center in San Antonio. Eleven months later, Carrera died.
The next day, the cover-up began. Gonzales called everyone into his office and assured them, "we're going to get through this." When Gonzales found out that a bus driver had already written a memo about the incident, he called the bus driver into his office and said, "who the fuck told [you] to write a memo ... nobody told you to write any memos ... I'm the one that's going to take care of the memos." Gonzales demanded that the bus driver change his account to say that Carrera had assaulted them. The driver refused.
Gonzales contends that the district court erred in overruling his motion to dismiss count three of the indictment, concerning his deliberate indifference to Carrera's serious medical needs, for failure to state an offense. Reyna makes the same contention respecting count four, the comparable count naming him.
We review the sufficiency of an indictment de novo. United States v. Fitzgerald, 89 F.3d 218, 221 (5th Cir.1996).
Rule 7(c) provides that an indictment "must be a plain, concise, and definite written statement of the essential facts constituting the offense charged. . . ." Fed. R.Crim. P. 7(c). An indictment's sufficiency is determined by an examination of its specific language, taking account of the indictment as a whole in the context of its statutory background. United States v. Haas, 583 F.2d 216 (5th Cir.1978), cert. denied, 440 U.S. 981, 99 S.Ct. 1788, 60 L.Ed.2d 240 (1979). The test for sufficiency is not whether the indictment could have been better drafted, but whether it conforms to minimal constitutional standards. Haas, 583 F.2d at 219. These minimum constitutional standards are met where the indictment alleges "every element of the crime charged and in such a way `as to enable the accused to prepare his defense and to allow the accused to invoke the double jeopardy clause in any subsequent proceeding.'" United States v. Bieganowski, 313 F.3d 264, 285 (5th Cir.2002)(quoting United States v. Webb, 747 F.2d 278, 284 (5th Cir.1984)).
The indictment alleges that defendants were at all relevant times INS officers and the challenged counts (counts three and four) charge that the particular defendant:
The defendants argue that the statutory element "willfully", the mental state expressly required by section 242,4...
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