JUAN MURO
Charge: Grand theft
Value of stolen goods: $830 (83 wooden pallets)

"I screwed up bad, I got to admit. But for taking some pallets to make a 
bonfire, it's too much time," the slight Mexican national said in sorrow. He 
was wearing the San Diego jail uniform of jeans and a white T-shirt. "I picture
myself that, I commit a crime, I got to pay, but not to that point, you know? 
Not 25 years just for some old wooden pallets."

Juan Muro's theft qualified as a third strike because of two prior burglary 
convictions. When he was asked if he knew about the "three strikes" law before 
he came across the border this last time, he laughed and shook his head several
times. "Hell no, man."

Deputy Public Defender Jack Hochman, who is defending the man who wishes to be 
called Juan Muro, suggests that someone should apply a "truth in advertising" 
standard to the "three strikes" law. "They bill it as a crime-fighting 
measure," he explained, "when in reality the intent of the law is to export our
criminals to other states -- or to Mexico."

When asked how society should respond to him, Muro replied, "I don't think that
society should punish a person for his addictions. Let's face it," he says, 
shaking his head, "I'm such a bad drunk. I wish somebody would help me with 
this, you know, but they never did that yet. Now they going to lock me up for 
25 years for such a small thing, because they say I always commit crimes so I 
am dangerous." 

"No way," he stresses forcefully. "No way. I never beat nobody up, I never use 
a knife or a gun or nothing like that. No, I don't think I am dangerous to 
anybody." He pauses for a moment, shrugging his eyebrows, "Except maybe to 
myself, with the alcohol and the weed."

"But I not so sure about tomorrow," he continues. "Inside prison, I am a 
Mexican. I got no choice; you got to run with a gang, or everybody does things 
to you, you know? I am a Border Rat. If somebody fucking around with me, I got 
nothing to lose. I'm almost 40 years old now. With 25 years I got nothing to 
lose, you know. So that law, really, it just makes more criminal things happen,
not less."

He was asked how far he would go to protect himself. He thinks about it for a 
minute, then shrugs. "If somebody was to ... I don't know. Right now, I am not 
a gang member, but inside prison, if I'm going to be there a long time, I got 
to protect myself. Like I said, I'm a Mexican so I got to run with the Border 
Rats. If you don't do that, somebody take your property, somebody try to rape 
you. They do a lot of things to you in there. The place has got some bad 
people, you know. Not people like me, but truly bad people that hurt anybody, 
they don't care."

Up until now, he points out, he has always done short terms and has been able 
to stay out of trouble while incarcerated. In fact, he claims, "my whole time 
in prison, I only got one disciplinary report. I been able to not get involved,
you know?"

Muro was born in Mexico. He first came across the border illegally in 1970, at 
the age of 14. He found a good job right away as a dishwasher and worked his 
way up to being a waiter. He then talked the cook into letting him be an 
apprentice, and soon became a cook himself.

His first burglary was in Pomona, in 1985. Tell me about it, he was asked. "I 
got caught," Muro said. Fair and square? "Fair and square."

He was working as a cook at the time, in Baldwin Park. It was at a restaurant 
that has since become a Denny's. He worked hard. It was his first job as a 
cook. His boss, Mike, told him at least once a week what a good job he did.  
Muro still can't explain why he committed that residential burglary. "It was 
just stupid. I didn't want nothing. I didn't need nothing. I was with a friend,
and he said he knew a house where there was a pound of weed and no one was 
home. So he said, `Come on, let's go get it,' and I said, `Yeah, let's do it.'"
He scratches his head as he remembers.  "We didn't find anything, and we came 
out of the house, we didn't have anything. No weed, no stuff, no nothing, 
'cause we just wanted the weed, you know? We didn't want to steal nothing." But
the neighbors across the street had seen them go around into the back yard, and
when they came out of the driveway onto the street, the cops were right there.

Knowing what he knows now about the system, Muro doesn't understand why he 
didn't get probation for such a first offense
-- or, at worst, jail time. "I was making about, more than $200 every week. I 
told them I would pay a fine, but I don't know. They just, boom." 

Asked how Muro could have gotten two years in prison for that first offense, 
Deputy Public Defender Hochman, an Indianan of German ancestry, answered, "I 
wouldn't tell you it's a racist society, but if you look at my list of 
defendants on third-strike cases, just one of them is white that they filed on 
in South Bay [San Diego County]. The rest are Hispanic or black, with maybe 2 
percent Puerto Rican. But only one white guy out of about 40 third-strike cases
that they've filed so far."

The story is no different in Los Angeles, which may explain why his Pomona 
crime resulted in a prison term for his first offense. When we talked to a 
deputy public defender who works out of the Pomona office, he indicated that 
offenses committed by minorities were probably prosecuted more harshly in 
Pomona than in southern San Diego County. "Face it, this is `white flight' 
country from the '60s and '70s. Prison for a minority first offender isn't that
unusual around here, and that happens even with minority prosecutors handling 
the case." 

Hochman picked up that theme in a separate conversation. "Since we have a lot 
of Latino DAs down here, I talk to them and I say, `Hey look, how can you do 
this? How can you support this?' And they say, `Oh, no, we do them ourselves; 
it's just the way the records are.' And I say, `Do you ever think it might be 
systemic? That it might be that 10, 15 years ago these guys didn't get the 
pleas, couldn't cut the deals that the whites got?'"

"What I've noticed recently," he points out, "is that many of the best minority
DAs have gone back to the misdemeanor unit. They don't want to do third strikes
anymore." 

Muro served his first prison term at Chino, a minimum-security facility in 
next-door Pomona. For reasons he does not understand, the Immigration and 
Naturalization Service didn't bother Muro when he was released. They didn't 
even bother him the second time. "But from then on, each time, they deport me 
when I get out." So why does he keep coming back? "I don't know. I asked that 
myself. I guess it's because really I don't know anyone in Mexico except my 
mom." His father died in 1989. 

Muro doesn't know anything about today's Mexico, having left that country 
nearly a quarter of a century ago. "Besides," he said, "I tried working in 
Tijuana a couple of times, but unless you sell dope or run people across the 
border, there's no work down there. You starve."

After his release from prison in early 1987, he again found work quickly. This 
time he was cooking at Cindy's Coffee Shop, a family kind of restaurant. Cindy 
was the owner and his boss. He did well for a couple of months, and he and the 
boss got along well. "I was respectful with her, you know, because she was a 
nice lady. And I always worked hard." 

Then one day Cindy said, "I've got to let you go. I know you're on parole." He 
said, "Yeah, how did you find out?" She said his parole agent had called to 
verify that Muro was working there. Muro continued: "`So what did you tell 
him?' She said, `I told him you were a good worker and that you're doing okay.'
`So why you letting me go?' `Well,' she say, `he told me you were in prison for
burglary and you a dangerous person and to watch out for you.'" With that kind 
of an endorsement, it is easy to understand why Cindy reluctantly ended his 
employment. 

After two more trips to prison for non-"strike" offenses, Muro was arrested for
a residential burglary in 1991. 

Muro's fourth prison term -- and his second strike -- was another residential 
burglary in 1991. "We were trying to break into the house and they caught us. 
Right then." "Going in?" Muro is asked. "The back yard, the back yard," he 
insists. Out of prison, jobless and homeless, Muro and a friend had been living
in the friend's truck. The friend said he knew where some money was, so Muro 
said the two of them went to the house. But the police were notified by 
someone, and the would-be burglars were quickly and quietly apprehended. Muro 
pled guilty to second-degree burglary and received a two-year term.
After being released this time, Muro was determined to try to do a better job 
of staying out. He was also determined to not drink so much beer. He hoped that
if he got out of the Los Angeles area, he could turn himself around. The 
decision turned out to be a good one. He went down to San Diego, and by a 
stroke of good fortune he landed a job right away. He worked as a mechanic at a
garage owned by Vicente Via. The garage was located in a large industrial yard 
that contained several other businesses as well. 

"He has worked for me for almost a year," Via said. "He is a very good worker. 
A good mechanic. He comes to work every day." Via's wife, Paula, also thinks 
highly of Muro. "I think he is a good man," she says. Both Vias volunteered to 
come to court to be character witnesses for Muro.

Muro's third strike occurred on July 22 of this year. A Chula Vista K-9 unit 
was on routine patrol in the business area of the Price Club. As the rear of 
the store came into view, the officer saw a pickup truck parked next to the 
20-foot-high cement block wall that encloses the storage area. The pickup was 
loaded with wooden pallets. One man was in the back of the truck, and the other
was out of sight on the other side of the wall. When the officer drove closer, 
Muro jumped down and ran off across the parking lot.

At this point, the officer recalls, "my K-9 partner was barking. The suspect 
stopped running, and I got out of my patrol unit to talk to him." Muro says he 
stopped because he knows what a K-9 dog can do. "I hear one of them bark, it's 
like that cop Hunter says on TV, it works for me."

Meanwhile, his crime partner got away before the backup officer arrived. 
Unfortunately for him, says Muro, it was the partner's truck and he had to go 
to the police station to get it out of the impound lot. So, Muro continued, his
partner did the only sensible thing -- he said Muro stole it. Muro maintains 
that the man he was staying with was home when his crime partner drove his 
truck over to pick Muro up, on their way to the Price Club. And, says the 
public defender's investigator, the roommate will corroborate Muro's story when
he testifies in court. The fact that Muro has not been charged with auto theft 
lends some credence to story.

Why, after being law-abiding for a year, did he accompany a man at 1 a.m. to 
steal these pallets? Muro explained that the man who owns the industrial yard 
where he works was throwing a big birthday party for his son the next evening. 
The party was going to be on the beach. Apparently it is a local custom to 
build beach bonfires out of wooden pallets. Since the man had been nice to 
Muro, he says he didn't mind agreeing to participate in the pallet heist.

But Hochman explains how stupid the whole thing was. "I saw a Polaroid that the
officer took of the pallets on the truck.  Think about it. Eighty-three of 
those wooden pallets in the back of a regular pickup truck." He grins as he 
tell us, "They were piled up more than 10 or 12 feet high. I don't care how 
well they might have been tied down, that truck was never going to get out of 
the parking lot."

As the interview with Muro ended, Hochman asked him, "Have you ever gone to 
trial?" The answer was no. But, he added after a pause, with a trace of a 
smile, "I'm sure as hell going to trial now." 


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