Although new evidence suggests that the co-defendants may have had nothing to do with the crime for which they were convicted, Peasley still believes that he prosecuted the right men. "I have never seen a case where I believed the prosecutors set out to prosecute someone whom they believed to be innocent," says Rob Warden, the director of the Center on Wrongful Convictions at the Northwestern University School of Law, whose staff members were involved in eleven of the eighteen recent exonerations on Illinois 's death row. "They just get wedded to a theory and then ignore the evidence that doesn't fit." According to Barry Scheck, who co-founded the Innocence Project, which has won exonerations for more than a hundred and fifty convicted defendants, "After a while, some veteran prosecutors think that they can just trust their gut. Once you get to the point where you believe your instincts must be right, you quickly get to the point where you just deep-six inconvenient evidence."
One of the men Peasley prosecuted in the 1992 case is still on Arizona 's death row. Unless a court intervenes, that man, Martin Soto-Fong, who was a seventeen-year-old high-school dropout at the time of the murders, will be executed, although no date has been set.The case already ranks as an extreme example of prosecu-torial misconduct, but if Martin Soto-Fong is killed for a crime he didn't commit, it will stand for something far worse.
Shortly after ten o'clock on the night ofJune 24, 1992, in Tucson, an anonymous caller dialed 911 and said, "Yeah, I just walked into the El Grande. It's on Thirty-sixth, and uh, there are two, uh, guys that work…They laying down on the floor, and one's laying in a pool of blood, and there's no one in the store."
The operator apparently recognized the reference to the El Grande Market; the battered, one-story painted-brick store was a landmark of sorts on the desolate streets of South Tucson -a desert ghetto of vacant lots, trailer parks, and auto-repair shops.When the police arrived at the scene, they found that the caller had understated things. There were three, not two, people on the floor, two dead and one dying from gunshot wounds. They were Fred Gee, forty-five years old, the store manager; Zewan Huang, seventy-five, Gee's uncle, who also worked there; and Raymond Arriola, thirty-one, who had started at the market as a clerk the previous month. Peasley soon arrived on the scene, as did Joseph Godoy, a detective with the Tucson Police Department.
This was familiar duty for Peasley. Shortly after he joined the Pima County prosecutor's office, in 1978, he agreed to be the first lawyer called to most murder scenes, and he held on to that demanding assignment, often working with Godoy, for almost two decades. For several months after the murders in the El Grande
Market, there were no viable suspects, and pressure built in the local press for a break in the case. One headline in the Arizona Daily Star read,"TRiPLE murder has police puzzled."
With a population of about half a million people, Tucson is one-third the size of Phoenix. The contrast between the two cities extends to politics and is exemplified by the difference between their two most famous sons, Morris Udall and Barry Goldwater. " Tucson is as far away from Phoenix as San Francisco is from Los Angeles," Bruce Babbitt, a former governor of the state, told me. " Phoenix was built on the pursuit of monetary gain, and Tucson was built around the university, which has given a kind of intellectual and idealistic strand to its politics." Tucson, however, never turned into a desert version of Berkeley or Cambridge. "There's always been a dark side to Tucson, too," Babbitt said. "The mob was a significant presence for years, with the Bonnano family living there. The drug trade, with the proximity to the Mexican border, has always been a problem."
Government, including law enforcement, dominates Tucson in the way that business, notably real-estate development, controls Phoenix. Dingy municipal buildings, not gleaming office towers, predominate in downtown Tucson. A couple of forlorn palm trees, and a cactus here and there, offer the only reminders of its desert setting. The county attorney's office long ago outgrew its quarters in the courthouse and now occupies nine floors in a dreary building a few blocks away. There, from a corner office on the tenth floor, Ken Peasley could watch storms roll in over the Santa Catalina Mountains.
Peasley would sometimes arrive at his desk before dawn to prepare for trials, which he often scheduled back to back. His appetite for trial work was matched by a compulsive streak outside the courtroom. He arranged the papers on his desk in rigidly precise piles. He chain-smoked. He drank a case of Pepsi a day. (Later, he lost thirty pounds just by switching to diet soda.) "For me, it wasn't a job," Peasley told me."It was who I was and what I did."
Peasley was early for our first meeting, which was at my hotel's restaurant. He doesn't look like someone who could dominate a courtroom. He's on the short side, more shrunken than fit at fifty-seven, with thinning gray hair and a wispy beard, and he dresses in the civil-service uniform of white shirt, striped tie, and oversized aviator glasses. His voice, though, is a low growl that demands attention, and he talks in emphatic declarative sentences, like a man unaccustomed to interruption.The ordeal of his disbarment may have taught him a little humility, but just a little. He's more angry than sorry.
Peasley's father, a sign painter, and his mother, a legal secretary, moved from Michigan to Mississippi to Texas; they settled in Tucson when Ken was in junior high school. He attended the University of Arizona for college and law school, and served as an intern in the public defender's office. Stanton Bloom, who is still a prominent defense lawyer in Tucson, recalled, "I was supervising Ken, and we were raising an insanity defense in a case where my guy blew someone's head off with a shotgun.And we interviewed a witness who said my client was acting 'like the wild man of Borneo.' Later, I needed Ken to testify about that conversation, and he said he didn't remember and didn't have it in his notes. I could tell Ken just didn't like defending people. I told him he ought to get a job as a prosecutor, and he did."
As a deputy county attorney, Peasley thrived, finding satisfactions that had eluded him in his personal life. An early marriage ended in divorce, and Peasley does not see the two children from that union. His second wife, Elizabeth Peasley-Fimbres, was also a prosecutor, but that marriage ended after Peasley had an office romance with a college-student intern. (Peasley-Fimbres is now a juvenile-court judge in Tucson.) A third marriage also failed. Peasley and his fourth wife, a nurse, have been married for twenty years, and have teenage twin boys. "What he did for his job was his first love-more than women, more than his children," Lea Petersen, the former intern, told me. "It was his identity."
Peasley never tried to make friends in the courtroom. "I didn't believe in playing grab-ass or glad-handing during trial," he said. "If I went to trial on somebody, frankly, I was convinced that they had done something really bad and I didn't think that it was funny. So during the trials, no, I didn't kid around a lot.There was nothing to kid around about, from my point of view." Defense lawyers regularly asked judges to make Peasley stop glaring at their clients. "I was something of an asshole," Peasley said.
The burden of the El Grande investigation fell to Peasley and Joe Godoy. Peasley and Godoy made an odd pair. Godoy is genial and outgoing, where Peasley is taciturn and severe. Godoy is thickly built, with a big thatch of black hair and a drooping mustache that curls down to his chin. When he talked about the El Grande murders, the case that led to his departure from the force, he never appeared defensive or unsure. "Joe is just totally likable, and juries loved him," Judge Hantman said. "He was very soft-spoken, very credible, very sympathetic." First thrown together at crime scenes, Peasley and Godoy started working cases as a team, and then became friends.