Claims of wrongful convictions, tainted evidence can be submitted to through the Tulare County District Attorney’s Office
@TheSunGazette
TULARE COUNTY – The Tulare County District Attorney’s Office has already dismissed 40 cases involving two Visalia Police officers charged with corruption but that number may be just the beginning.
In response to the recent criminal filing against officers Bryan Ferreira and Shane Logan, the Office of the District Attorney has created a conviction review application for defendants who believe that investigations performed by the officers may have tainted their cases or resulted in a wrongful conviction.
“When this office announced criminal charges against these two officers, we had an ethical obligation to revisit cases and investigations they were involved in,” said District Attorney Tim Ward. “Today, defendants or their assigned representatives can begin that review process.”
The application and its instructions can be downloaded from the District Attorney’s website at www.da-tulareco.org by clicking the “Conviction Review Application” link on the front page. The application asks those seeking review of their cases to offer proof to support their claim of innocence, if the applicant has submitted a similar claim elsewhere and if there is DNA evidence involved in the case. Assistant District Attorney David Alavezos, who is overseeing the review process, said they will be looking for cases where the two officers were material witnesses, if they were signatories on search warrant submittals, and if the officers admitted evidence that they found when other officers were not present.
“We’ve had a conviction review process in place for a number of years but we have not had this large of a number of cases for review,” Alavezos said.
Officers Ferreira and Logan were arrested on Nov. 16 on 60 felony charges of police corruption. Ferreira was charged with 38 felony and five misdemeanor counts while Logan was charged with 22 felony counts he shared with Ferreira. The conspiracy charges result from the officers discussing and planning to file false police reports. The officers then filed false reports of drug sales that had never taken place. Those police reports were then the basis of search warrants that the officers submitted to and were granted by judges, resulting in the perjury charges. Those crimes stretched from May 2017 to April 2018. Additionally, the five misdemeanor charges for disclosing confidential records stemmed from Ferreira sharing DMV records regarding someone’s physical and mental condition between February and April 2018.
Logan made bail on Nov. 16 while Ferreira remains in custody. Ferreira was arraigned in Department 6 of Tulare County Superior Court by a Kings County judge on Monday, Nov. 19 to avoid any conflict of interest. Ferreira was given a reduced bail of $100,000 with conditions including no contact with any former informants or Logan.
Both Logan and Ferreira will be in court on Dec. 12 at 1 p.m. for further proceedings at Tulare County Superior Court. Ferreira faces up to 24 years and eight months in prison and Logan faces up to 11 years and four months in prison if convicted. Both officers are 37 years old, 13-year veterans of the department and both men have worked together in the narcotics unit for the last two years. Both had earned the honor as VPD’s Officer of the Year, with Ferreira receiving that honor earlier this year. Both officers have been on paid administrative leave since May.
