The Making of a Jailhouse Lawyer

By Edward Humes

A slightly different version of this article appears in the September 2000 issue of California Lawyer Magazine

One, two, even three times a week over the past two years, a thick sheaf of papers from the state prison in Pleasant Valley would land with a thump on Clifford E. Zall’s desk at the Attorney General’s Office, some of the missives neatly typed, some scrawled in a hurried cursive, all of them angry and urgent pleas for justice. The clockwork deliveries became a kind of running joke in the criminal division where Zall works: Each time, he would stand up and announce with a flourish to his fellow deputy attorneys general, “Hey, I got another letter from Jerome Valenta today.”

Jerome Valenta: The name provoked a shaking of heads, uneasy laughs, expressions of sympathy about the case that just wouldn’t go away — and the defendant who wouldn’t take no for an answer. There was grudging respect, too, on Zall’s part, for this layman with his law books, who would not be slapped down no matter how many replies and rebuttals Zall filed, no matter how many motions the appeals court denied. Valenta managed to make his consolidated appeal and writ of habeas corpus among the most widely known criminal cases in Zall’s workplace, no small feat in an office that litigates the state’s death penalty appeals and other high-profile cases. Yet Valenta’s was about as far from a headline-grabbing saga as could be imagined, involving no important precedents, no pressing questions of public safety or policy, not even a single press inquiry. Quite the contrary: The Bakersfield man had been convicted of the minor crime of unlawfully recording confidential telephone conversations (his own, without the other person’s permission) as part of his investigations into official wrongdoing in Kern County. Legally, his was about as unremarkable a case as could be imagined, except for its unprecedented sentence — a whopping seven years, four months in prison for two counts of this minor offense, which invariably caused double takes, even in Zall’s office — and its remarkably loquacious, in pro. per. defendant, who insisted his conviction out of Kern County was the product of prosecutorial misconduct and official vendetta.

And so, one after another, Zall’s supply of cardboard banker’s boxes were filled by the endless papers streaming from the busy typewriter of Jerome Valenta, Inmate Number K-43238: Appeals, writs, submittals, supplements, exhibits, memoranda, points and authorities, tables, indices, newspaper clippings, transcript excerpts, police report excerpts, requests for reconsideration, requests for judicial notice, requests for recusals, requests to modify past requests. And, of course, there were the letters, one after another, to the corrections department, to the appeals court, to Zall himself, complaining that prison authorities were denying him access to medical treatment, to the law library, to typewriters, to copying machines, to his own files. Do something, Mr. Zall, the letters would implore. I know we’re opponents, but your job is also to see justice done, isn’t it? Please help.

The files in the case of Jerome Valenta and his consolidated appeals and writ of habeas corpus before the Fifth District Court of Appeal soon exceeded most capital cases. He had become the jailhouse lawyer to end all jailhouse lawyers, doggedly, even obsessively, pursuing his claims long after his appellate attorney was ready to throw in the towel, long after the Fifth District seemed ready to shut the door on him for good, long after most people in his position would have given up and done their time in silence. Even during a fifty-two day hunger strike intended to draw attention to his plight, the filings continued to fly. And in the end, he prevailed. This state auditor turned recording executive turned millionaire turned convicted sex offender turned penniless parolee and activist-gadfly finally accomplished the improbable: He won his own freedom.

He accomplished this feat not only on the grounds of prosecutorial misconduct by the Kern County District Attorney’s Office, but by successfully challenging the sufficiency of much of the evidence against him. Any seasoned appellate attorney knows appealing the facts of a case rarely gets you anywhere. But Jerome Valenta didn’t know that.

But then, after the decision came down and Clifford Zall pretty much had decided against appealing the case further, there came another thump on Zall’s desk. Incredibly, Valenta, who had not been released because no remitter had been issued as yet by the appeals court, was asking the Fifth District to hold everything and to reconsider its decision in his favor. He felt the court had not gone far enough. There were seventy other issues that they had not reached that he wanted them to rule upon, important matters of law and public policy, he said.

“To me, that’s the ultimate Jerome Valenta story,” Zall says. “He delayed his own release because he still wasn’t satisfied.”

Zall couldn’t help but shake his head in weary awe at that last brief. He had read thousands of pages penned by this man, yet he really had no idea what made him tick. To this day, he can’t help but wonder, Who is this guy?

* * *

Back in Kern County, where Jerome Valenta was convicted of illegal taping in 1997, the question was never so much who he was. It was closer to: Who does this guy think he is?

“The powers that be here think I’m arrogant. I prefer to say, I’m assertive, that I assertively stand up for what’s right,” the fifty-five-year-old Valenta says. “They see that as arrogant. Maybe they’re right. But if I am arrogant, I’m not the only one. The people in power here do not like to be challenged. They do not like to hear an ordinary citizen say, ’Wait a minute, that’s not right.’ Now that’s arrogance.”

In any case, it was Valenta’s penchant for challenging authority — on a regular, if not daily, basis — that started his legal problems in Kern County. It seems he began irritating local officials, beginning with the Department of Corrections and its parole office, then expanding rapidly to the Kern County Sheriff’s Department and his favorite target, the District Attorney’s Office, almost as soon as he arrived in Bakersfield in September 1993 to begin a new life as a paroled sex offender.

He was not interested in maintaining a prudent low profile: He immediately joined a support organization for parolees, and aggressively represented their interests in court and at parole hearings. He launched protests at the courthouse over criminal convictions he deemed wrongful (most of which were eventually overturned, a string of embarrassing reversals that continues to roil the Kern County courthouse) and he assembled a rag-tag team of courtroom monitors, sitting in on trials, watching for injustice. He became a frequent presence in the gallery, glaring at prosecutors, their witnesses and the judges, his long gray hair in a pony tail, his wiry, six-foot frame rigidly erect, a notebook clutched in his hand. His observations were then featured in an alternative newspaper Valenta founded. He particularly irked local officials with his prolific letter writing — including one missive he sent to every judge in Kern County, suggesting they urgently needed to familiarize themselves with a certain document he had enclosed: a courtesy copy of the U.S. Constitution.

And then there was the source of his downfall and subsequent resurrection— as had been his habit for years, he began covertly tape-recording his telephone conversations with those officials. It is one of the many ironies in this case that Valenta later was able to use those tapes to prove he had been falsely charged in another matter by Kern County authorities — only to see those same tapes seized upon by prosecutors and used against him as the chief evidence in the illegal taping case.

There seems little in Valenta’s background to foreshadow his legal troubles — or his transformation from millionaire businessman to obsessive gadfly, from civic leader and charity fundraiser to outspoken critic of California’s most zealous prosecutors. By all accounts, until ten years ago, he lived a normal, commendable, even admirable life.

Once the prosperous and law-abiding president of the Kiwanis Club in the Santa Barbara County town of Santa Maria, he was been head of the State Board of Equalization’s office there. Later he started his own construction company, building capital by rehabilitating old properties, then amassing a fortune with shrewd investments in stocks and real estate. After that, he founded his own record company, specializing in Latin music, with seventeen artists on his label and offices in Mexico City and Santa Maria. He built a large home on several acres of land, with stables, a pool, all the hallmarks of wealth and respectability.

When he wasn’t traveling for his recording business, he hobnobbed with the city’s elite. Councilmen, judges and other civic leaders counted him a friend, partied at his house, and turned to him for help, particularly when raising funds for schools and other community projects.

“Jerry would cook a spaghetti dinner for twelve hundred people, you never saw any one work so hard,” recalls George Crosby, a fellow Kiwanis officer. “He was a peach of a guy.”

The vision Crosby summons from the past — of a younger, driven Valenta hunkered over steaming pots of sauce and spaghetti, cooking and stirring for hours on end in order to raise money for local schools —offers a clue, perhaps, to the zealousness that would later characterize his criticism of the Kern County Justice System and the obsessive pursuit of his own appeals. “Whatever Jerry decided to take on,” Crosby says, “he took it on all the way.”

Valenta’s ex-wife and mother of his four children — they divorced amicably years before his first arrest — confirms this impression. Ramona Casillas remembers him as a hardworking, almost fanatical entrepreneur who, unlike many businessmen, was unwilling to compromise on his role as a family man. He wanted to build a business, but he was also dedicated to spending time with his kids. “So he found jobs for our children in the construction company. We’d all be in there, hammering away. That way, he wouldn’t miss them so much during the day.”

In 1989, when he was charged with molesting the nine-year-old daughter of his housekeeper-girlfriend — his friends were astonished. Few who knew him believed the allegations. But given the unsavory nature of the charges and the prevailing wisdom in that era — the false belief by many investigators and prosecutors that children never lied about molestation — few leaders in the community stepped forward to support Valenta. Feeling alone and adrift in his jail cell, Valenta further astonished the community when he abruptly agreed to plead no contest to two counts of lewd and lascivious conduct with a minor under fourteen. He entered the plea barely a month after his arrest, before any defense investigation could take place and long before the strength of the evidence against him could be tested in court. He and his family say they were assured by his attorney — falsely, they claimed — that probation was certain and that a quick plea would spare everyone a lot of pain. A day later, he tried to withdraw his plea, maintaining his innocence as he does to this day, saying he didn’t understand what a no contest plea was when he entered it, or the possible consequences he could face as result.

Even then, it seems, Valenta had been routinely taping phone calls without permission (he says this was a habit he developed as a businessman, because of a poor memory for recalling appointments, names and other details of conversations). The attorney he hired after the plea, Steve Balash of Santa Barbara, remembers mentioning the possible existence of just such a tape, showing Valenta might have been misled about sentencing matters by his first attorney. But the judge, already angered by Valenta’s attempts to reverse his plea, wagged his finger at the mere suggestion, Balash recalls, and said, “If your client has such a tape, he may be facing a new charge.” The no contest plea stood.

* * * *

Valenta spent the next three years honing his skills as a jailhouse lawyer, pursuing ultimately unsuccessful appeals of his no contest plea. It was during this time that Valenta the respected businessman and pillar of the community vanished, to be replaced by Valenta the zealous activist. He had always been a devout Catholic, but in prison, he decided that his faith required him to dedicate himself to helping those he considered to be victims of injustice. Making money would only get in the way of this cause, he decided, so he took what he calls a vow of poverty. That wasn’t so hard in his case: Though he had entered prison worth about $12 million, by the time he left three years later, he had only the two hundred dollars in gate money doled out by the prison, his fortune picked away by years of neglect, litigation, foreclosures and default judgments. His businesses had folded, his alleged victim had sued him and won big (though little was left to collect, according to Valenta). He lost everything.

When he was paroled, he landed in Bakersfield, the closest city to the prison that had housed him. He soon joined an organization called Friends Outside, which helped parolees start new lives, finding them clothes, jobs, and places to live. As a member of the organization’s board of directors, Valenta would comb flea markets and garage sales for old clothes, coffee makers, hotplates and shoes, then instruct parolees how to dress for job interviews, how to make simple meals for themselves, how to go shopping for groceries and to stay within a budget. “I know what It's like to try to readjust to society after prison,” Valenta says. “So I help people no one else cares about Ð society’s discards.”

If Valenta’s activities had been limited to teaching ex-cons how to make home-fried potatoes, perhaps the parole office in Bakersfield would not have found him so irritating. But it was Valenta’s other role that became a source of controversy — in which he became an advocate for parolees facing criminal charges, parole revocations or other difficulties with the Department of Corrections. If a parolee would be denied a travel pass to attend an out-of-state child-custody hearing, Valenta would fire off a series of letters to officials from Bakersfield to Sacramento, complaining that the parolee was being denied his rights of redress in the courts. If a parolee claimed jail deputies beat him, a charge few would credit, Valenta would bubble over with outrage, sending complaints to the sheriff’s department, internal affairs investigators, the FBI, prosecutors and the grand jury, leaving them no choice but to investigate, no matter how grudgingly. When criminal charges were filed against a Friends Outside “client,” he would interview witnesses over the telephone to verify information in police and parole reports. Most of the people he interviewed were in law enforcement — probation, parole or police officers — and Valenta tape-recorded many of these conversations, unbeknownst to his interview subjects. Valenta's energy seemed boundless, churning out letters and lawsuits by the ream from the small apartment he sub-letted from Friends Outside, his fingers in innumerable pies.

Next, Valenta started his newspaper, the Bakersfield Reporter, with the self-described mission of telling “the other side,” and with his favorite topics being official injustice, criticism of District Attorney Ed Jagels, and brutality he claimed was endemic within the Kern County Jail. He also detailed in the paper his infamous mailing of copies of the Constitution to all the judges. “Oh, they were steamed at that,” concedes Valenta unrepentantly. “I was making a statement.”

In the midst of all this muckraking and pot-stirring, he resigned in protest from Friends Outside in April 1995 after the organization nominated a parole officer to its board of directors, a move Valenta likened to sleeping with the enemy. The organization gave him thirty days to clear out of the apartment he sub-letted, but Valenta ended up having the last laugh: His nephew bought the property occupied by Friends Outside, giving control of it to Valenta. He promptly turned the tables by evicting his former colleagues and their new parole officer board member. The he opened a rival parolee-support organization, Extend a Hand for Justice, with the help of a small band of like-minded supporters.

That, says Valenta, was the last straw. After that, he claims, he became a target of selective prosecution and an all out-effort to get him on something, anything, that culminated in his being charged with illegal taping.

“I challenged them. And when I wouldn’t go away, they came after me. Even if it meant cooking up a case against me, they were determined to silence me. They couldn’t take the heat.”

There is no question, really, that Valenta was an irritant — even he admits as much, a man with a criminal record and no real job who dared to talk as an equal to the scions of Kern County’s justice system, as if he were still the same Jerome Valenta who once took local leaders horseback riding and ran the Kiwanis Club with them. His critics in Kern County knew nothing and cared nothing about his past; they dismissed him as a man on the fringe, an ex-con who saw conspiracies everywhere, who believed nothing a prosecutor or cop had to say, but who invariably took the word of a jailed crook as gospel. And he chose to do this in Kern County, of all places, a place known for being extremely tough on crime and, as Jagels is fond of pointing out, for sending more people per capita to prison and imposing more Three Strikes sentences per capita than any other county in the state in recent years. To many, Valenta seemed unable to abide by the rules of civil society, his downfall inevitable.

But Valenta has his own take on the events that landed him in prison a second time: He asserts that he was targeted for malicious prosecution because of what he unabashedly describes as his growing “power” in Kern County in the mid-1990s — power arising from the weekly newspaper he published, from his “representation” of other parolees, and from his leadership of activists policing the courthouse for civil rights abuses. He notes that the cases he targeted for criticism eventually unraveled before everyone’s eyes, an embarrassing string of wrongful convictions — all of them high-profile cases featuring lengthy prison terms — overturned in Kern County amid claims of prosecutorial misconduct, coerced testimony and suppression of evidence of innocence. (The revelations have continued this year with the recent release of two brothers imprisoned for molestation for fifteen years, their convictions overturned in April when it was learned medical reports showing no evidence of molestation were never given to the defense.)

But was Valenta really singled out because of his role as gadfly to the Kern County justice system? Officials there in the past have denied that allegation vigorously (though a representative of the D.A.’s office there said there would be no comment for this article).

“We are required by our ethics to be objective,” supervising Deputy District Attorney Michael Yraceburn told the Bakersfield Californian. “We treated him no differently than we would any other defendant.”

Another deputy district attorney involved in the case, Vikki Del Pellegrino, put it more bluntly, telling the newspaper Valenta was not worth the trouble of singling out. “He was thinking that he had an impact, and he was thinking he was really catching people’s attention. But in reality he was just insignificant. He had all of these visions of grandeur of what he was doing and the impact he was having, but nobody paid any attention to him.”

But the circumstances of his arrest and a pointed report on Valenta’s “aggravating” behavior by his parole officer seem to lend credence to the notion that he was singled out for unusually harsh treatment, his trial attorney, Joseph King, says.

“Anyone else would have been charged with a misdemeanor,” the attorney asserts. “This did not seem to be to be equal justice.... The evidence supports that he was singled out. There’s no question he was a thorn in a lot of people’s sides — in the parole office, and the district attorney’s office. And they went after him with a vengeance.”

The conservative editorial pages of the Bakersfield Californian hit a similar note, criticizing the “heavy prosecutorial hammer” used against Valenta, and wondering “if the District Attorney’s office would have vigorously prosecuted less politically incorrect tappers, such as Linda Tripp.” Deputy Attorney General Zall later mused, “Being rude and getting in people’s faces may be irritating, but it’s not a crime.”

Even the appeals court took notice of the climate surrounding Valenta’s arrest and parole revocation, pointedly quoting in its opinion his parole officer’s report, a report that seems to belie the suggestion that nobody paid any attention to him: “He was writing to local judges and the contents of the letters were aggravating and threatening in manner, which was beginning to irritate the judges. Valenta’s actions have caused a great deal of time to be spent addressing his ‘demands.’”

The parole officer who authored that report, Cynthia Ott, had taken over supervision of Valenta in September 1995. (Ott and her supervisor declined comment for this article.) During her first two weeks on the case, she began compiling information on possible grounds for revoking his parole. She traveled to City Hall to inquire whether Valenta had a business license for Extend a Hand. He did not. Nor did he have a site plan. Both, the parole officer determined, were misdemeanor violations of the city code. (It turns out she was wrong, Valenta says: Since Extend a Hand was a charitable organization that neither sold nor bought anything, the license and site plan were not required.)

Not long after, in October 1995, Valenta began representing a parolee facing revocation for violating the terms of his release — he was associating with children, contrary to his parole conditions as a registered sex offender. But Valenta learned that the children were brought by the parolee’s sister for a visit — they were his niece and nephew, and the visit was completely innocent, according to Valenta. The complaining witness was an off-duty sheriff’s deputy who happened to live on the same street as the parolee.

As he often did in such cases, Valenta interviewed the witness. After their conversation, the deputy called the parole office and his own department, and eventually filed a complaint that Valenta had threatened him and attempted to dissuade him from testifying. His parole officer now had far more serious grounds to revoke Valenta’s parole — intimidation of a witness, a felony. Charged with the two city code misdemeanors as well, Valenta was taken to jail and later sent back to prison, his parole revoked.

But Valenta protested his innocence. His conversation was professional, polite and in no way threatening, he said — and he could prove it. He called his girlfriend and colleague at Extend a Hand and asked her to dig out the tape recording of the conversation, which was eventually turned over to a sheriff’s investigator probing the witness intimidation charge. That detective — with the complaining witness’s agreement — ultimately determined that the tape showed any threats were “ambiguous.” Prosecutors declined to file the witness intimidation case.

In fact, there is nothing ambiguous at all about the tape — there is nothing remotely threatening on it, Valenta argues. A transcript of the tape seems to support his view — the witness is laughing at the end of the conversation, and no where on the tape does Valenta even suggest that the witness should not testify. Valenta argues that if a tape had later proved he had filed a false police report against someone else, he undoubtedly would have been prosecuted for it. But no thought was ever given to pursuing such a charge against the deputy who falsely accused him, he complains.

Instead, a parole search of Valenta’s office at Extend a Hand led to the seizure of numerous other tape recordings, and the same sort of evidence that had cleared him of witness intimidation became the subject of ten counts of unlawful recording of confidential communications (although the one conversation used to resolve the question of witness intimidation was not among those charged by the district attorney).

Defense attorney King sees fundamental unfairness in this turnabout. “If Jerry hadn’t had not been taping, there is no question he would have gone down for witness intimidation. They were going to get him no matter what.”

Valenta’s defense at trial and in his subsequent appeals lay in the theory that Penal Code Section 632 bans the unauthorized taping of confidential communications only, not just any old conversations. The law, adopted as part of the Privacy Act in 1967, was never intended to outlaw the kinds of taping Valenta did, he argues. It was mostly concerned with putting limits on evolving technology that could secretly be used to eavesdrop and impinge on individual privacy and personal liberties in ways “that cannot be tolerated in a free and civilized society.” Valenta’s tapings, by contrast, were part of his ongoing activities to expose the truth about very public matters — the conduct (and misconduct) of the justice system — and therefore do not fall within the boundaries of the Privacy Act, he argues.

Those he interviewed and taped — almost all were law-enforcement officials — had no expectation of confidentiality, as Valenta sees it: They knew he was a newspaperman and an advocate for the accused, that he was going to share his information with his clients at the very least, and that no reasonable person would expect such conversations to remain private. Taping, therefore, would be legal without anyone’s permission, he says. Indeed, in some cases, the individuals he taped had asked that Valenta repeat the conversation to others; in several other instances, coworkers of the parole officer or deputy being taped were listening on the other end, absolute proof that there was no privacy expectations.

Ultimately, two of the counts were dismissed for lack of evidence. The jury acquitted on six of the remaining eight counts, apparently accepting the argument that the bulk of the conversations were not confidential. But jurors convicted on two counts — one involving a taped conversation with Andrew Gindes, a court-appointed defense attorney representing one of Valenta’s clients. (Here lies another irony in this case: Gindes is best known in his former role as a deputy district attorney singled out by the Fifth District for spectacularly harsh criticism in People vs. Pitts, one of the high-profile cases reversed in recent years because of official misconduct in Kern County.) The other count resulting in conviction involved a conversation originally thought to be between Valenta and a parole officer (and charged as such at Valenta’s preliminary hearing), but which turned out to be between the officer and another parolee Valenta was helping.

During the trial, Kern County Superior Court Judge Stephen P. Gildner repeatedly chastised the trial prosecutor, Deputy D.A. Clifford Johnson, for playing numerous portions of the tape recordings that had been excluded from evidence — portions that reflected other, uncharged conversations. Prosecution witnesses also violated Gildner’s evidentiary rulings barring the government from informing the jury of Valenta’s parolee status. Transcripts containing inadmissible evidence were also given to jurors by the prosecution.

Although he was clearly angered by these transgressions, at one point telling Johnson he was “at the end of my rope” and “very concerned about the integrity of the trial,” Gildner denied Valenta’s repeated requests for a mistrial.

At sentencing, the conviction was treated as a second strike under the state’s Three Strikes law. Gildner declined to remove the strike or lower the violations to misdemeanors, as Valenta maintains is almost always done in such cases. Two previous Kern County convictions for illegal taping, both of them high profile, one involving a former city councilman, led to jail time and probation, but no prison terms, Valenta points out. But Valenta got an aggregate sentence of more than seven years for his crimes.

During the course of his appeal, Valenta’s appointed appellate attorney urged him to drop his bid for freedom, fearing that a worse fate could be awaiting him. Because Valenta’s first criminal conviction in Santa Maria had involved two separate counts, he could be charged as a third-striker if the conviction was overturned and he was retried, the attorney warned. The sentence could go up to twenty-five years. Valenta told him to forget it.

He spent months researching the law in his case, hitting one roadblock after another, forcing him to file protests, write letters to the court, and to have his family members contact legislators in order to preserve his access to legal research materials and tools. His tiny cell, built for one person but housing two, soon filled to overflowing with his legal documents. He had to keep his papers in green plastic trash bags — the guards wouldn’t allow him to have boxes. He struggled to meet filing deadlines as prison authorities repeatedly seized his legal records, sometimes for weeks at a time, finally returning them without explanation. He was moved to eight different prisons during his three years behind bars. Sometimes his papers would be lost in transit. At one prison, he was given a three-hundred pound, mentally ill cellmate who “used me as a punching bag,” according to Valenta. During one terrible beating, Valenta say, several ribs and his left foot were broken; for five months, he asserts, the only medical treatment he received for these injuries was Tylenol.

Yet, through it all, he persisted. By the time he was done, he came to believe that he knew more about the obscure law pertaining to taping of conversations than anyone else involved in his case — jury, judge, lawyers and appeals court justices included. “They were all confused by the law,” he says bluntly, his humble circumstances doing nothing to humble him.

In his pro. per. appeal and writ, Valenta accused the Kern County D.A. of misconduct for the repeated introduction of improper evidence. Prosecutors called these infractions minor, a fumbling with a tape recorder rather than a deliberate violation of evidentiary rulings, but the Fifth District agreed with Valenta’s take on the facts, terming the transgressions “gross violations” that may have affected the outcome of the case. The appeals court also agreed with Valenta’s assessment that the evidence in the second count was insufficient to convict, because the prosecution introduced no evidence at all of Valenta’s involvement with the taping of two other people. The prosecution had won this count without proving a major element of the offense, and the trial judge had missed this glaring weakness in the case. Valenta, however, did not.

The appeals court found the evidence supporting the count involving attorney Gindes to be borderline at best. A jury could reasonably have acquitted on this count, the court found, because Gindes testified that he had no expectation that the conversation with Valenta would be kept confidential. Although the appeals court declined to find the evidence insufficient on this count, it ruled that it was so weak that the prosecutorial misconduct might have been enough to sway the jury to convict when it might otherwise have acquitted.

Prosecutors were entitled to refile the one count involving Gindes, but elected not to do so. A man who in 1990 didn’t even know what a no contest plea was managed to write his own ticket out of prison.

“I’m not a lawyer,” he explains. “But when you’re in a dark black hole, you do what you can to get out. You do what you have to.” It also didn’t hurt that, in yet another irony, the corrections department had paid for his training as a paralegal after he was paroled to Bakersfield, giving him the tools he needed to overturn his wrongful conviction.

The decision in his favor came down in October 1999, but Valenta was not through. He wanted the court to address the subjects of malicious prosecution, improper parole searches, and the confusion in the case law concerning what constitutes a “confidential communication,” an area of the law even the appeals court concedes has never been fully hashed out by the California Supreme Court. He also was concerned that the factual background in the unpublished opinion contained numerous errors he wished to correct.

“Although it may appear that Petitioner is looking a gift horse in the mouth, the opinion is fact is a Trojan Horse. Petitioner cannot accept a reversal of a false conviction based on technical issues of error. Petitioner wishes to eliminate future persecution and prosecution of religious, political and free speech in the Kern County Judicial System.”

Thanks, but no thanks, the appeals court and Supreme Court responded in fairly short order, and Valenta had no choice but to go free at last. Still, he had added several months more to his incarceration, not walking out of prison until February, five months after his conviction was overturned.

“I give him credit. He brought more to the table than most inmates. And he’s persistent, there’s no doubt about that,” says Deputy Attorney General Zall. “But he inundated the court. He ran the risk they wouldn’t even find the salient issues buried in all that paper. And appealing the ruling overturning his conviction? You have to wonder about that: It seems he was his own worst enemy.”

* * *

Jerome Valenta is back in Bakersfield now, living with a friend and board member of Extend a Hand for Justice, trying to get his old organization back on track. He says it will take a while, but that he is not about to surrender. Most people might slink away, find a new place to live, start over without the notoriety his case has engendered. But not Valenta.

“There’s too much injustice out here, and too few people willing to do something about it. I had never been to Bakersfield before in my life, it was just the closest city to where I was released. But clearly I’m needed here. I’m a firm believer that God has a plan for me. And this is where he has brought me.”

Since his release, he’s been attending trials, writing letters to the editor, going to legislative hearings in Sacramento. If anything, his zealousness has been intensified by his imprisonment and successful appeal. He says he has two passions in life now, besides revitalizing his parolee-support network. One is to campaign to have his hero, Kern County’s own Caesar Chavez, made a saint in the Catholic Church. “I pray to him all the time. I used his example in my battles against injustice. He’s my hero, my role model. He fought against the wealthiest, most powerful, most influential people in California. And he wouldn’t take no for an answer.”

His other goal is to promote a campaign to have Governor Gray Davis excommunicated from the Catholic Church. Valenta says Davis’ stance in support of the death penalty and other draconian criminal-justice measures is inconsistent with being a Catholic.

He’s not going to hold his breath on that second goal, he concedes. But as he often says in justification of his crusades, “I feel someone has to put these issues on the table.”

Hopefully, he adds as an afterthought, he won’t be needing a governor’s pardon any time soon.

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