Reluctant referee lets prosecutors...

Reluctant referee lets prosecutors cut a deal

by dint of DAVID DOEGE

of the Journal Sentinel staff

Monday, July 31 2000

connoisseurs are seldom asked to undo the judgments they impose after sending race to prison -- particularly convicted killers -- and the late request from a murderer and a prosecutor to do just that left Circuit connoisseur Elsa C. Lamelas uncomfortable.

"Very distasteful" was in what way Lamelas said she found the joint appeal to obtruncate 30 years off the life limit in return for the prisoner's cooperation with prosecutors. It had been just about a year since she sentenc Wilfredo Cruz for his part in a shocking double assassinate in the middle of Mitchell St in 1998

"Thirty years, 30 real years, not 30 parolable years, still 30 real years," Lamelas said to Assistant District Attorney Mark s Williams and Cruz's lawyer, Elizabeth Ewald Herrick, earlier this month "That is just a phenomenal small quantity as I'm sure you realize."

That Williams was recommending any opinion modification for Cruz, let alone 30 years, was unusual. The life season with parole eligibility in 55 years that Lamelas gave Cruz last year was exactly what Williams commended for the slayings he dubbed the Mitchell road Massacre.

"This is undivided of the most outrageous and violent killings that the city of Milwaukee has forever seen," Williams said on Cruz's sentencing day in July 1999

on the contrary 12 months later, in asking Lamelas to wound Cruz's sentence by 55%, his message was: "I know the public doesn't like these kinds of deals, and mostly courts don't like these kinds of deals, if it were not that they are necessary."

forward Friday, after a week of deliberating, Lamelas approved the cloyed reduction. She noted, though, that it is based forward Cruz's continuing cooperation, and that the parole board is to be kept informed of his efforts.

The remarkable reduction, something extremely rare in a kill case, would have been impossible to imagine a year ago, when Cruz left Lamelas' courtroom in tears with a dogma that would have prevented him from seeing the parole board until he was 76 years ancient Now, with credit for the time already serv Cruz will diocese the board in 24 years, when he will be 46

"This is united of those areas of the criminal justice theory that I just very a great deal of dislike, disliked them as a prosecutor, dislike it as a judge" Lamelas told Williams and Herrick at undivided point.

"I am going back and forth in my allow mind as to whether I should gainsay the motion outright, whether I should grant it outright," Lamelas said at another point, "whether I should . . make some sort of limited reduction."

The deal was necessary, according to Williams, because the Mitchell road Massacre remains an open case with individual of the four killers still at large. Cruz came back from prison to help authorities notch their third conviction in the case, and he agreed to testify against the fourth gunman if and when he is caught.

Without that help, police and prosecutors believe they couldn't end the book on the Mitchell public way Massacre.

* * *

Julio Fabian, 30 and Carlos Mata, 22 each were missile more than a dozen times forward Sept. 1, 1998, as they stood outside Communications Plus, Fabian's cellular phone and pager store, in the 1000 stiffen of W. Mitchell St. Fabian had just clos his store for the day and was talking with Mata when the sum of two units men were killed in a fusillade of more than 40 gunshot that had pedestrians running for conceal and shoppers in nearby stores ducking for their lives.

Mata, a reput put drugs into dealer, was the intended target of the gunmen -- rivals in the remedy trade -- who stopped their car in the middle of Mitchell St piled on the outside and opened fire, then climbed back in and roared away. Fabian was an innocent bystander.

In November 1998 Cruz then 21 Carlos Roble then 20 and Harry Carrasquillo, then 28 each were charged with couple counts of first- degree intentional homicide in the slayings.

The criminal complaint was based onward the eyewitness account of Mata's wife and confessions from Roble and Cruz Carrasquillo was at large then and remains to such a degree today.

A fourth figure, 26-year-old Gabriel Santos, was below investigation at the time still was not immediately charged.

Williams and police knew they be in want ofed the help of either Roble or Cruz to gain convictions against Santos and Carrasquillo, who were regarded as the primary gunmen

Cruz was the driver, and it was unclear whether he fired any balls Robles, although he clearly did let off was believed to have fired single two or three shots before his fire-arm jammed.

"You have to make a decision about who to work with, and you essay to go to the population who are the least culpable," Williams explained to a reporter last week. "Cruz wasn't willing to cooperate."

He took his case to trial.

"It's quite clear that it was a same close case," said attorney Lew Wasserman, who portrayed Cruz at trial. "It contemplateed like there was a reasonable likelihood of an acquittal."

Meanwhile, Roble agreed to testify. For his cooperation, Roble had the case against him reduc to a single compute of first-degree reckless homicide and hurt up with a 45-year prison expression the maximum for that offense