Freed Farmworker Sues After Spending 25 Years on San Quentin's Death Row

Vicente Benavides, a 69-year-old Californian native who spent 25 years on San Quentin's Death Row on false grounds, has filed a lawsuit against those who he believes framed him back in 1991.

NTD Newsroom

Published: 6/29/2019, 1:41:42 AM EDT

Freed Farmworker Sues After Spending 25 Years on San Quentin's Death Row — A condemned inmate is led out of his east block cell on death row at San Quentin State Prison, in San Quentin, Calif. on March 13, 2019. (Eric Risberg/AP)

Vicente Benavides, a 69-year-old Californian native who spent 25 years on San Quentin's Death Row on false grounds, has filed a lawsuit against those who he believes framed him back in 1991.

"I continue suffering from the injustice I lived through and the pain I must carry for the rest of my life," said Benavides through an interpreter, according to ABC7.

On Wednesday, June 26, Benavides held a press conference together with his attorney Ron O. Kaye outside First Street Courthouse in Los Angeles, where they announced they had filed a lawsuit against Kern County, the City of Delano, four law enforcement officials, the prosecuting district attorney, and a county forensic pathologist, reported 23ABCNews.

They claim that Benavides was wrongfully imprisoned based on a trial featuring fabricated evidence and witnesses who were pressured by law enforcement officials to make false statements, which ultimately led to Benavides's death sentence for a crime he never committed.

"He was sent to death row in San Quentin as a child rapist. Do you understand what that means?" his attorney Ron Kaye said. "They framed — and I don't say this lightly — they framed this innocent man," said Kaye, according to NBC New York.

Benavides was freed from San Quentin prison on April 19, 2018. That same day, Kern County District Attorney Lisa Green announced that prosecutors had dropped all charges against Benavides.

“Our professional and ethical standards require us to decline to re-try the case when, upon an objective review of the facts, there is insufficient evidence to establish guilt beyond a reasonable doubt,” she said, The Innocence Project reported in 2018.

It was on November 18, 1991, when Benavides was arrested, and he was incarcerated from that day on, for more than 25 years.

He was convicted in 1993 of first-degree murder and sexual assault of his girlfriend's daughter, 21-month-old Consuelo Verdugo. Initially, a forensic pathologist concluded that the girl died from sexual assault, and several medics also attested in court that the injuries were caused by sexual assault.

But in March 2018, the non-profit Habeas Corpus Resources brought the case to the attention of the Supreme Court of California, which reexamined all evidence and the medical experts' statements, most of which were recanted by the officials involved, because they said they hadn't had full access to all the medical files.

Those documents indicated that no traces of sexual violence were apparent. An expert found the 1993 testimony against Benavides was deemed to be “so unlikely to the point of being absurd," Death Penalty Information Center noted in 2018 on its website.

It wasn't until the child was admitted to a second hospital, that the child incurred what appeared to be injuries to the anal and genital area, which were likely caused by nurses struggling to insert a catheter into the urethra of the dying child, DPIC said.

"All the evidence shows that she likely died from being struck by a motor vehicle," NBC recorded Kaye saying. And that was the probable cause why, despite medical care, on November 25, 1991, Consuelo died.

The state Supreme Court concluded that there was no evidence of sexual abuse before her death, and there were no legal grounds to hold Benavides any longer in detention.

Deputy District Attorney Robert Carbone told 23ABCNews he still believes Benavides is guilty of murder.

"I believe he killed this child — inflicted blunt force trauma on this child," he said.