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In all fairness, Johnson was not an easy client. He went through nine trial attorneys before he settled on Buford, and by then he had acquired a reputation for being a "hostile and aggressive" client, according to a letter from one of his attorneys to the judge. A handcuffed Johnson even head-butted his original court-appointed attorney, at a hearing in which he'd asked for a new lawyer. (A psychologist's report says that Johnson may have a paranoid disorder, noting that "it is not surprising" he would be dissatisfied with his lawyers.)
During and after his trials, Johnson argued angrily that Buford was ineffective and that she wasn't listening to him. Charles Hoehn helped him file a motion for a new trial in the Johanna V. case based on legal arguments of Buford's professional deficiencies. The attorney in Johnson's direct appeal of the Johanna V. case also claimed that Buford had been ineffective.
All of these arguments have been rejected by the courts, which have never found Buford to be incompetent. (She declined to comment for this story.)
Some standards do exist: The American Bar Association recently established minimum guidelines for defense attorneys, in The Ten Principles of a Public Defense System. No. 8 reads, "The same attorney continuously represents the client until completion of the case." It is not easy to fire one lawyer and hire another when they are supplied for free by the state, and Johnson likely didn't help his case by doing so multiple times. It's impossible to say whether one of the attorneys he dismissed would have done a better job than Buford. But it is clear that Buford's lackluster defense helped seal his fate.
Despite Johnson's exoneration, the Department of Corrections seemed to want to keep him in prison.
In January 2001, about the time that Johnson was asking the state to test the rape kits in both of his cases, prison guards found a sharpened piece of metal in his jail cell and slapped him with a weapons violation.
Johnson argued vociferously that he and his cellmate, Zachary McPeak, had been set up, but prison guards figured he was lying, and he was found guilty of the charge during a March 2001 prison hearing. As punishment, 360 days were deducted from Johnson's "good time" credits, and he was moved to another prison and put in solitary confinement.
But in August 2001, the truth came out. An inmate had sent a letter to the warden admitting that a prison guard had helped some white supremacists he knew plant the knife in Johnson and McPeak's cell. During McPeak's hearing on the matter, the charges were dropped.
No one bothered to notify Johnson. In fact, he didn't learn about the new evidence until February 2002, when McPeak was coincidentally transferred to the same Los Angeles-area jail.
The first time they talked, McPeak updated Johnson on the dropped charge and gave him copies of all the documents from his hearing. Johnson immediately began filing appeals with the Department of Corrections. For almost eight months he got the bureaucratic runaround. The weapons charge was still unresolved when Johnson left the prison in October 2002, after he was exonerated in the Richmond case.
It would come back to haunt him. Four days after he was released, Johnson was put back into custody.
He was shopping with his sister Diane when he learned that there was a problem. Their mother called Diane's cell phone to say that Johnson's parole officer wanted him to call immediately. When Johnson finally returned the call several hours later, his parole officer told him that he needed to report to his office the next day, for reasons that couldn't be discussed on the phone.
The next morning Johnson met his parole officer at about 9. The officer told him that the Department of Corrections had forgotten to add in the 360 days of credit lost for the weapons charge, and he had to go back to prison. His new release date would be August 2003.
Johnson couldn't believe it. His sister, who had driven him to the parole office, became hysterical. Johnson asked to use the phone and called his mother and his attorney.
"My mother was going crazy," Johnson recalls. "My sister was crying at the parole office. I had to calm her down. It was crazy. I can't even explain it. Even the parole officers, they weren't even understanding it. I couldn't believe it, but it was like, after all them years and everything I been through, it was like nothing surprises or amaze me."
After he was reincarcerated, Johnson contacted the Northern California Innocence Project, and lawyers there helped him file a writ of habeas corpus with documents proving the knife was a setup. Within a month, the state attorney general agreed that the charges should be dropped and the "good time" credits restored. Johnson, exonerated yet again, was to be rereleased in late December 2002, just in time to spend Christmas with his family.
But he didn't spend the holidays with his loved ones. Before Johnson could be released, the Department of Corrections violated its own regulations and reopened an assault allegation that dated back to May 2002 -- more than six months after the fact.
In that incident, Johnson, who was in solitary confinement at the time, allegedly threw a food tray and grabbed two officers by the arm through the cell's food slot, then bit them. (He says it was in self-defense; he claims he bit the officers to make them release their hold on his arm because he felt they might break it.) Soon after the incident, the Department of Corrections referred the matter to the L.A. District Attorney's Office, which dropped the charges.
