$12 Million for Former California Prisoner 
Exonerated After 17 Years

On June 18, 2024, City Commissioners in San Jose, California, voted to approve a settlement paying $12 million to Lionel Rubalcalva, 45, who spent 17 years wrongfully incarcerated for a 2002 gang shooting that he didn’t commit. 

Rubalcalva was arrested on April 8, 2002, for a drive-by shooting three days earlier that left 19-year-old Raymond Rodriguez paralyzed from the waist down. A Norteño street gang member, Rodriguez told detectives that he had most likely been targeted by members of the rival Sureño gang. Both he and his mother said they didn’t suspect Rubalcalva, who was not a rival and had once belonged to another Norteño group. Cell tower data also confirmed Rubalcalva’s alibi—that he was driving to a movie date 45 miles away in Hollister at the time of the shooting.

Nevertheless, police pressured ­Rodriguez and three others to testify that Rubalcalva was the shooter, after which the officials also falsely claimed that the identification was made without coercion. When Rodriguez later began to waiver, they paid him off, moving him and his mother to a nicer neighborhood—details that the office of Santa Clara County District Attorney George Kennedy never shared with Rubalcalva’s defense attorneys. 

Rubalcalva was convicted in …