State Supreme Court throws out woman’s 2005 murder conviction, a win for San Diego-based Innocence Project

A Riverside County woman’s long-running effort to overturn her murder conviction ended Monday when the state Supreme Court threw out her conviction, ruling that her defense lawyer made a critical mistake in trial.

The unanimous ruling by the court was in favor of Kimberly Long. She was convicted in 2005 of murdering her then live-in boyfriend two years earlier. Long always maintained her innocence and after one trial a jury deadlocked in favor of acquitting.

She was a tried a second time and convicted.

The high court’s ruling also represented another victory for the California Innocence Project at California Western School of Law in San Diego. The organization has represented Long for years in her efforts to overturn her conviction. Lawyers for the group earned her release in 2016 by convincing the judge who presided over her first two trials that the result would have been different if Long’s lawyer had presented evidence of the time of death of the victim, Ozzy Conde.

While she was out of prison on bail after that ruling, a Court of Appeal reversed the trial judge. The Supreme Court decision was an appeal of that ruling, and essentially agreed with the court that not presenting evidence about the time of Conde’s death amounted to ineffective assistance of counsel — a ruling that holds the lawyer bungled the case so badly that it affected the outcome.

Long’s trial lawyer was a Riverside County deputy public defender Eric Keen. He is now a judge in the Superior Court there, appointed by Gov. Jerry Brown in 2018.

Justin Brooks, the executive director of the California Innocence Project, said he was “thrilled” with the decision.

“This ruling ends a 17-year legal battle and affirms that Kim Long never should have been convicted of this heinous crime,” he said.

A spokesman for the Riverside County District Attorney’s Office, which has fought for years to protect the conviction, said the office “will be evaluating the case again in light of this new ruling before making a decision regarding any retrial.”

Long was one of the “California 12,” a group of convicted people whose cases the California Innocence Project at Cal Western has been working on for years. Ten of the 12 have had been exonerated, paroled, had their sentence commuted or verdict reversed.