Inside Ex-Prosecutor's Suit Alleging Honesty Cost Him Job

Chris Ross remembers vividly the moment he knew he needed to leave Riverside County, California, for good.

Ross is a former prosecutor with the Riverside District Attorney's Office who took on murder and death penalty cases with a nearly perfect conviction record. He is also an Iraq War veteran who served in the Green Berets, one of the most dangerous jobs in the Army.

But driving around Indio in December 2013, Ross felt defeated. He said none of his friends from the DA's office would answer his calls. "It was like I had the plague," he said.

He still speaks like a soldier. In clear concise sentences, he gave a no-frills, but detailed, account of how he was ultimately driven out of the state, caught up in what would be a seven-year legal battle with his former employers after they allegedly pushed him out of a job.

Ross had spent three years insisting that evidence did not support the theory that a jailed suspect, Roger Parker, murdered Bryan "Tennessee" Stevenson back in 2010. But instead of being rewarded for his diligence, Ross said he was taken off the case in 2013, put on administrative leave a few weeks later and eventually prohibited from returning to the office. Ross' superiors maintain that he voluntarily resigned because he did not want to provide medical records and that his leave had nothing to do with the Parker case, but rather his own personal health.

Parker, now 32, was in jail for four years before his case was dismissed by the district attorney's office in March 2014. His factual innocence was legally declared just three months ago.

While the murder case has officially gone cold, civil litigation stemming from the investigation is ongoing.

Ross and his lawyers just secured fresh momentum in a discovery battle before the state's highest court, and his wrongful termination suit is advancing toward a trial next summer. Separately, Parker himself has sued officials, seizing on Ross' allegations of prosecutorial misconduct as part of his wrongful imprisonment claims.

"I was on the side of right," Ross told Law360. "I did the right thing. I was honest. I did what I was raised to do by my parents, what the Army makes you live by: honor, integrity, veracity. These people did anything but that, and they prevailed. How could this happen?"

Filing Suit

Ross moved to Los Angeles in December 2013, but said he couldn't get a job at any district attorney's office in California or even a low-level public defender position. Eventually, he moved to San Antonio, where he was hired by a civil law firm in the Lone Star State.

In July 2014, Ross filed a wrongful termination suit against Riverside County alleging retaliation and disability discrimination. The lawsuit has lasted longer than he ever expected. It kept Riverside County in his life.

To Ross' shock, his case was dismissed by Superior Court Judge David Chapman in 2017. Judge Chapman said that Ross' retaliation claim didn't hold up because he couldn't show that he was engaged in protected activity.

Ross said he spent all of his retirement fund to appeal the decision to California's Fourth Appellate District.

"When that motion for summary judgment was granted, it felt like somebody took a bat to my stomach," he said. "I had to say: Do I really want to do this? Is it worth it? But there's a reason I never lost a trial. It wasn't that I'm smarter or better than anybody. I was smart enough to know when I was wrong and when I was right."

In 2019, an appellate panel agreed with Ross that the suit should be allowed to proceed.

"If credited by a trier of fact, the evidence shows Ross engaged in protected activity because he disclosed information to a governmental or law enforcement agency and to people with authority over him which he reasonably believed disclosed a violation of compliance with federal and state law applicable to criminal prosecutions and prosecutors," the appellate court said.

Although he was victorious in his appeal, Ross says he still feels like he is facing an uphill battle as a trial in the case approaches.

The county's lawyers argued in a response to Ross' complaint that Ross has little to support his retaliation claims, particularly because the DA's office eventually agreed with him about Parker's innocence, dismissing Parker's case in March 2014. They say that Ross had a medical condition that made it difficult for him to work, but instead of accepting a role in the filings unit or providing the appropriate medical records so that his supervisors could accommodate him, he chose to resign.

Ross remembers things differently, but he's worried about the venue in which he will be telling his version of events to a jury.

The former superiors Ross accused in the suit not only of harassing him but illegally hiding Brady evidence and keeping an innocent man in jail for four year without trial have gone on to powerful positions in the county. Sean Lafferty, a former assistant district attorney, is now a Riverside Superior Court judge. Jeffery Van Wagenen, ex-Riverside County District Attorney Paul Zellerbach's chief of staff, was appointed county executive officer of Riverside in February.

Not only does Ross see this as unfair, he worries it is undermining his case, which is being heard in Riverside County Superior Court.

"There's a lot of emotion when I think about this," Ross said. "It's about these people in positions of power."

Representatives for Lafferty, Van Wagenen and the Riverside County District Attorney's Office declined to comment for this story. Zellerbach did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

A Murder Investigation

On March 18, 2010, in Desert Hot Springs, Willie Womack, who at the time was 50, said he returned home to find a man he knew named Bryan "Tennessee" Stevenson dead in his living room.

Womack told police officers, detailed in several memorandums provided to Law360, that Stevenson was homeless and would sometimes hang out in Womack's garage. Someone had sliced open Stevenson's esophagus, and the top of his head was oozing "brain matter," reports said.

Police ruled out Womack as a suspect early in their investigation. They focused instead on Womack's 20-year-old roommate, Roger Parker.

Parker, who has a developmental disorder that can sometimes manifest as uncontrollable rage, appeared to fit the bill for a suspect in a violent crime. He had a long rap sheet. Moving in and out of group homes throughout his childhood, he was arrested at 11 years old, twice at 15, and three more times after that, nearly all on assault charges.

But Parker's assaults weren't random. He told Law360 that growing up, he didn't take kindly to the bullying he received from his peers, who frequently mocked his mental illness. He said he would sometimes lash out at authority figures: staff at the group homes and psychiatric facilities he used to live in, social service workers or teachers.

"Words hurt me at that time," he said. "I didn't have parents. I had given up on the world, pretty much."

Stevenson, on the other hand, was a distant acquaintance at best. In interrogation, Parker "adamantly denied knowing anything" about the murder. According to the district attorney's office memos provided to Law360, Parker willingly went in for questioning and agreed to take a lie detector test, give his fingerprints and a blood sample, and submit to a DNA swab.

But police "were confident it was Roger," according to a memo from deputy district attorney Lisa DiMaria, who handled the case for the Riverside District Attorney's Office prior to Ross' involvement. The interrogators were trying to get Parker to confess, she noted. They continually told him that if he said he had acted in self-defense, "that's not a crime."

Finally, officers falsely told Parker that Womack was planning to evict him when he got out of the police station. That's when Parker said he cracked.

"I thought to myself, 'Man, I'm not going to be able to make it,'" Parker told Law360. "I was like, 'Well, you got a choice. You go back to the fucked-up world you are in, or you just crack and say I did it and go to jail for a while and just get out. I'm tired, bro. I'm just gonna quit. You win.'"

At 4 p.m, after having been in the police station for 15 hours, Parker called in the detective to confess formally. He gave hardly any details and was not asked to provide more, DiMaria noted. He was arrested and put in Riverside County jail just a week before his 21st birthday.

DiMaria didn't respond to a request to be interviewed for this story, but Rod Pacheco, who was the district attorney of Riverside County from June 2006 until January 2011, told Law360 she was "honest and formidable," and one of the best prosecutors in the office.

Immediately, DiMaria saw flaws in the Parker case. In a memo she wrote to then-Assistant District Attorney Lafferty on July 22, 2011, DiMaria said she was concerned Parker's confession was coerced.

"As I expressed at the initial staffing in March, 2010, I have serious concerns about his guilt (if we have the right person)," she said.

She asked police investigators to lead Parker through a videotaped reenactment of the murder at the crime scene. He was not convincing. Parker changed details of his confession and gave explanations that made "absolutely no sense," she said in the memo.

The fingerprint on a knife left at the scene did not match Parker's. He was also eliminated as a DNA match on a white sweatshirt that Stevenson was wearing. And when a Riverside detective reinterviewed him, Parker said he made the whole thing up.

DiMaria told her superiors she did not want to prosecute Parker. She suggested to Lafferty and District Attorney Zellerbach, who had just entered the office in January 2011, that Parker's case be dismissed and the investigation be reopened. Instead, Lafferty tapped another deputy district attorney, Chris Ross, to take a second look.

Chris Ross

As a prosecutor, Ross was the person you wanted in a tough battle, Pacheco said. At the time he was handed the Parker case, Ross' had 61 convictions, no defeats and one hung jury.

"We had 275 lawyers, and there were one or two, maybe three, that we could count on to win cases that were almost unwinnable," Pacheco said. "Chris was one of those. He was not afraid of anything."

But Ross said he was suspicious when Lafferty pulled him into a meeting and asked him to take a second look at the Parker case. DiMaria was "one hell of a prosecutor," Ross said. He trusted her, and he didn't understand why Lafferty was ignoring her advice.

Following orders, Ross began to dig deeper into the case. He sent Parker's boxer shorts, bedsheets, pants and shoes back for more DNA testing. He didn't find Stevenson's blood on them.

"There was nothing more that I could do," he said. "I had exhausted all the remedies for forensic testing, for investigating all the witnesses. So at this point in time, I concluded I can't prove this man did it."

He wrote Lafferty several memos, provided to Law360, explaining his doubts about the case. One, in May 2012 said, "Dismiss the case as it appears rife with reasonable doubt. There were many mistakes made during the investigation of this case. These mistakes cannot be undone, nor can many of them be remedied by further investigation."

However, Ross said Lafferty remained unconvinced and, at several points, Lafferty explicitly asked Ross not to turn over his analysis of the evidence to Parker's defense attorneys.

Since a 1963 landmark ruling in the U.S. Supreme Court, Brady v. Maryland , prosecutors in the U.S. must turn over all evidence that might exonerate a defendant.

"I was in disbelief," Ross said. "I had never, ever heard of a prosecutor being told not to turn over exculpatory evidence."

The county didn't specifically address Ross' claims about violating the Brady rule in its response to his wrongful termination suit. However, it generally denied all of Ross' allegations. It has also maintained that the details of the Parker case had nothing to do with Ross' exit from the office.

Ross began to suspect that Lafferty, Van Wagenen, and Zellerbach all had an agenda: Zellerbach's campaign for reelection in 2014. Ross suggested that dismissing Parker's case would put a stain on Zellerbach's conviction record as DA, something that would hurt his chances of staying in office.

"It started to dawn on me, 'Wait a minute, this is a homicide,'" Ross said. "There's not that many, thank God. So it's like a GPA. You get an A, your GPA goes up 0.1 or 0.3. You get an F, and your GPA goes down 1.5. It drags it down like a concentration gradient."

Ross' suspicions were, in part, fueled by Zellerbach's reputation, both as a prosecutor and as a former Superior Court judge.

During his judicial tenure from 2000 to 2011, Zellerbach was publicly admonished by the California Commission on Judicial Performance twice. In 2006, he was chided for attending a baseball game while a jury was deliberating in a murder case and holding up the verdict by refusing to leave the game early or letting another judge hear the jury's decision.

He ran into trouble again as a judge in 2010, when he lambasted the Riverside District Attorney's Office during a discovery hearing on a case against a former employee of then-DA Pacheco, one of Zellerbach's political foes. The commission said Zellerbach did not disclose that, at the time, he was already planning to run against Pacheco for district attorney.

While Zellerbach defeated Pacheco in 2010, he would go on to lose his 2014 reelection bid to now-District Attorney Michael Hestrin after being charged with a misdemeanor for allegedly stealing Hestrin's campaign signs.

When Zellerbach was deposed in Ross' wrongful termination case, he said he was hardly aware of Ross and the Parker case.

"My involvement was second and third and fourth hand," Zellerbach said. "I'm not aware of what specific cases prosecutors usually are handling. We file 40 [thousand] to 50,000 crime cases every year in the office, and I'm not aware of who's handling which case usually."

Stevenson's murder was one of just three homicicides in Desert Hot Springs in 2010 and one of 87 homicides in Riverside County overall.

Zellerbach said in his testimony that Ross was becoming "more erratic, more argumentative, to a certain extent more paranoid."

"He was mis-recalling or misrepresenting meetings that he had with administrative or management personnel," Zellerbach said. "He was calling people liars. Those are some of the things that I recall now, years later, about the concerns that the office had with respect to Mr. Ross' attitude or behavior that was of a growing concern as time went on."

This was a far cry from what Ross' superiors, including Lafferty, said about him in a performance appraisal signed in July 2013. The appraisal, which was provided to Law360, describes Ross as the "epitome of a prosecutor," and "one of the top prosecutors in the office," primed for management, if he chose to pursue it.

"I think that one of the most complimentary comments that I have heard about Chris from another manager is that if their family member had been killed they would want Chris to prosecute the case," the report said. "In a word, Chris Ross is exceptional."

In Ross' view, his career as a prosecutor in California ended three months after that glowing review when, in October 2013, he had his investigator obtain the jailhouse call transcripts of Womack, who was beng held on separate charges. Ross discovered that Womack — Parker's roommate and the man who reported Stevenson's murder to the police — had inadvertently confessed to killing Stevenson, not once, but twice.

Ross recalls hearing Womack say to his girlfriend on the phone, "Hey, if that guy is messing with you, I'll cut his head off like I did that other guy in my place in Desert Hot Springs." Womack had a nearly identical phone conversation with his sister, Ross said.

"So right there. That is the most compelling evidence that you can ever have."

A few days after Ross showed Lafferty the call transcripts, on Oct. 29, 2013, Ross recalls Lafferty telling him that he was no longer the prosecutor on the Parker case. Lafferty came down to Ross' office and asked him to hand over the Parker case files, Ross said. He asked where the jail calls were. Ross told him he had given them to the paralegal for homicides.

"Do you want me to turn them over to defense?" Ross said he asked.

Ross recalls Lafferty saying, "No, I don't." Lafferty took the case and said he would take care of it, Ross said. On Nov. 1, Ross said his superiors told him to transfer all his murder cases to another prosecutor, John Aki. A week later on Nov. 7, Ross was placed on administrative leave.

The county's lawyers did not address Womack's jailhouse calls in their initial demurrer of Ross' complaint. They did stress that the district attorney's office ultimately dismissed the charge against Parker, and Ross acknowledged that outcome, even as he leveled claims about Lafferty being angry and hostile.

The tapes, according to Ross and his lawyers, were not turned over to the defense until over four months later, on March 5, 2014, a day before the DA's office dismissed the case against Parker. Womack has not been charged in Stevenson's murder. When asked, the Riverside District Attorney's Office said that Stevenson's case had been transferred to the Cold Case Unit.

Pushed Out

While the Parker case was ongoing, Ross was dealing with another burden.

In the Army, Ross said he was a part of a team assigned to Northern Africa and Middle Eastern Asia and that he worked specifically on anti-terrorism hostage rescue assignments. His role in the combat unit was primarily as a breacher, meaning he knocked down doors.

In 2013, he began experiencing symptoms he suspected were related to his proximity to explosives and other physical trauma from his time in the military. He went to Cedars-Sinai Medical Center for an evaluation and was told to get evaluated at the Mayo Clinic to rule out several possible diseases. He had a series of examinations at the Mayo Clinic in Arizona and was eventually diagnosed with post-traumatic concussion syndrome.

He asked for accommodations at work for his visits to the Mayo Clinic, but nothing extreme, he said. He was already working on a handful of murder cases, so he asked not to be given any new cases and not to be sent to the filings unit. But his superior Tricia Frandsal ignored this request, Ross said, claiming he needed an official diagnosis and continuing to add to his caseload.

In one meeting about his health situation, Ross said Lafferty "demanded to know what was medically wrong" with him and called him a "nonproductive member of the homicide unit" because he had not gone to trial in six weeks.

"He started yelling and screaming and cutting me off," Ross told Law360. "He said, 'That's insubordination. You have to provide me with a doctor's note. You didn't do it. You get fired for insubordination like this.'"

In a meeting a few days later, the first week of November 2013, Ross said Lafferty ordered him to go on administrative leave, something he and Pacheco both said was only invoked for prosecutors who are believed to be a danger to the public, themselves or other district attorney employees. The county said in its initial demurrer that the leave of absence would serve "to ascertain an appropriate accommodation for his disability and need to avoid stress at work."

Ross said he asked Lafferty to provide a good reason for sending him on leave but that Lafferty refused.

The county ordered that Ross not return to work until he could provide medical documentation of his diagnosis. Ross said he informed them that the Mayo Clinic does not provide this kind of doctor's note, and that he was still undergoing testing to determine an official diagnosis. He said he offered to get a letter from his treating doctor but the county refused to accept this.

The county's lawyers said in their initial demurrer to Ross' complaint that Ross claimed he was unable to continue in the stressful environment of homicide prosecution and sought a transfer out of the homicide unit because of a disability.

"His supervisors requested medical documentation to allow them to fully understand and effectuate any necessary accommodation," the county said. "While waiting for medical documentation identifying Ross' need to avoid stress, they reassigned Ross to the filings unit, but he refused the assignment and was ultimately placed on a leave of absence."

After several months away from work on administrative leave, Ross said he was "constructively terminated." He submitted his resignation on April 24, 2014, after he had already moved out of the county.

"They ruined his career," Pacheco said. "And they did it intentionally. They didn't think twice about it. They could care less about what happened to Chris Ross, whether he was damaged or hurt or whether the community was damaged as a result of losing an amazing prosecutor."

Suing Riverside

Ross retained new lawyers after his case was sent back down to Riverside Superior Court in 2019: solo practitioners Terry Singleton and James Parkinson; Stephen Hill of Parkinson Hill PLLC, and Efaon Cobb of Hewgill Cobb & Lockard APC.

The attorneys told Law360 they each felt a special connection to the case. Cobb, as a Black man who grew up in welfare housing with a single mom, said he saw himself in Roger Parker.

Singleton is a Vietnam War veteran, so he said he feels a special indignation on behalf of Ross, that his prolonged injuries from war were the foothold the DA's office could use to push him out.

Singleton and Parkinson grew up together. Parkinson said he most remembers playing with Singleton's brother Jerry, who also fought in Vietnam and died in battle in 1970.

To discuss taking on Ross' case in 2019, the pair of lawyers and childhood friends met at Jerry's gravesite in Indio.

"[Terry] told me about the case and the military connection," Parkinson said. "I had basically retired. I wasn't handling any cases and I didn't want to handle any cases. But as he told me who the client was, I thought, 'Wait a second, we've got a former Green Beret, a breacher, the first guy in the door to get shot at, becomes a DA, and he has a 61 and 0 record. I said this is ridiculous."

Before his case was dismissed on summary judgment, Ross' previous lawyers had petitioned to remove the individual defendants, Zellerbach, Van Wagenen, Lafferty and Frandsal, from the case, in exchange for the promise that none of them would countersue.

Ross has argued in court papers that his former lawyers did this without his permission. However, his prior counsel disputed this in a deposition, saying Ross had verbally expressed his support for the move and that they had on multiple occasions spoken with him about the benefits of taking the individual defendants out of the case and that he did not express his disapproval to them throughout the litigation process.

Those lawyers did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

After the appellate court revived the suit, Ross' new lawyers filed a motion to reinstate the defendants with the new judge on the case, Riverside County Superior Court Judge Kira Klatchko, in January 2020.

In June, Judge Klatchko, denied the motion and suggested that Ross was being strategic, waiting this long to ask to reinstate the individual defendants so that they would not have time to seek counsel and prepare for the upcoming hearings. She pointed out that Ross' former lawyers said they routinely discussed with him the idea of removing individual defendants, and if Ross was so adamantly opposed to this, it didn't make sense that he wouldn't have sought other counsel.

She said Ross had not provided "convincing proof that his attorneys acted without his authority such that the dismissals were void or entered as a result of mistake, inadvertance, surprise or excusable neglect."

At the very least, she said, he reaped the benefits of his lawyers' actions and waited too long before seeking to reinstate the defendants.

Singleton told Law360 that there are no time limits for such a request. "There are no time limits on doing the right thing," he said.

"The judge, I think, went out of her way to try to find some sort of impediment to granting the relief we sought," Singleton said.

Ross and his legal team clashed with the judge again after the lawyers deposed Pacheco in February. The former district attorney shed light on Ross himself and the inner workings of the district attorney's office across several years. He also said something particularly alarming about a conversation he had with current Riverside District Attorney Hestrin, a friend of his.

Pacheco said that he had recently spoken to Hestrin about the Ross lawsuit and Hestrin's potential deposition.

"Well, we were talking about our respective opinions of Mr. Zellerbach as one of the most unethical … lawyers we've ever seen as prosecutors," Pacheco said in his deposition. "... and [Hestrin] said that the County lawyer or lawyers were telling him not to say that. And his response to them was to say, 'I ran on that' — this is what he told me — 'I ran against Mr. Zellerbach and said that loudly. I'm not changing my testimony about that. He's clearly unethical.'"

Ross' lawyers saw this as an accusation against the county lawyers of suborning perjury. They filed a motion to subpoena Hestrin to confirm whether the county's lawyers were pressuring him to withhold his opinions if deposed for the case. But Judge Klatchko sided with the defense counsel, granting their motion to block the lawyers from taking Hestrin's testimony at all.

"Hestrin is a high-ranking government official with no direct personal factual information pertaining to the material issues in this action," Judge Klatchko said in a June ruling.

"I can remember saying to the court, 'Your Honor, we have an obligation to find out if somebody tried to get a witness not to tell the truth,'" Parkinson said. "She said, basically, 'Not relevant. Let's move on.' Well, we didn't move on."

After the Fourth Appellate District Court in September backed the trial judge's ruling, Ross and his legal team turned to the Supreme Court of California.

They weren't alone in asking the court to take up the case. In an October brief, the Consumer Attorneys of California told the justices the petition would settle an important question of law about obstructing discovery and counsel pressuring potential witnesses.

"In CAOC's experience, these efforts also often involve high-ranking officials in the public or private sector who follow the unethical and illegal advice of counsel to present false or misleading testimony, or to tamper with documentary evidence," the brief said. "For that reason, CAOC believes that our profession would benefit from precedent that efforts to obstruct justice are discoverable, even where that discovery would require depositions of high-ranking individuals at private or public entities."

Ross' efforts paid off two months later when, on Dec. 1, the high court upended the earlier appellate order and forced Judge Klatchko to explain why Ross' attorneys shouldn't be able to depose Hestrin.

On Thursday, Judge Klatchko pushed the trial date from January to June of next year to accommodate the appellate hearings in which she will need to justify her ruling on quashing Hestrin's deposition.

Ross' lawyers have also petitioned Judge Klatchko to recuse herself from the trial, but she declined to do so in a May order, ruling that just because Ross' lawyers were unhappy with her rulings did not constitute evidence of bias.

Ross argued as part of his recusal bid that the judge could not impartially decide whether to reinstate now-Judge Lafferty, her colleague on the bench, as a defendant. But Judge Klatchko said, "There is no legal requirement that all judges of a court are disqualified from presiding over a case involving a judge of the court."

While Ross believes he already has a strong case going into the jury trial, he and his lawyers do worry that a trial set in the county he is suing could be doomed to fail.

"We're currently in the discovery phase of a case. It's not the trial phase," Parkinson said. "It's the long-standing policy of the California Legislature and the courts that discovery is open. You're looking for anything that is either relevant or potentially could be admissible at trial, and you don't know that until you ask questions. So when someone shuts down your ability to ask questions, that leads to a big question: What's going on here?"

Stepping Out of Riverside's Shadow

While Ross and his lawyers prepare for trial, Roger Parker is preparing to wage his own war against Riverside County.

Parker said he thought he was prepared for prison, but it hardened him in ways he wasn't expecting.

"I thought I was used to being locked up," said Parker, who was raised in California's Level 14 homes for emotionally disturbed children. He said living in a Level 14 home was akin to being "caged up like an animal." There were barbed wire fences over the facilities, staff watching him 24/7 and daily injections of medication "shot right there in your butt cheeks," he said, laughing about it now.

"But I learned very quickly how real jail really acts," Parker said of his time in Riverside County Jail from 2010 to 2014. "You know how some people gotta learn the hard way, but some can learn the soft way? There was no choice but to learn the hard way."

In the four years, Parker said he encountered violence regularly. He fought with his younger cellmates and occasionally with prison guards, who sent him to the hospital once, he said. His grandmother died while he was locked up. But he also found mentors and eventually learned to read, devouring the "Game of Thrones" series.

In the end, when Parker was released from jail in 2014, he said he mostly just wanted to "piss on their wall."

"That's how I felt," he said. "That was my revenge. I can't do nothing else."

It wasn't until this year that he realized there was something else he could do to make the county pay for keeping him in prison for so long.

Gerry Singleton, managing partner at trial firm Singleton Schreiber McKenzie & Scott, learned about Parker through his father, Terry Singleton, Ross' lawyer. Reading through a witness interview Parker had given for Ross' wrongful termination case, Gerry Singleton told Law360 he realized that no one was looking out for Parker.

"It became obvious that he really needed a lawyer and that he had gotten a raw deal," he said.

Singleton sought to rectify that. In August, after he and his law firm colleague John C. Lemon petitioned the Superior Court of California, Judge Otis Sterling ordered that Parker be declared factually innocent and his arrest records be destroyed.

Now, Singleton says that along with his colleague Kimberly Trimble and NAACP lawyer Wil Colom, he is helping Parker sue Riverside County for wrongful imprisonment.

On July 29, they filed a lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California against Zellerbach, Lafferty, Frandsal, Van Wagenen and the County of Riverside. The defendants answered the complaint in September, demanding a jury trial.

Singleton said he thinks the biggest challenge will be the immunity that is often granted to prosecutors, designed to protect them in making tough calls. But he said that Ross' legal fight with the county will be a huge help, as the former prosecutor brings to light years of alleged mismanagement in the district attorney's office.

"It's a very rare circumstance because it's hard to show that there was basically deliberate misconduct by the prosecutor," he said. "It wasn't until Ross came forward publicly that we knew. In 20 years doing this, this is the first time I've ever seen a case where we can actually prove that it happened, as opposed to us suspecting that it happened."

Ross said he hopes, above all, that Parker gets justice.

"That man spent four years in jail," Ross said. "Oh my God. I mean, you can't believe that happens in modern America. The people need to know, the state, the legislature, the nation. Everybody needs to know this is wrong."

After everything that happened to him, Ross has some ideas for how the criminal justice system should change. There aren't enough checks and balances on prosecutors' offices, leaving them vulnerable to bad actors who know they will face little accountability for their actions, he said. And he doesn't necessarily feel like he is getting a fair hearing in Riverside County Superior Court.

"It's really hard as an attorney reading [the rulings] and having to take it. It really is," he said. "But that's why we have an appellate court. The bottom line is; This needs to change. The corruption needs to stop. So hopefully, we can remedy these errors and get a fair shake. All we want is a level playing field."

--Editing by Jill Coffey.

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