On the morning of April 9, 2013, George Gonzalez returned to his townhome in Orlando, Florida, and saw a man peek out from his home office.
"I looked at him, he looked at me, and I realized I was being robbed," Gonzalez would later testify.
Gonzalez chased the man but was unable to catch him and returned home to call the police. There, he encountered two more burglars coming down the stairs. Gonzalez put one in a chokehold and then pepper-sprayed the other. The two men got away, jumping over a fence that separated his development from another one across the street.
In a statement given to the Orlando Police Department, Gonzalez described the first man as young and Hispanic, "with an afro haircut like you wouldn't believe." Gonzalez said the burglars stole jewelry and silver worth several thousand dollars.
Later that day, 19-year-old Jorge Valle-Ramos and his roommate, Marquis Hickson, were returning home after playing basketball at a recreation center when the car they were riding in was pulled over by the police. According to later testimony, the police were pulling cars over looking for drugs and weapons. They checked the driver licenses of Valle-Ramos, Hickson, and the driver, and let the young men go.
In Valle-Ramos's license photo, which had been taken in 2011, his hair was in a wide afro. Officials also found another photo of Valle-Ramos in the Florida license database that was taken a few years earlier than that, possibly for his learner's permit. In that photo, Valle-Ramos wore his hair in a close-cropped afro.
Detective Michael Stanley prepared a photo array from the Florida driver license database, with five fillers and the earlier photo of Valle-Ramos, who had a juvenile arrest for grand theft auto. Gonzalez viewed the array on April 18, and selected Valle-Ramos as the first burglar he had encountered when he came home. Stanley then showed Gonzalez the 2011 photo of Valle-Ramos, where his afro was wider and less styled.
In a pre-trial deposition, Gonzalez was unable to provide any other facial descriptions of the first burglar. But he said the second photo of Valle-Ramos Gonzalez made him feel certain that he picked the right person. "When they showed that other picture, I was more sure, but that - that was the guy I first picked out," Gonzalez said. "That was the guy right there."
Valle-Ramos was arrested on April 24, 2013, and charged with burglary with assault or battery and third-degree grand theft.
Two women had also seen the burglars as they made their getaway. Charlene Bloom's description of the driver was at odds with Gonzalez's. She said he was short, with blond hair and no afro. Bloom never viewed a photo array.
Months after Valle-Ramos's arrest, Bethany Szewczyk came to the police department to look at the same initial photo array Gonzalez viewed. Police had interviewed her on the day of the crime. Szewczyk lived in the townhouse complex on the other side of the fence from where Gonzalez lived and had seen three young men get into a car parked near her house. On September 4, 2013, she selected Valle-Ramos as the driver.
Valle-Ramos's trial in Orange County Circuit Court began on May 21, 2014. No physical or forensic evidence connected him to the crime scene. Police had made no other arrests in the case and had not recovered any of the stolen items.
Gonzalez testified about the burglary and the chase. He said he looked directly at Valle-Ramos for 7-10 seconds when he first saw him inside the townhome. He said that Valle-Ramos's afro was longer, "fluffier," than in the initial photo array he viewed. During cross-examination, Gonzalez was asked to review the initial photo array and say how many of the other five men in the array had afros. He said none.
Szewczyk, an attorney, testified that she was leaving for work when she saw three young men jump into a car parked in the road. She said she heard one of the men tell the others to hurry before the cops come. She said the three men were all young and Hispanic and looked like they could have been brothers. She testified that although she gave a statement on the day of the burglary, it was several months before she viewed the photo array. She identified Valle-Ramos in court as the driver of the car.
Szewczyk described the driver's hair as "poofy," with "not very long" hair but with "enough length to be messy."
During cross-examination, Carli Citraro, Valle-Ramos's attorney with the Orange County Public Defender's Office, asked Szewczyk about the photo array she viewed.
"Would you say that any of the other five individuals in that lineup have afro-style haircuts?"
"No," Szewczyk responded.
Stanley testified about the investigation and the creation of the photo array. He said that both Gonzalez and Szewczyk quickly selected Valle-Ramos with what appeared to be little hesitation.
During cross-examination, Stanley said that the haircuts of the five fillers in the photo array didn't match the descriptions of the suspect. "They are not the afro with which I was provided information at the time," he said.
"To be clear, your testimony is that one, three, four, five and six are not the same afro style that was reported?" Citraro asked. "What I'm trying to say, and I'm not certain if that's what you're asking, is but the picture of Mr. Ramos that is in there, um, is not the same picture as what was described to me at the time of the incident," Stanley said.
Hickson testified that he and Valle-Ramos were at home at the time of the burglary. Hickson had the day off, Valle-Ramos worked nights, and they both slept in. Hickson said that Valle-Ramos's hair was long at the time, well beyond the afro he had once sported. "If it wasn't in a ponytail, it would fall down over his face like a girl," he said.
Valle-Ramos testified and said he didn't commit the burglary, that he had never been to Gonzalez's house, and that he didn't even know where it was. He said at the time of the burglary, his hair was already so long that it couldn't remain in an afro. He said it was always kept in a ponytail.
During cross-examination, the prosecutor asked Valle-Ramos how it could be that two people who didn't know him had picked him out of a photo array. "It wasn't me," Valle-Ramos said. "It doesn't matter."
Bloom testified for the defense and said that Valle-Ramos wasn't the man she saw as the driver of the car. Bloom said she wasn't wearing her glasses at the time but that her vision was still pretty good without them and that she got a clear look at the driver. She said that none of the men had an afro. Bloom said she viewed a mugshot of Valle-Ramos after receiving a subpoena in the case and thought that he was "absolutely not" the person she had seen on the morning of the burglary. She said she explained that to someone in the police department but was never asked to look at a photo array.
The jury convicted Valle-Ramos on both counts on May 22, 2014. He was later sentenced to two years and six months in prison.
Valle-Ramos's conviction was affirmed in 2015 by Florida's Fifth District Court of Appeal. He filed a pro se motion for a new trial on August 4, 2015, asserting that there was insufficient evidence and that Citraro had been ineffective for failing to ask for a pre-trial hearing on the photo array used by Stanley. The motion was dismissed on March 1, 2017.
On July 16, 2015, 21-year-old Amos Ortiz was shot to death in a parking lot about three miles from Gonzalez's townhome. At the time, Ortiz was homeless, and there was extensive coverage of his murder in the local media and on social media.
Jasmine Ortiz, Valle-Ramos's girlfriend and no relation to Amos Ortiz, saw a photo of Ortiz and thought he closely resembled Valle-Ramos. She began researching his background, which included an arrest for grand theft auto in August 2013. That alleged crime occurred less than a mile from Gonzalez's home. In addition, Gonzalez and Ortiz had lived less than two miles apart.
Jasmine Ortiz and Valle-Ramos were unable to hire an attorney to help advance this potential lead.
Valle-Ramos was released from prison in November 2016. Several years later, attorneys Lisabeth Fryer and Laura Cepero agreed to represent him pro bono. A defense investigator approached Szewczyk, presenting her with the photos of Ortiz and Valle-Ramos. Szewczyk said she had made a mistake. In an affidavit dated December 1, 2021, Szewczyk recanted her testimony identifying Valle-Ramos as the driver of the car. She said she selected Valle-Ramos from the photo array because he was the only person in the lineup with an afro-style haircut. "If I had been presented with a photographic lineup that included Amos Matthew Ortiz, I would have identified Mr. Ortiz as the individual who entered the driver's side of the getaway vehicle," she said.
Szewczyk said that she had doubts when she went to testify at the trial and saw that Valle-Ramos had darker skin than the driver. According to her affidavit, Stanley introduced her to Gonzalez, who had just testified. She said in the affidavit that Gonzalez told her that he was certain it was Valle-Ramos.
On January 14, 2022, Fryer and Cepero filed a motion for a new trial based on Szewczyk's recantation. The motion also said Valle-Ramos had submitted to a polygraph test, where the examiner found no deception in his answers in which he asserted his lack of involvement in the burglary.
The motion noted the problems with witness misidentification, exacerbated by stress, suggestive photo arrays, and confirmation bias.
The state did not file a response to the motion, and an evidentiary hearing took place on March 28, 2023, before Judge Luis Calderon.
Szewczyk testified about her initial viewing of the photo array. She was asked what feature she concentrated on when making a selection. She said the hair. "I mostly focused on that, because he was the only one in the lineup with an afro, and he resembled the person that I remember seeing," she said.
Szewczyk said her doubts about Valle-Ramos first surfaced at the photo array; Valle-Ramos's skin looked too dark, but she thought it was because of the poor quality of the photos she viewed. She said these doubts increased when she saw Valle-Ramos at trial, and she recognized him as the person from the lineup but not necessarily as the person she had seen on the day of the burglary. She said her brief conversation with Gonzalez allayed her concerns.
During cross-examination, a prosecutor walked Szewczyk through her doubts and suggested she had committed perjury by not testifying to those doubts at the trial. The prosecutor also asked Szewczyk if-as an attorney-she had violated her duties as an officer of the court by waiting seven years to correct her testimony or tell someone about her doubts. This delay undermined the credibility of the recantation, the state would argue.
"This was different," Szewczyk said. "This was a case in which I was a witness. And just because I had doubts, it didn't mean that I was certain that I had put the wrong person in prison. I simply didn't know."
Jasmine Ortiz testified about discovering the photo of Amos Ortiz after his death. "My heart just sank immediately to my stomach, and I screenshotted the photo," she said. "They just looked so similar, and I knew the photo that got Jorge convicted was very similar to the photo of Amos."
Dr. Brian Cahill, a forensic psychologist at the University of Florida and expert on witness misidentification, testified that thousands of young men in the Orlando area could have fit the broad description that placed Valle-Ramos in Stanley's lineup, which he said was unreliable and poorly constructed.
"There's only one individual in this lineup that remotely fits the description provided by the witnesses; the main attribute being an afro," Cahill said. "And both witnesses mentioned this in their report, in their depositions, and statements when they said, I picked the person out because he had-he had the afro. So they're telling you in their own words the attribute they're looking for in this lineup. And the fact that no one else in this lineup has an afro makes this test of the likely guilt or innocence of this person immaterial."
Cahill also said that Szewczyk's delay in viewing the photo array could have impacted her identification. He said that a sharp decline in the accuracy of recall occurs a week after an event.
Valle-Ramos testified about his hair length at the time of his arrest, reiterating his trial testimony that it was long and in a ponytail.
Gonzalez testified that he did not remember telling Szewczyk about his testimony prior to her taking the witness stand. He was asked if Szewczyk ever expressed any doubts.
He said: "No. I do just recall one thing. I appreciated the fact that she came out, because most people don't want to be a witness to anything if it's not involved with them-nowadays, anyway-but you still get a few out there, so I appreciated that fact, that she picked him out like I did."
On March 5, 2024, Judge Calderon vacated Valle-Ramos's conviction and granted him a new trial. He wrote: "The court finds Ms. Szewczyk's testimony and recantation of her trial testimony to be realistic, forthright, credible and otherwise truthful. Furthermore, the additional evidence presented at the evidentiary hearing supports the credibility of her doubts and recantation."
Judge Calderon also found the new evidence regarding Amos Ortiz-whom he referred to as Valle-Ramos's "doppelganger-to be "compelling."
The state dismissed the charges on March 13, 2024.
On July 12, 2024, Valle-Ramos filed a lawsuit against the City of Orlando, Stanley, and other officers, seeking compensation for his wrongful conviction.
At the time of his arrest, the lawsuit said, Valle-Ramos was studying to become an X-ray technician. He continued his studies and finished all his coursework, sure that the charges would be dropped. "In fact, all he had to do before becoming a certified technician was to complete an externship and take a licensing exam," the lawsuit said. "He figured he would complete those steps after the trial. As it turned out, however, Valle-Ramos went to his trial and never came back."
- Ken Otterbourg
"I looked at him, he looked at me, and I realized I was being robbed," Gonzalez would later testify.
Gonzalez chased the man but was unable to catch him and returned home to call the police. There, he encountered two more burglars coming down the stairs. Gonzalez put one in a chokehold and then pepper-sprayed the other. The two men got away, jumping over a fence that separated his development from another one across the street.
In a statement given to the Orlando Police Department, Gonzalez described the first man as young and Hispanic, "with an afro haircut like you wouldn't believe." Gonzalez said the burglars stole jewelry and silver worth several thousand dollars.
Later that day, 19-year-old Jorge Valle-Ramos and his roommate, Marquis Hickson, were returning home after playing basketball at a recreation center when the car they were riding in was pulled over by the police. According to later testimony, the police were pulling cars over looking for drugs and weapons. They checked the driver licenses of Valle-Ramos, Hickson, and the driver, and let the young men go.
In Valle-Ramos's license photo, which had been taken in 2011, his hair was in a wide afro. Officials also found another photo of Valle-Ramos in the Florida license database that was taken a few years earlier than that, possibly for his learner's permit. In that photo, Valle-Ramos wore his hair in a close-cropped afro.
Detective Michael Stanley prepared a photo array from the Florida driver license database, with five fillers and the earlier photo of Valle-Ramos, who had a juvenile arrest for grand theft auto. Gonzalez viewed the array on April 18, and selected Valle-Ramos as the first burglar he had encountered when he came home. Stanley then showed Gonzalez the 2011 photo of Valle-Ramos, where his afro was wider and less styled.
In a pre-trial deposition, Gonzalez was unable to provide any other facial descriptions of the first burglar. But he said the second photo of Valle-Ramos Gonzalez made him feel certain that he picked the right person. "When they showed that other picture, I was more sure, but that - that was the guy I first picked out," Gonzalez said. "That was the guy right there."
Valle-Ramos was arrested on April 24, 2013, and charged with burglary with assault or battery and third-degree grand theft.
Two women had also seen the burglars as they made their getaway. Charlene Bloom's description of the driver was at odds with Gonzalez's. She said he was short, with blond hair and no afro. Bloom never viewed a photo array.
Months after Valle-Ramos's arrest, Bethany Szewczyk came to the police department to look at the same initial photo array Gonzalez viewed. Police had interviewed her on the day of the crime. Szewczyk lived in the townhouse complex on the other side of the fence from where Gonzalez lived and had seen three young men get into a car parked near her house. On September 4, 2013, she selected Valle-Ramos as the driver.
Valle-Ramos's trial in Orange County Circuit Court began on May 21, 2014. No physical or forensic evidence connected him to the crime scene. Police had made no other arrests in the case and had not recovered any of the stolen items.
Gonzalez testified about the burglary and the chase. He said he looked directly at Valle-Ramos for 7-10 seconds when he first saw him inside the townhome. He said that Valle-Ramos's afro was longer, "fluffier," than in the initial photo array he viewed. During cross-examination, Gonzalez was asked to review the initial photo array and say how many of the other five men in the array had afros. He said none.
Szewczyk, an attorney, testified that she was leaving for work when she saw three young men jump into a car parked in the road. She said she heard one of the men tell the others to hurry before the cops come. She said the three men were all young and Hispanic and looked like they could have been brothers. She testified that although she gave a statement on the day of the burglary, it was several months before she viewed the photo array. She identified Valle-Ramos in court as the driver of the car.
Szewczyk described the driver's hair as "poofy," with "not very long" hair but with "enough length to be messy."
During cross-examination, Carli Citraro, Valle-Ramos's attorney with the Orange County Public Defender's Office, asked Szewczyk about the photo array she viewed.
"Would you say that any of the other five individuals in that lineup have afro-style haircuts?"
"No," Szewczyk responded.
Stanley testified about the investigation and the creation of the photo array. He said that both Gonzalez and Szewczyk quickly selected Valle-Ramos with what appeared to be little hesitation.
During cross-examination, Stanley said that the haircuts of the five fillers in the photo array didn't match the descriptions of the suspect. "They are not the afro with which I was provided information at the time," he said.
"To be clear, your testimony is that one, three, four, five and six are not the same afro style that was reported?" Citraro asked. "What I'm trying to say, and I'm not certain if that's what you're asking, is but the picture of Mr. Ramos that is in there, um, is not the same picture as what was described to me at the time of the incident," Stanley said.
Hickson testified that he and Valle-Ramos were at home at the time of the burglary. Hickson had the day off, Valle-Ramos worked nights, and they both slept in. Hickson said that Valle-Ramos's hair was long at the time, well beyond the afro he had once sported. "If it wasn't in a ponytail, it would fall down over his face like a girl," he said.
Valle-Ramos testified and said he didn't commit the burglary, that he had never been to Gonzalez's house, and that he didn't even know where it was. He said at the time of the burglary, his hair was already so long that it couldn't remain in an afro. He said it was always kept in a ponytail.
During cross-examination, the prosecutor asked Valle-Ramos how it could be that two people who didn't know him had picked him out of a photo array. "It wasn't me," Valle-Ramos said. "It doesn't matter."
Bloom testified for the defense and said that Valle-Ramos wasn't the man she saw as the driver of the car. Bloom said she wasn't wearing her glasses at the time but that her vision was still pretty good without them and that she got a clear look at the driver. She said that none of the men had an afro. Bloom said she viewed a mugshot of Valle-Ramos after receiving a subpoena in the case and thought that he was "absolutely not" the person she had seen on the morning of the burglary. She said she explained that to someone in the police department but was never asked to look at a photo array.
The jury convicted Valle-Ramos on both counts on May 22, 2014. He was later sentenced to two years and six months in prison.
Valle-Ramos's conviction was affirmed in 2015 by Florida's Fifth District Court of Appeal. He filed a pro se motion for a new trial on August 4, 2015, asserting that there was insufficient evidence and that Citraro had been ineffective for failing to ask for a pre-trial hearing on the photo array used by Stanley. The motion was dismissed on March 1, 2017.
On July 16, 2015, 21-year-old Amos Ortiz was shot to death in a parking lot about three miles from Gonzalez's townhome. At the time, Ortiz was homeless, and there was extensive coverage of his murder in the local media and on social media.
Jasmine Ortiz, Valle-Ramos's girlfriend and no relation to Amos Ortiz, saw a photo of Ortiz and thought he closely resembled Valle-Ramos. She began researching his background, which included an arrest for grand theft auto in August 2013. That alleged crime occurred less than a mile from Gonzalez's home. In addition, Gonzalez and Ortiz had lived less than two miles apart.
Jasmine Ortiz and Valle-Ramos were unable to hire an attorney to help advance this potential lead.
Valle-Ramos was released from prison in November 2016. Several years later, attorneys Lisabeth Fryer and Laura Cepero agreed to represent him pro bono. A defense investigator approached Szewczyk, presenting her with the photos of Ortiz and Valle-Ramos. Szewczyk said she had made a mistake. In an affidavit dated December 1, 2021, Szewczyk recanted her testimony identifying Valle-Ramos as the driver of the car. She said she selected Valle-Ramos from the photo array because he was the only person in the lineup with an afro-style haircut. "If I had been presented with a photographic lineup that included Amos Matthew Ortiz, I would have identified Mr. Ortiz as the individual who entered the driver's side of the getaway vehicle," she said.
Szewczyk said that she had doubts when she went to testify at the trial and saw that Valle-Ramos had darker skin than the driver. According to her affidavit, Stanley introduced her to Gonzalez, who had just testified. She said in the affidavit that Gonzalez told her that he was certain it was Valle-Ramos.
On January 14, 2022, Fryer and Cepero filed a motion for a new trial based on Szewczyk's recantation. The motion also said Valle-Ramos had submitted to a polygraph test, where the examiner found no deception in his answers in which he asserted his lack of involvement in the burglary.
The motion noted the problems with witness misidentification, exacerbated by stress, suggestive photo arrays, and confirmation bias.
The state did not file a response to the motion, and an evidentiary hearing took place on March 28, 2023, before Judge Luis Calderon.
Szewczyk testified about her initial viewing of the photo array. She was asked what feature she concentrated on when making a selection. She said the hair. "I mostly focused on that, because he was the only one in the lineup with an afro, and he resembled the person that I remember seeing," she said.
Szewczyk said her doubts about Valle-Ramos first surfaced at the photo array; Valle-Ramos's skin looked too dark, but she thought it was because of the poor quality of the photos she viewed. She said these doubts increased when she saw Valle-Ramos at trial, and she recognized him as the person from the lineup but not necessarily as the person she had seen on the day of the burglary. She said her brief conversation with Gonzalez allayed her concerns.
During cross-examination, a prosecutor walked Szewczyk through her doubts and suggested she had committed perjury by not testifying to those doubts at the trial. The prosecutor also asked Szewczyk if-as an attorney-she had violated her duties as an officer of the court by waiting seven years to correct her testimony or tell someone about her doubts. This delay undermined the credibility of the recantation, the state would argue.
"This was different," Szewczyk said. "This was a case in which I was a witness. And just because I had doubts, it didn't mean that I was certain that I had put the wrong person in prison. I simply didn't know."
Jasmine Ortiz testified about discovering the photo of Amos Ortiz after his death. "My heart just sank immediately to my stomach, and I screenshotted the photo," she said. "They just looked so similar, and I knew the photo that got Jorge convicted was very similar to the photo of Amos."
Dr. Brian Cahill, a forensic psychologist at the University of Florida and expert on witness misidentification, testified that thousands of young men in the Orlando area could have fit the broad description that placed Valle-Ramos in Stanley's lineup, which he said was unreliable and poorly constructed.
"There's only one individual in this lineup that remotely fits the description provided by the witnesses; the main attribute being an afro," Cahill said. "And both witnesses mentioned this in their report, in their depositions, and statements when they said, I picked the person out because he had-he had the afro. So they're telling you in their own words the attribute they're looking for in this lineup. And the fact that no one else in this lineup has an afro makes this test of the likely guilt or innocence of this person immaterial."
Cahill also said that Szewczyk's delay in viewing the photo array could have impacted her identification. He said that a sharp decline in the accuracy of recall occurs a week after an event.
Valle-Ramos testified about his hair length at the time of his arrest, reiterating his trial testimony that it was long and in a ponytail.
Gonzalez testified that he did not remember telling Szewczyk about his testimony prior to her taking the witness stand. He was asked if Szewczyk ever expressed any doubts.
He said: "No. I do just recall one thing. I appreciated the fact that she came out, because most people don't want to be a witness to anything if it's not involved with them-nowadays, anyway-but you still get a few out there, so I appreciated that fact, that she picked him out like I did."
On March 5, 2024, Judge Calderon vacated Valle-Ramos's conviction and granted him a new trial. He wrote: "The court finds Ms. Szewczyk's testimony and recantation of her trial testimony to be realistic, forthright, credible and otherwise truthful. Furthermore, the additional evidence presented at the evidentiary hearing supports the credibility of her doubts and recantation."
Judge Calderon also found the new evidence regarding Amos Ortiz-whom he referred to as Valle-Ramos's "doppelganger-to be "compelling."
The state dismissed the charges on March 13, 2024.
On July 12, 2024, Valle-Ramos filed a lawsuit against the City of Orlando, Stanley, and other officers, seeking compensation for his wrongful conviction.
At the time of his arrest, the lawsuit said, Valle-Ramos was studying to become an X-ray technician. He continued his studies and finished all his coursework, sure that the charges would be dropped. "In fact, all he had to do before becoming a certified technician was to complete an externship and take a licensing exam," the lawsuit said. "He figured he would complete those steps after the trial. As it turned out, however, Valle-Ramos went to his trial and never came back."
- Ken Otterbourg
Posting Date: 07-24-2024
Last Update Date: 07-24-2024
Case Details:
State:
Florida
County:
Orange
Most Serious Crime:
Burglary/Unlawful Entry
Additional Convictions:
Theft
Reported Crime Date:
2013
Convicted:
2014
Exonerated:
2024
Sentence:
Term of Years
Race / Ethnicity:
Hispanic
Sex:
Male
Age at the date of reported crime:
19
Contributing Factors:
Mistaken Witness ID, Official Misconduct, Inadequate Legal Defense
Did DNA evidence contribute to the exoneration?:
No