Vincent Julian Valdez's stupidity on MySpace cost him 10 years in a California prison.
In 2007, the trigger-happy Santa Ana hoodlum with the Thug Family Life (T.F.L.) gang obviously didn't get the memo concerning stealth.
Valdez attempted to reduce his potential prison exposure after committing a series of violent crimes including two attempted murders in Santa Ana and Anaheim, getting arrested and landing in court.
His plan?
]
Gang membership automatically adds a whopping decade in prison for each gang-related conviction and so Valdez decided that he'd simply deny his T.F.L.
membership in hopes of saving himself 20 years of extra incarceration.
But there was a huge problem. Valdez had a T.F.L. gang moniker, “Yums.”
How did cops know this?
Valdez
publicly celebrated his gangster life on his MySpace account, where he displayed
a picture of himself making his gang's hand sign, bragged about his
contempt for law enforcement, celebrated his “thug life,” and on the website's
“interests” section described his dedication to “mobbing the streets and
hustling.” He also called himself “G,”
shorthand for “gangster,” according to police.
Kevin Ruiz, a gang expert in the Orange County District Attorney's office, captured Valdez's MySpace data and testified to the obvious: the defendant was an active gang member.
A jury convicted Valdez and Superior Court Judge William R. Froeberg sentenced him to a term of 46 years to life in prison for two drive-by shootings.
He appealed, claiming numerous violations of his rights, including that jurors should never have seen his MySpace page.
This month, a California Court of Appeal based in Santa Ana reviewed the case and gave Valdez a break.
A
three-justice panel sanctioned the admission of the MySpace information
in the trial, but believed the defendant's claim that the second
shooting had been a personal vendetta against a Monte Black Gangster Crips hoodlum who'd
dated his sister. The court erased one of the two, 10-year gang enhancements.
This means that
Valdez can potentially emerge from prison during his 50s, not his 60s.
–R. Scott Moxley / OC Weekly
CNN-featured investigative reporter R. Scott Moxley has won Journalist of the Year honors at the Los Angeles Press Club; been named Distinguished Journalist of the Year by the LA Society of Professional Journalists; obtained one of the last exclusive prison interviews with Charles Manson disciple Susan Atkins; won inclusion in Jeffrey Toobin’s The Best American Crime Reporting for his coverage of a white supremacist’s senseless murder of a beloved Vietnamese refugee; launched multi-year probes that resulted in the FBI arrests and convictions of the top three ranking members of the Orange County Sheriff’s Department; and gained praise from New York Times Magazine writers for his “herculean job” exposing entrenched Southern California law enforcement corruption.