Carmona

MEMORANDUM *

In February 1998, a Denny’s restaurant in Costa Mesa, California, was robbed by an armed man. There were two eyewitnesses to the robbery, both of whom described the robber as a Hispanic male. Two days later, a Juice Club store in nearby Irvine, California, was robbed by an armed man. Eyewitnesses to the Juice Club robbery gave varying physical descriptions of the robber, but all agreed that the robber was a Hispanic male in his teens and that he was wearing a baseball cap. One Juice Club employee who was able to describe the cap in detail told the police that it was a Los Angeles Lakers cap with “crazy” writing on the front and emblems on both sides. The police located the cap soon after the robbery.

Several hours after the robbery, a Costa Mesa resident called the police to report that she had seen a young Hispanic male wearing a baseball cap with some sports insignia on it jumping the freeway overpass behind her backyard. Police responded to the neighborhood, encountered plaintiff Arthur Carmona walking down a sidewalk near the freeway overpass, and arrested him in connection with the Juice Club and Denny’s robberies. Carmona was 16 years old at the time.

Two…