Meet the Man Whom Anaheim Council Candidate Steve Lodge Had Wrongfully Imprisoned for Murder
By Gustavo Arellano, the OC Weekly Thu., Oct. 11 2012 at 8:00 AM
In 2003, then-Santa Ana police officer and current Anaheim city council candidate Steve Lodge–he of the multiple police-brutality lawsuits filed against him–received a glowing profile in the Los Angeles Times by then-Orange County bureau reporter and current Pulitzer Prize winner Jeff Gottlieb. It focused on something that Lodge loves to trumpet as worthy of qualifying him for public office: that he worked on cold-case homicide cases and brought many murderers to justice. “He Won’t Let Killers Get Away With Murder” was the title of the piece, and Lodge claimed to Gottlieb that he had “revisited 31 of these cold cases, in which the crimes occurred five to 11 years ago. Fifteen people have been convicted in seven of these cases, and suspects in five cases await trial. Seven cases have been cleared because the suspect was discovered to have been murdered or the district attorney’s office determined the killing was self-defense.”
But Lodge didn’t tell Gottlieb about the man whom he had locked up for over a year, on murder charges that were ultimately dropped by state prosecutors for lack of evidence, who had sued him earlier that year for wrongful imprisonment.
Click here to read the rest of this article.