DNA Test Clears Man Convicted of Rape : Courts: A former nurse is freed three years after being sent to prison on allegations of sexually assaulting a mental patient. He had maintained his innocence and insisted that he had an airtight alibi.

By J. MICHAEL KENNEDY

Jan. 16, 1994 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

Mark Bravo placed the collect call to his wife from Tehachapi state prison the day after Christmas.

It had been three years since he had been found guilty of raping a mental patient at the Metropolitan State Hospital in Norwalk. And five more years of his sentence stretched out before him.

He had sworn to all who would listen that he was innocent, that his alibi had been absolutely solid. The jury had believed otherwise at the end of the three-week trial and had sent him to prison.

But then, on the other end of the line, came the unexpected words.

“I’ve got good news,” said Roseanne, his wife. “You’re coming home.”

Bravo was stunned. After all the appeals had failed, all the way to the state Supreme Court, he had almost given up hope that something could change the course that his life had taken.

The only glimmer of a remaining possibility came from the world of science. Superior Court Judge James Bascue had ordered DNA testing two months earlier on the items that had been found at the rape scene--a sheet, blanket and a pair of panties. DNA testing is used to create a molecular profile, in many cases allowing for the positive identification of a person from even the smallest bits of material. Bravo and his lawyers hoped that the tests would show conclusively that he could not have committed the rape.

The results came back the day before Christmas from a laboratory in Maryland. None of the stains on the items matched the DNA profile of either Bravo or the woman who had been raped. Bascue issued an order Jan. 6 that Bravo be released immediately.

The judge said Bravo did not get a fair trial, that the victim had recanted her accusation, that the scientific evidence presented at the trial was misleading and that Bravo did, indeed, have an unimpeachable alibi.

By the next day, Bravo was out of prison, riding in a car with Roseanne and their 13-year old son, Gabriel, toward their La Puente home. Bravo wore jeans, a black sweat shirt and tennis shoes. And he also carried a box of legal papers that represented what had become the focus of his life--the fight to prove he was innocent.

“We got in the car and got the hell out of there,” said Bravo, 35. “We got as far away as we could.”

The strange case of Mark Diaz Bravo is one that stirs the emotions and incites finger-pointing from all sides. Those in his camp call his conviction a travesty, contending that the trial never should have happened and that the judicial system failed miserably.

Bravo’s appeals lawyer, Sylvia Paoli, contends that major mistakes were made all along the way.

“Everybody screwed up,” said Paoli, who practices in Tustin. “There was a continual, ongoing rash of mistakes.”

Meanwhile, Deputy Dist. Atty. Linda Chilstrom, who prosecuted the case in 1990, said she remains unconvinced of Bravo’s innocence. She suggested that the DNA evidence may not be as conclusive as Bravo’s lawyers contend--that the items tested may not have come from the rape.

The story of Bravo and how he went to prison began Feb. 20, 1990, when he was working as a nurse at Metropolitan State Hospital. A short, heavyset woman--a longtime patient at the institution--approached a guard and said she had been raped sometime that afternoon. In the course of being interviewed by hospital authorities, she named several people as her attacker. One assailant she named was an employee at the hospital, a supervisor, a man named Bravo.

Bravo maintains that he had an ironclad alibi. He said he left the hospital grounds at 11 a.m. as part of a second job and had not returned until after 12:30 p.m. Then he had been in meetings all afternoon, from 1 p.m. until past 3 p.m. According to Bravo, he went home that night not knowing that anyone had been raped.

The next morning, Bravo walked into the hospital building where he worked and two Los Angeles County deputies were waiting for him.

“They said: ‘You need to put your hands behind your back. You’re under arrest,’ ” he said. “They put me in handcuffs and whisked me away.”

Bravo was charged with the rape shortly after his arrest, beginning an ordeal that would last three years. He said he hired a lawyer by finding a name in the Yellow Pages that had a nice ring to it--Steve Nieto.

Soon after Nieto took the case, the main controversy began to develop. Nieto, whose law office is in Whittier, said that well before the trial he requested that the district attorney’s office perform DNA tests on items found at the crime scene. The alleged rape occurred in an alcove that patients often used for sexual trysts, hospital officials said. He said the prosecution told him they planned to do the testing.

But Chilstrom said that was not true, that Nieto never mentioned a desire to have DNA testing done early in the case.

“The defense lawyer never asked us to explore DNA until six months after the arraignment,” Chilstrom said. “Never did he indicate to us that he was interested in further testing.”

Chilstrom said that when Nieto asked for DNA testing just before trial, she took it to be a delaying tactic.

“If DNA had been brought up (earlier), I would have had to write memos Downtown to get permission,” said Chilstrom, who works out of the West Covina branch of the district attorney’s office. “There would be no way I could turn down DNA without someone else in the office knowing about it.”

Paoli said she is not sure what happened. “Someone is lying,” she wrote in her appellate brief.

At the beginning, the case seemed open and shut. It was the testimony of a well-regarded supervisory nurse against that of a mental patient who had recanted the rape on at least one occasion. There were other hospital employees who could account for Bravo’s whereabouts during the time the rape supposedly took place.

The strongest piece of evidence the prosecution seemed to have was blood on the blanket, a blood type found in only about 3% of the population. Bravo has that blood type.

But Chilstrom took a tack that was not expected by the defense. She started to zero in on Bravo and paint him as a liar. She took what in other circumstances might have seemed like little things and made them examples of how Bravo had a pattern of lying. How he had called himself a Marine corpsman to perhaps leave the impression that he had done medical work in the military, how a business card identified him as having a master’s in social work when he did not even have a four-year degree.

(Paoli, Bravo’s lawyer, acknowledged that her client had misrepresented himself on occasion, but said that had nothing do with the rape charge.)

Chilstrom presented item after item, witness after witness, and Bravo saw the tide turning against him. He was being picked apart.

“As time passed, I started to get scared,” he said.

When the jury returned with the guilty verdict, Bravo and his wife found themselves forced to adapt to new lives. In prison, Bravo was soon taken aside by an inmate and told that rapists were looked down upon and that he needed to lie about why he was there.

“I constantly worried about my safety because I didn’t know what to expect,” he said. “I did a good job of distorting and lying about what I was in there for. I had seen rapists and child molesters beaten.”

At the same time, Roseanne Bravo carried on in public as if nothing happened. The case had drawn little publicity, so she went about her business, confiding only in two co-workers at the hospital where she is a nurse.

“I handled it as if he were still here,” she said. “I felt that if I went and told everyone at my job, they were going to label him the way they wanted to. I did not want to be the talk of my workplace. And I wanted to protect my child as well.”

After the conviction, Paoli was appointed as Bravo’s appeals lawyer and she went about bringing the case to higher courts. But at each step of the way, Bravo’s conviction was upheld. The state Supreme Court denied the appeals of the verdict and a motion to admit new evidence.

As time went by, though, several things happened. The woman who accused Bravo of rape recanted and named another man as her attacker. Although the higher courts affirmed Bravo’s conviction, Bascue ordered the DNA tests after it was returned to Los Angeles Superior Court in October.

On Jan. 4, Paoli filed a blistering brief in which she presented the case for why Bravo should be released, including the results of the DNA tests. Two days later, the judge ordered Bravo freed.

For Bravo, it was a case of modern science coming to his rescue when it was almost too late.

“If they had done this a long time ago,” he said, “none of this would have happened.”