Op-ed | One Law, Two Outcomes. The Difference Was a Badge

East Palo Alto is one mile from Stanford University. A highway separates them — not by accident, but by design. In 1926, Highway 101 was routed to divide East Palo Alto from Menlo Park and Palo Alto, walling off a community the surrounding county had already decided did not deserve the same resources, schools, or infrastructure as its neighbors. By 1992, East Palo Alto was the murder capital of the United States: forty-two people killed in a city of 24,000, a homicide rate nearly twenty times the national average. One mile from Stanford.

Miguel Rivera grew up in that city in the 1990s. The crack epidemic had already hollowed it out. Youth unemployment was the highest in the county, the schools underfunded, the police overwhelmed. The community had been stripped of the economic infrastructure that might have offered an alternative to what the streets offered. Miguel did not choose to be born in East Palo Alto in 1992. He was assigned that zip code at birth, along with everything the system had built into it.

East Palo Alto did not have gangs in the way the word is usually meant. There were no Bloods or Crips, no organized criminal enterprise. The community had been so completely walled off — by the highway, by the redlining, by a county that left it to rot — that identity collapsed down to the block you came from. The affiliations were neighborhood affiliations: hyperlocal, often mixed-race, defined by geography because geography was all the state had left these kids. When Miguel was young, he watched a person shot and killed on a street corner — the same corner where, years later, I would drop off a Mother’s Day card to his mother. He made a decision a child should never have to make: that it would not be him, and it would not be his brothers. He chose survival inside the only structure that offered it. That is not the choice of a ruthless person. It is the choice the state left him.

Those are the same brothers I have shared Thanksgiving dinner with. His mother and his aunt — absolute angels in my life — made me the best banana pudding and oxtails I have ever eaten. And while I sat at their table, their son sat in a Level 4 maximum security prison where the men around him pretend to be tough, and where the pretending gets people killed. He calls me wanting to talk about stocks and bonds and Bitcoin and politics. He is more intelligent than I am. He is counting the years.

In October 2012, Christopher Baker was shot to death in East Palo Alto. Rivera was present. His co-defendant, Jerry Coneal, fired the shots — at the outset of the proceedings that followed, there was no dispute about this. Rivera was the driver. He drove to the scene. He drove away from it. In 2017, facing a grand jury indictment that included lying-in-wait and gang special circumstances — allegations carrying life without the possibility of parole — Rivera pleaded no contest in San Mateo County to second-degree murder in exchange for their dismissal. He was sentenced to thirty-five years to life. He is currently serving that sentence at a Level 4 facility. He will almost certainly die in prison.

Jereh Lubrin was a Santa Clara County correctional officer. He had a badge, a union, a pension, and the full institutional protection of the county sheriff’s department. He also had a file of ten complaint forms submitted against him by inmates — every one describing mistreatment by the same officer. They were submitted to a sergeant in early 2015. The sergeant ignored them. The complaints went nowhere.

I know this because I was there when they were filed. Lubrin guarded both Miguel Rivera and me at the Santa Clara County Main Jail. I am the person who handed those ten complaint forms to the sergeant. I am the person who was subsequently walked to a chemical closet and told to “never pull some shit” like that again. I documented everything on jail-issued yellow legal paper the same day it happened — dates, times, names. I mailed those pages to my parents. I described the retaliation deliberately on recorded jail calls, creating an institutional record the county itself would have to preserve. I knew what I was doing. Documentation was the only protection available to me.

On August 26, 2015 — less than six months after those ten complaints went nowhere — Lubrin and two other officers entered the cell of Michael Tyree. Tyree was thirty-one. He was in custody on a petty theft charge, waiting for a psychiatric treatment bed. He was mentally ill. He was in the care of the state. He could not leave. He had surrendered his physical safety entirely to the people holding him. Lubrin was one of those people.

They beat him to death.

The medical examiner counted thirty-four separate injuries. Tyree’s spleen was nearly torn in half. His liver was lacerated across more than six square inches. He bled out internally — forty to fifty percent of his blood volume pooling in his abdominal cavity — on the floor of a cell his killers had walked out of. The examiner said the only times he had seen a spleen rupture like that were when someone was hit by a train, in a car crash, fell from a roof, or was beaten to death.

In 2017 — the same year Miguel Rivera was sentenced — a jury convicted Lubrin, Matthew Farris, and Rafael Rodriguez of second-degree murder and sentenced each of them to fifteen years to life.

What happened next is the story this piece is about.

In 2018, the California Legislature passed Senate Bill 1437, eliminating the natural and probable consequences doctrine as a basis for murder. That doctrine had allowed juries to convict people of murder not for their own mental state but for the foreseeable consequences of crimes they participated in — so a driver, a lookout, someone who provided backup could be convicted of murder without the prosecution proving they intended anyone to die or even knew a killing was coming. Senate Bill 775, in 2021, made the change retroactive, reaching convictions on direct appeal and creating a petition process under Penal Code section 1172.6 for cases already final.

Both Miguel Rivera and Jereh Lubrin used this same body of law to challenge their convictions. The mechanism was identical. What happened to each of them was not.

Rivera petitioned under section 1172.6, arguing his plea had been entered in lieu of trial on a theory of liability that no longer existed. The trial court denied him without a hearing. The Court of Appeal reversed in 2021, finding he could make a prima facie showing — and at that stage, the court noted, there was no dispute that Coneal had been the actual shooter. The case was sent back for a full evidentiary hearing.

Here is where the prosecution’s theory shifted.

At the 2023 hearing, the San Mateo DA’s office was no longer arguing Rivera was the driver whose accomplice fired the fatal shots. It now argued he was himself a shooter. The evidence? Ballistics showed two guns were fired during the first round of shots. Two men were seen running afterward. Therefore — the court concluded, beyond a reasonable doubt — Rivera must have been one of them.

Must have been. Therefore.

*(Continue the remainder of the article using the same publication formatting: one- to three-sentence paragraphs, centered section breaks using **, block quotes where appropriate, and the author biography separated by a final horizontal break.)

Casey Olson is a 2026 graduate of the University of San Francisco School of Law and an incoming post-bar law clerk at the San Diego County Public Defender’s Office, sitting for the California bar in July 2026. He is also a petitioner seeking a Certificate of Rehabilitation in Santa Clara County Superior Court. His underlying conviction is a 2014 driving-under-the-influence manslaughter offense for which he was incarcerated and released in June 2016. He has had no convictions of any kind since his release.

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