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The Case of Joaquin Ciria
📻 Episode #371
🎙️ Hosted by Guest Host Earlonne Woods
📅 Jun 29, 2023
About This Episode
On March 24, 1990, Felix “Carlos” Bastarrica was shot and killed on the street in San Francisco, CA. Following the shooting, Candido “Peter” Diaz, started rumors that one of Felix’s friends, Joaquin Ciria, was responsible. Relying on the rumors, police immediately targeted Joaquin and coerced 18-year-old George Varela – the man who drove the actual…
Case status as carried in this site's original 2026 profiles. Independent record verification is rolling out episode by episode — statuses are being re-checked against court and registry sources and date-stamped as verified.
The Case
On March 24, 1990, Felix “Carlos” Bastarrica was shot and killed on the street in San Francisco, CA. Following the shooting, Candido “Peter” Diaz, started rumors that one of Felix’s friends, Joaquin Ciria, was responsible. Relying on the rumors, police immediately targeted Joaquin and coerced 18-year-old George Varela – the man who drove the actual shooter to the crime – to falsely implicate Joaquin. Based primarily on this, and despite the complete lack of physical evidence linking him to the crime, Joaquin was convicted of murder and sentenced to 31 years to life in prison. Earlonne Woods talks to Joaquin Ciria and Paige Kaneb, Joaquin's attorney.
https://ncip.org/
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In Their Own Words — transcript excerpts
Short excerpts from the episode's official published transcript, with timestamps — listen from these moments, or read the full transcript via the podcast's own platforms.
00:05:09“Speaker 4: to do that, you know, to go fight to some Speaker 4: other country, like a lot of joints in Cuba, they Speaker 4: were saying to Angola to fight a lot of all Speaker 4: these young people got killed, you know. Speaker 2: So me and might say, oh, I don't want to”
00:19:33“Speaker 3: for Joaquin, and they essentially tell him like, he's just Speaker 3: got to say that Joaquin is the guy in the Speaker 3: car with him at the time of the shooting, and Speaker 3: that Joaquin is the shooter. And George Verilla literally says, Okay, Speaker 3: whatever you said, and then he repeats the story that”
00:34:25“Speaker 3: stakeholders who all agreed Joaquin is fully innocent. And in Speaker 3: my experience, usually when that happens, the courts are pretty Speaker 3: willing to go along pretty quickly, right. But unfortunately we Speaker 3: had the exact opposite experience here, and I can only Speaker 3: imagine some of that was the politics going on in”
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← #370 False Confessions - Tyra Patterson #372 False Confessions - Teina Pora →
Also on the podcast: #499 Joaquin Ciria