Robbery charges dropped against man jailed three and a half months

"We know who the robbery victim was," Deputy Public Defender Steve Immerman fumed in a courthouse hallway. "It was my client."

The real "robbers," he explained, were the Metro Police bicycle patrolmen who took $87 from the client -- 32-year-old construction worker Marcel Cash -- and turned it over to the victim of a brazen gunpoint holdup that had occurred on the Strip minutes before.

Although Cash was charged in the March holdup and pistol whipping of the man sitting in his car waiting for a red light to change at Tropicana Avenue, those charges were dismissed Tuesday as his trial was preparing to get under way.

Cash, however, did plead guilty for what he had done -- possess a small quantity of cocaine. The sentence will be probation under Nevada law, and such charges would not have kept him in jail. District Judge Joseph Pavlikowski, in fact, ordered his release without bail at Tuesday's hearing.

Immerman said Cash "spent three and a half months in jail for something he didn't do. The state doesn't have a case."

Although Deputy District Attorney Christopher Lalli conceded that in the end there was insufficient evidence to result in a conviction, he said there originally was enough to arrest Cash and hold him for trial.

Lalli said that as the investigation progressed in preparation for the trial, "major discrepancies" surfaced that made him doubt Cash's guilt and prompted the ultimate plea bargain.

Immerman alleged "there were out and out lies by law enforcement" that resulted in Cash's arrest and prolonged incarceration on the robbery and battery with a deadly weapon charges.

The defense attorney said he will be filing a court motion in an attempt to have Metro refund the money taken from Cash's pocket and turned over to the victim, Paul Titus.

"That was outrageous," Immerman said, noting that even if the cash had been the actual proceeds of a holdup, it should have been impounded by police as evidence rather than simply passed along to the victim.

Lalli countered that while police might have handled the money issue more appropriately, the reality of police work on the streets sometimes results in expeditious decisions.

He noted that Titus was out of work, had been evicted and was living with his family in a motel.

Immerman said there were several other problems and peculiarities with the case that he suggested were designed to implicate and convict Cash.

Titus described the bandit as a thin, bearded black man nearly six feet tall who was carrying a blue duffle bag.

Immerman said that at a preliminary hearing one of the Metro officers who arrested Cash said they stopped him minutes after the robbery because he matched the description broadcast over the police radio of a 5-foot-7 black man who weighed 190 pounds.

No such broadcast ever went out, the veteran defense attorney said, charging the officers "backtracked their story" to match the defendant's burley physique. He added that a jail photo showed Cash was clean shaven.

After the officers who stopped Cash radioed that they thought they had the robber, Titus was driven to the location on Duke Ellington Way and identified Cash as the bandit.

Immerman pointed out, however, that Cash was handcuffed and standing between two officers and that improperly "suggested" to Titus that Cash was the culprit.

"Instead of lying and setting up a misidentification, the police should have conducted a photo lineup and a live lineup," Immerman said. "The only thing in common between the robber and Cash was that they were both black and wore dark pants."

Lalli explained that streetside viewings of suspects by victims is not unusual and often results in a suspects quickly being cleared as well as quickly identified.

"There was nothing out of line," Lalli said. "There was no violation of the defendant's rights."

But in the end, he concluded the identification simply wasn't strong enough to justify a trial.

"The last thing I want to do is convict someone who is not good for it," Lalli said.

Cash will be sentenced on the felony drug charge Oct. 5

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