Pubdate: Thu, 16 Dec 1999 Source: New York Times (NY) Copyright: 1999 The New York Times Company Contact: http://www.nytimes.com/ Forum: http://www10.nytimes.com/comment/ Author: Todd S. Purdum LOS ANGELES POLICE SCANDAL MAY SOIL HUNDREDS OF CASES LOS ANGELES, Dec. 15 -- A widening investigation into accusations of corruption, brutality and false testimony by police officers in a gritty, drug-plagued precinct here has forced the review of hundreds of criminal cases in which suspects may have been wrongly convicted, and the number could grow to many more than that, prosecutors and defense lawyers said today. District Attorney Gil Garcetti said that in his 31 years in the prosecutor's office, "there has never been a more important case," because the accusations of false testimony go "to the heart of the criminal justice system." Mr. Garcetti said his deputies were already offering anecdotal reports that the scandal in the precinct, the Rampart Division, was hurting their conviction rates in unrelated cases. But he said he did not have statistics to buttress that belief. Word of the investigation surfaced in September, when prosecutors won the release of a gang member serving a 23-year sentence for assault on the police after a former rogue officer told investigators that he and a partner had handcuffed and shot the man, who was unarmed, then framed him by planting a gun near his paralyzed body three years ago. Since then, nine other verdicts have been reversed and 13 officers have been dismissed or relieved of duty. The district attorney said today that he did not know whether a handful, or 20 or 30, or 100 officers might ultimately be involved, in a department of some 10,000, but he vowed to "go wherever the investigation leads us." He said he had seven lawyers working on the case full time, and was prepared to add another 20 if needed. The public defender's office said it might have to request additional money or lawyers to handle the cases of prisoners who may have been wrongly convicted. Mr. Garcetti said at a brief news conference this morning that hundreds of other cases were being reviewed as possibly tainted, and he said the inquiry would take many months. But he scoffed at an estimate by public defenders that as many as 3,000 cases might have to be reconsidered, a figure first reported in The Los Angeles Times today. "We certainly have been looking at hundreds of cases," Mr. Garcetti said. Robert Kalunian, the county's assistant public defender, said the district attorney had provided his office with some 3,000 cases in which about 10 of the suspected officers had played any role over the past 10 years, from transporting arrested people to jail to offering substantive testimony at trial. Mr. Kalunian said it was not yet clear in how many cases the officers had played a substantive part. "Certainly all 3,000 cases are not going to be reopened," Mr. Kalunian said, "but I can't tell you how many will be." So far, no criminal charges have been filed against the suspended officers, and Mr. Garcetti said today that his first priority remained to free anyone wrongly imprisoned, then to help the police in finding officers who should be fired, and finally, developing evidence sufficient to prosecute any officers guilty of crimes. In recent years, a number of police agencies around the nation have grappled with scandals over false testimony by corrupt officers, a practice known in police lingo as "testilying." But Edwin H. Delattre, the dean of the school of education at Boston University and a national expert on police ethics, said that the Los Angeles situation was "the worst case of a poisoned well in a police department that I've seen in 25 years, and the work that has to be done will be staggering." Mr. Delattre helped the New York State Police in an inquiry into evidence-tampering in the early 1990's that ultimately involved about eight troopers required about 120,000 hours of investigation of potentially tainted cases. Here in the home Hollywood, the case seems the stuff of noir fiction, of "L.A. Confidential" come to lurid life. The former rogue officer, Rafael A. Perez, who was convicted of stealing cocaine being held as evidence, told investigators that he and a former partner, Nino Durden, intentionally shot a drug gang member, Javier Francisco Ovando, at point-blank range in a 1996 raid, then planted a .22-caliber rifle to make it seem he had attacked them. Since then, the authorities have been forced to review not only cases handled by those two officers, but by partners and other officers in a widening circle in an anti-gang street crime unit known as Crash at the Rampart station just west of downtown. The Los Angeles Police Department commissioned a sweeping internal review, scheduled to be released next month, and local officials have declined for weeks to predict just where the investigation will lead. It has already forced suspension of an injunction intended to bar gang members from congregating, because of fears that statements by officers in support of the measure might have been false. The Southern California chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union has called for appointment of a special prosecutor to take over the investigation, arguing that the district attorney's office, which relies on police testimony in most of its cases, cannot adequately investigate police misconduct. "I don't know if it's ultimately 300 cases or 3,000 but it's going to be a whole lot," said the group's executive director, Ramona Ripston. "We absolutely cannot go on like this." Merrick J. Bobb, a special counsel to the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors, who served as a deputy counsel to a commission that recommended many procedural changes in the police department here in 1991, after the Rodney King beating, said the Rampart case had already put big burdens on the city's trust in law enforcement. "The entire justice system, both the criminal justice system and the civil justice system, will be put under extraordinary strain now and into the indefinite future by virtue of the sheer numbers of cases that will have to be reviewed," Mr. Bobb said, "and the sheer numbers of lawsuits that can be anticipated. "I think that one of the most tragic and disheartening things about the Rampart scandal is that the L.A.P.D. had begun to emerge from the shadows of Rodney King and the civil disturbances, and the O. J. Simpson case, and was beginning to resurrect its reputation. This scandal, I'm afraid, necessarily will set the L.A.P.D. back." - --- MAP posted-by: Doc-Hawk