L.A. County Lawyer Ordered Back to Class

A federal judge has ordered a veteran lawyer for Los Angeles County government back to school to study legal ethics.

Last month, U.S. District Judge George H. King directed Peter Glick, a principal deputy in the Los Angeles County counsel’s office, to complete 30 hours of “continuing legal education” in ethics, federal civil procedure and civil rights law.

King issued the order after Glick directed a court official to send a $70,000 legal bill to the plaintiff in a lawsuit against the county. The judge, in a highly unusual ruling, called Glick’s action “frivolous, unfounded, legally unreasonable and without factual foundation.”

Earlier in the same civil rights case, King had fined Glick $500 for filing -- without checking with the plaintiff -- a document that supposedly reflected factual matters agreed to by both sides.

The litigant in the case is Leslie Vernon White, 46, a career criminal and jailhouse informant who rocked the county legal establishment in the late 1980s by disclosing a scheme involving false confessions. He and other snitches had concocted “confessions” from fellow inmates and traded them to prosecutors and police in return for favors.

White’s revelation embarrassed the Los Angeles County district attorney’s office, where Glick worked at the time. A grand jury concluded in 1990 that county prosecutors had for many years tolerated suspected perjury by White and other informants as a way of winning murder cases.

The civil rights case at hand, White said, has roots that reach back to the first time he took on the legal establishment as a jailhouse informant. He admitted to lying under oath 12 times as a prosecution witness.

White said in a recent interview that he was “shocked, shocked, I tell you, that a federal judge would find that a government official associated with the district attorney’s office needs to go to school to learn legal ethics.”

Imprisoned on a drug possession charge, White said he would file a complaint with the State Bar seeking Glick’s disbarment.

Glick, who was a deputy district attorney for nearly 20 years and has been with the county counsel’s office for 10 years, declined to speak with a reporter. He referred questions to Gary Miller, who heads the county counsel’s general litigation section. Miller did not respond to repeated requests for comment.

County public information officer Judy Hammond said she had spoken with executives in the county counsel’s office and they, too, would have no comment.

White’s civil rights case stems from his 1998 drug conviction, in which he pleaded no contest and agreed to a nine-year sentence for possession of narcotics. Redondo Beach police had arrested him for driving without a license and found vials of methamphetamine hidden underneath the hood of his vehicle during what officers described as a routine search. He is scheduled to be released from prison in 2005.

After his plea, White unsuccessfully challenged the constitutionality of the search. Then he filed a federal civil rights lawsuit against the district attorney’s office, arguing that prosecutors had failed to investigate a complaint he had lodged against Redondo Beach police. In the complaint, he had accused the police of lying in court about their justification for searching his vehicle. He said police had failed to mention the existence of information supplied by an informant.

In the suit, White alleged that prosecutors had essentially ignored his complaint because of a “burning hatred” they felt for him after he blew the whistle on the misuse of information from jailhouse informants.

Glick, representing the district attorney’s office against White, first angered King with the joint stipulation that purportedly set forth points that had been agreed to by both parties and therefore were not in dispute.

King determined in May 2003 that the document did not accurately reflect all of White’s legal positions because Glick had never consulted White about them. King fined Glick $500.

Four months later, White voluntarily dropped his case “without prejudice,” meaning he was free to refile it at any time. The merits of his claims -- denied by police and prosecutors -- were left unsettled.

Glick went to the federal court clerk with a legal bill for $70,000, most of which covered fees incurred by his office in litigating the case, and had the clerk send it to White.

Although the winning parties in some lawsuits are eligible to collect legal expenses from the losing parties, there was no winner or loser in White’s case.

When the $70,000 bill arrived at White’s prison cell, he protested -- and the judge supported him. King ruled in a March 12 order, previously undisclosed, that Glick had violated federal court rules because no one had prevailed in the suit.

Glick, a graduate of Valparaiso University School of Law in Indiana who has practiced law in California for more than 30 years and has appeared many times in federal court, told the judge that he had misread the rules. Glick said he believed the defendants were entitled to attorney fees “as a matter of right.”

King didn’t buy the argument. “Any reasonable attorney who conducted any reasonable inquiry into the facts and law would have concluded that the claim for costs and fees that was made in this case was frivolous, unfounded, legally unreasonable and without factual foundation,” the judge wrote.

He added, referring to the earlier $500 fine he had levied against Glick, that he had warned the veteran attorney that any “future violation” of court rules “may result in the imposition of more drastic sanctions.”

“Apparently,” the judge continued in a written ruling dated March 12, “neither the monetary sanctions nor the court’s warning has succeeded in deterring Mr. Glick from willfully or recklessly violating local rules.”

So King ordered Glick back to school.