D.A. Might Retry 3 Rampart Officers

Los Angeles County Dist. Atty. Steve Cooley will decide whether to retry three police officers convicted of framing gang members, a spokeswoman said this week. Those convictions were overturned by a state appellate court.

The California Supreme Court on Wednesday declined to review the appellate decision. District attorney’s office spokeswoman Jane Robison called that disappointing.

“We always thought we had a strong case, and we disagreed with the ruling of the lower court,” she said.

Sgts. Edward Ortiz and Brian Liddy and Officer Michael Buchanan, all assigned to the Rampart Division of the Los Angeles Police Department, were found guilty in 2000 of conspiring to frame gang members Cesar Natividad and Raul Munoz, who the officers said assaulted them.

But in an unusual move, Superior Court Judge Jacqueline Connor dismissed the officers’ convictions after ruling that the jury had based its guilty verdicts on a misreading of police jargon in a report.

Connor said she determined that she had committed a “fatal error” by not recognizing the misunderstanding, and ruled that the evidence did not warrant the convictions.

The district attorney’s office argued to the appellate court that Connor abused her discretion by overturning the jury’s verdicts.

Harland Braun, who represented Buchanan, said Thursday that he expected the district attorney’s office to decide against a retrial because that would be the “only rational thing to do.”