ACLU to Handle JDL’s Appeal of Spying Case

The American Civil Liberties Union said Wednesday that it will handle the Jewish Defense League’s appeal of a lawsuit accusing the City of Los Angeles of using an undercover police officer to provoke the JDL into violence.

A Los Angeles Superior Court judge dismissed the JDL suit May 16, saying he agreed with the city’s argument that a trial would force the disclosure of sensitive “national and international” law enforcement secrets and jeopardize national security.

City attorneys and legal observers said it was the first time a city had invoked national security to stop a trial.

Paul Hoffman, legal director for the ACLU in Southern California, said the organization is taking the case as part of an effort to combat any use of claims of national security to prevent U.S. citizens from pressing constitutional grievances in court.

Until the JDL case, Hoffman said, the ACLU had been concerned only about the federal government’s use of the national security claim. Hoffman said he expects the JDL case to set a precedent for use of the claim by local governments.

“If this claim is upheld, police departments around the country will start to make this type of claim in a wide variety of cases, and that will have a severe effect on civil liberties,” he said.

Hoffman led the ACLU’s earlier legal challenge to alleged abuses by the Los Angeles Police Department’s Public Disorder Intelligence Division. An ACLU lawsuit on behalf of 144 groups and individuals led to a $1.8-million settlement with the city last year. Shortly before the settlement, the Police Department dismantled the Intelligence Division and replaced it with an Anti-Terrorist Division.

Hoffman said that, in handling the JDL suit, the ACLU hoped to “safeguard the settlement decree” issued in the police spying case.

“Our action here is not to say that the settlement is not working at all,” Hoffman said. “But the thing we’re concerned about is, that, when there are improprieties, that people have a right to challenge them in court.”

Guidelines Set

As part of the $1.8 settlement that was made final in February, 1984, the Police Department and the ACLU agreed on a set of guidelines for undercover intelligence officers and procedures for handling complaints about their actions.

One of the guidelines was that undercover police officers may not “cause dissension within an organization or incite unlawful activity.”

The JDL filed its lawsuit in May, 1984. It alleged that, between 1979 and 1984, a Los Angeles police officer, Larry Winston, using the name Joel Kohen, infiltrated the JDL and attempted to provoke the group to commit violent acts. The suit alleged the undercover action was aimed at discrediting the JDL.

The lawsuit said that, a month after the ACLU settlement, Winston suggested that the group bomb Jesse Jackson’s presidential campaign office on Wilshire Boulevard.

The city has neither admitted nor denied the existence of Winston. But Hoffman said Wednesday that, after speaking with Irv Rubin, national chairman of the JDL, he believes Winston was a member of the Police Department.

Rubin says that he lives in the San Fernando Valley and that the office for the Los Angeles chapter of the JDL also is in the Valley, although he has declined to disclose the locations.

Judge David Rothman dismissed the suit after hearing secret testimony in Superior Court in Santa Monica from Los Angeles Police Chief Daryl F. Gates and others.

In explaining his decision, Rothman described the city’s grounds for requesting dismissal as “unprecedented under California decisional law.”

Hoffman said he will file the appeal within the next few weeks.