Touchy Cases Are Bailiwick of Elite Force in D.A. Office

The indictment of Rep. Bobbi Fiedler and an aide in an alleged political payoff scheme was only the latest in a series of high-profile cases taken on by the district attorney’s elite Special Investigations Division.

It was that division that presented the original case against Fiedler and her top aide and fiance, Paul Clarke, to the Los Angeles County Grand Jury, but recommended that only Clarke be indicted and not the three-term congresswoman from the San Fernando Valley. Last week, the district attorney asked a judge to dismiss the charge against Fiedler.

The division, established by then-Dist. Atty. Evelle Younger in the wake of the 1965 Watts riots, exclusively prosecutes public officials, including police officers (some of whom disparagingly refer to the unit’s prosecutors as “headhunters”).

Because the men and women the unit prosecutes are not run-of-the-mill street hoodlums, the division frequently pays a high price when verdicts are announced.

Fiedler Case Prediction

The unit has an admittedly low conviction rate, and Chief Deputy Dist. Atty. Gilbert I. Garcetti already had predicted that it would have been difficult to persuade jurors to find Fiedler guilty in that case.

“The purpose (of establishing the unit) was to assure the community that anytime a public official was accused of misconduct, it would be handled by an elite group of attorneys and investigators who had no political ax to grind,” said Garcetti, who formerly headed the unit. “And that any such allegation would be treated fairly, impartially and fully.”

“It was formed after the Watts riots because so many people had accused this office of just brushing under the table allegations of police misconduct,” he said.

“They said, ‘How can you look at it? You guys work with them every day.’ So this unit was set up so that you’re not going to work with the police and these are the only types of cases you handle.”

The Fiedler-Clarke case--in which the two originally were accused of offering a $100,000 bribe to state Sen. Ed Davis to induce him to drop out of the Republican U.S. Senate primary--is conceivably the most highly publicized case the unit has ever been assigned prosecuted.

Great Public Interest

But other cases of great public interest the unit has either investigated or prosecuted include:

- The Eula Love case, in which two Los Angeles police officers shot the 39-year-old Watts woman to death in a January, 1979, dispute over an unpaid gas bill. Following a lengthy investigation, the unit declined to file charges against the officers.

However, the case sparked the formation by then-Dist. Atty. John Van de Kamp of the division’s sometimes controversial Roll-Out Program, in which a prosecutor and an investigator “roll out” to the scene of police-related shootings and conduct independent probes.

- The Ron Settles case, in which the division declined to file murder charges against Signal Hill police after the June, 1981, in-custody death of the California State University, Long Beach, football star.

- The Edmund G. Brown Jr. case in 1981, in which the then-governor was accused of misusing state funds for political purposes. The unit determined that there was no basis for criminal charges.

- The Art Snyder drunken-driving case, in which the then-city councilman pleaded no contest in 1980 to a reduced charge of reckless driving and was fined $150 and placed on 18 months probation.

The Special Investigations Division presently is investigating about 300 cases and prosecuting about 30 more, said Steve Sowders, current head of the unit.

Those cases include an alleged vote-buying case against Compton City Councilman Floyd James and his campaign manager, bribery charges against Carl Robinson, president of the Board of Trustees of the Compton Community College, and several misconduct cases against law enforcement officers.