County Alleges Lawyer Incited Juvenile Uproar

The Orange County counsel’s office Friday accused an American Civil Liberties Union lawyer of encouraging three Juvenile Hall boys to create a disturbance to help the ACLU in its lawsuit against the county over conditions there.

Deputy County Counsel Edward N. Duran filed court documents that called ACLU lawyer Harry Lerner “unethical” and asked that he be removed from the ACLU class-action lawsuit over Juvenile Hall conditions.

Lerner called the accusations “ludicrous” and said the county is grasping at extreme measures in a bid to defeat the ACLU lawsuit.

Included in Duran’s papers, filed in Superior Court, were statements from the minors at Juvenile Hall, who said that Lerner had met with them last month.

One of them said, “Mr. Lerner told us to cause a riot or get tied down and he would bail us out so we wouldn’t (have to) pay any consequences.”

A major issue in the ACLU lawsuit, filed a year ago, is Juvenile Hall’s practice of tying minors to their beds if they have caused problems. Probation officials who run Juvenile Hall say the tie-downs are used only on rare occasions when a ward cannot otherwise be controlled. Lerner said they occur frequently and often for only minor rules violations.

Another of the minors said in the documents filed Friday: “He told us to get in trouble and he would get us out of trouble.”

The minor added that Lerner told him and another youth that if they got “burned” by the staff for the trouble they caused, then Lerner would “burn the staff.”

Duran said the juveniles made the statements about Lerner after complaining to counselors that they were not being protected from punishment, as they said Lerner had promised.

Lerner not only denied that he encouraged the youngsters to cause a disturbance but said that he “encouraged them to be on their best behavior at all times.”

The county’s court papers included statements from several counselors verifying that the boys had made the same complaints to them about Lerner that they made in their statements.

“I wanted it clear that the young people had gone to the counselors, and the counselors had not gone to them first,” Duran said.

Duran said he believes all three youngsters were referring to an Aug. 7 meeting with Lerner.

“And there was indeed an incident at the hall that night,” he said.

Added to the statements was a letter from Public Defender Ronald Y. Butler to Dr. Michael A. Schumacher, the county’s chief probation officer, who is in charge of Juvenile Hall, that “Mr. Lerner is no longer allowed to visit our clients at Juvenile Hall.”

Butler added in the letter that his staff had no “significant” complaints about conditions at Juvenile Hall.

Butler’s letter was a surprise to Lerner, who has said all along that deputy public defenders in the juvenile section privately support the ACLU cause. But Lerner said Friday that because the ACLU’s lawsuit is a class action, the wards “are our clients too.”

Lerner was also upset that Duran obtained statements from “our (ACLU) clients” without telling anyone at the ACLU.

The county’s request to have Lerner removed from the ACLU case will probably be heard by Superior Court Judge Philip E. Schwab on Sept. 18. Schwab has already scheduled a hearing for that date to hear ACLU complaints about Juvenile Hall conditions.

Duran said Friday that Lerner’s actions were “not only unethical and immoral, (but) he has taken advantage of unsophisticated minors.”