Ticket Fixing at Van Nuys Court Subject of Probe

The Los Angeles County district attorney’s office is investigating allegations that at least one Van Nuys Municipal Court employee illegally fixed parking tickets, authorities said.

The temporary clerk, a student worker, was dismissed in October after an internal audit uncovered irregularities, court officials said.

“The matter had been referred to us by the court, and we are investigating it,” said Deputy Dist. Atty. Robert N. Jorgensen. He refused to comment further, except to say that the investigation is focusing on “personnel in the clerk’s office. . . . I have no reason to suspect any misconduct by any judges or attorneys.”

The name of the former clerk was not disclosed. Edward M. Kritzman, administrator for the county’s Municipal Court system, said, “It involves primarily his own tickets.”

But an investigator for the district attorney’s office refused to rule out other employees.

Small Number of Tickets

“We’re looking at everyone out there who might have had access to the citations because we have to do that in order to determine who did what,” Wil Abram said.

“We don’t know how it happened, and we don’t know what happened,” Abram said. He described the number of tickets as “rather small.”

According to one Van Nuys Municipal Court source familiar with the investigation, no more than about 20 tickets were involved.

The entire Municipal Court system handles about $100 million a year in bail forfeitures, fines and fees, said a court spokeswoman, who asked not to be identified. Four auditors constantly monitor the system for irregularities or misconduct, the spokeswoman said.

Since 1982, internal audits have led to the criminal convictions and firings of at least three Municipal Court clerks, the spokeswoman said.

In 1983, Gwen Shepard, a clerk who handled bail refunds at the main County Courthouse in downtown Los Angeles, was convicted of theft of public funds after being caught writing and cashing phony bail refund orders. In 1985, Mildred Holmes, an office clerk at the downtown central arraignment courts, was convicted of embezzling public funds from fines that had been paid.

In 1986, Beryl Rebecca Vinson, a clerk in Van Nuys Municipal Court, admitted removing court records of drunk driving arrests. Vinson, 25, and her estranged husband, Richard, 26, both of Granada Hills, pleaded no contest a year ago to conspiracy to destroy public records. Beryl Vinson was sentenced to a year in jail and fined $1,500; her estranged husband was sentenced to two years in state prison and was fined $500.

In 1983, Long Beach Municipal Court clerks Wilfredo Bergenholtz, Bessie Hurd and Ronald Richards pleaded guilty to charges of accepting money to erase traffic citations from court records. In other instances, the clerks removed records and pocketed the money of people who believed they were paying their tickets, said Deputy Dist. Atty. Robert L. Cohen, who prosecuted the case.

“Any time the public hears about one of these things, it probably causes them to lose some trust in the system,” said Cohen, now assigned to the Van Nuys courthouse. Court clerks generally “are not very highly paid people, so there have been some problems,” he said.

Salaries of Municipal Court clerks generally range from $16,000 to $32,000 a year, said Peggy Shuttleworth, chief of Municipal Court clerks in Van Nuys.