Threat of Jail Hangs Over Reluctant Witnesses

Manuel Rangel, a 20-year-old day laborer, was an innocent victim shot in the head by a pair of gang members about midnight last July outside a dance club in North Hollywood.

He lived, but feared he might not be so lucky a second time if he testified against his attackers. So when he was ordered to testify in court last month in the attempted murder case against his assailants, Rangel did not show up.

“He was frightened, and he was obviously not taking the legal process very seriously,” Deputy Dist. Atty. Edward Nison said.

Fear is no excuse in a court of law. Rangel was thrown in jail for refusing to testify.

The next day, the North Hollywood resident decided to take the witness stand.

As the number of violent gang-related crimes grows in the San Fernando Valley--the number of gang-related murders has nearly doubled this year and the attempted murders have more than tripled since last year--the fear of retaliation is keeping witnesses out of the courtrooms, prosecutors say. Because of this, authorities are forced to rely on what they consider a last resort: jailing recalcitrant witnesses as a means to force them to testify.

“It’s proven to be effective and witnesses have been cooperative,” Nison said. “I tell a witness--if the witness is important and it’s a serious case--that we start with one basic premise. And that is that they will testify.”

“It’s not a pleasant thing to do, but it becomes necessary,” said Deputy Dist. Atty. Sandra Harris, who prosecutes hard-core gang crimes in downtown Los Angeles.

The law says that a witness served with a subpoena must appear before a judge or face contempt of court charges. If a witness refuses to testify, he can be jailed only up to 10 days. And, after two days in jail, a judge must determine whether to allow the witness to be freed on a promise to appear in court or on a surety bond, which is similar to bail, San Fernando Municipal Judge Paul Metzler said.

The timing of the jailing usually coincides with the defendant’s preliminary hearing. If the hearing is postponed and the witness continues to refuse to testify after 10 days in jail, he or she is released but subject to jailing again, prosecutors said. Most decide to testify within a few hours of being put behind bars.

Prosecutors say the alternative--doing without a key piece of testimony and possibly allowing a criminal to go free--is worse than temporarily taking away an innocent person’s freedom.

And they are not getting much argument from other legal authorities.

“We believe that people who are witnesses can’t pretend it didn’t happen,” said Joel Maliniak, a spokesman for the American Civil Liberties Union office in Los Angeles. “They can’t ignore their responsibility to be a witness.”

If a witness has been threatened into not testifying, the district attorney’s office can employ a host of procedures to protect the person and encourage him or her to provide testimony, said Deputy Dist. Atty. Loren M. Naiman, assistant head deputy of the hard-core gang crime division.

“If someone is really in fear for his life and we believe there’s justification for it, we can do things right away,” Nison said.

Protection measures range from increased police surveillance of a witness’s home, to relocation of a witness, to a full-blown identity overhaul such as provided by the Federal Witness Protection Program.

Officials often offer such precautions before resorting to jailing a witness who has been frightened into silence, Naiman said.

Heightened Awareness

Despite these measures, a heightened awareness of gang violence has made many witnesses fearful and unwilling to come to court, Harris said.

“I think the publicity has led to witnesses not wanting to testify,” Harris said. “It’s become more difficult to get the average witness to cooperate.”

In the past four months, Nison, who prosecutes hard-core gang crimes in the North San Fernando Valley, has thrown two witnesses into jail and has successfully used the threat of incarceration about 15 times, he said.

Harris said that this year she has jailed six witnesses, more than she has ever incarcerated before in the 2 1/2 years she has prosecuted hard-core gang crimes downtown.

Witnesses in non-gang cases are occasionally jailed if they fail to appear in court, but the procedure is most often used in gang-related cases, where witnesses are most frightened of retaliation, Metzler said.

The decision to jail a witness ultimately lies with the judge, who responds to a prosecutor’s request.

“I really hate to do it,” said Metzler, who issued the order to jail the two witnesses in the cases prosecuted by Nison.

“I look for every other alternative because I realize these people are victims,” Metzler said. “It’s an absolute last resort.”

Most prosecutors and judges agree that incarceration is a tactic to be used after all other attempts are exhausted.

“We talk to them, cajole them, protect them, promise them what we can, and if all else fails, then I say go ahead and pick them up,” said Deputy Dist. Atty. Andrew W. Diamond, who prosecuted hard-core gang crime cases in the Valley from 1983-86 and used the jailing tactic twice in that time.

Prosecutors are acutely aware that victims of crimes may regard it as an added indignity to be thrown in jail after they have already suffered at the hands of an assailant.

“That’s the most frustrating situation of all, because you don’t want to further victimize these people,” Harris said. “But you have to balance victimizing them with letting the defendant go free.”

“At first blush it kind of hits as being counterproductive,” Diamond said. “Your job is to put killers behind bars, not victims. But sometimes you have to take drastic measures.”

However, the drastic measures have their limits.

To avoid any possibility of further intimidation, jailed witnesses are housed and transported separately from defendants and criminals. Many witnesses are jailed for just a few hours, usually in temporary holding cells outside courtrooms or by themselves in police station jails.

The tactic sometimes can backfire on prosecutors. Last week, for example, a 20-year-old gang member from Los Angeles testified against Faitdon Gipson, a fellow gang member charged in the drive-by shooting death of a 20-year-old man and in the attempted murder of 10 others near the Los Angeles Coliseum.

Gipson was believed to have confessed about the shootings to the gang member. Gang loyalties predominated, and the witness refused to cooperate with authorities and was thrown into jail for a week. Although he did testify, his jailing had left him bitter.

“He was extremely hostile and very angry and was completely uncooperative,” Harris said. For this reason, Harris regards the practice of jailing witnesses as a “double-edged sword.”

“You can aggravate the situation when you put them in custody,” she said.

Other prosecutors agree the decision to jail a witness to a gang crime cannot be made lightly.

“On the one hand, it does ensure the presence of the witness,” Diamond said. “On the other hand, it does tend to alienate and reduce the possibility of any rapport or cooperation. It has to be used very judiciously.”