Attorneys Asked to Help Assess Jail-House Confessions

The Los Angeles County district attorney’s office said Tuesday that it has asked criminal defense lawyers for help in its investigation into whether jail-house informants have faked murder confessions by other inmates.

Richard Hecht, who is heading the inquiry for the district attorney’s office, said he called Los Angeles Public Defender Wilbur Littlefield and two private attorneys--Richard Hirsh, former president of a statewide criminal defense lawyer organization, California Attorneys for Criminal Justice, and Charles L. Lindner, president of the Los Angeles Criminal Courts Bar Assn.

Hecht, a senior prosecutor who is director of branch operations for the district attorney’s office, said, “I asked each of them to assist this department in its effort to identify those cases in the past 10 years in which we’ve had jail-house informants testify to alleged confessions.”

Hecht said he asked the defense lawyers “to forward those instances from their membership to me (so that) we will hopefully be able to identify and review as many cases as we can that fall into this category.”

He said the three defense lawyers had said they would cooperate fully.

Hecht said that more than 800 prosecutors in the district attorney’s office have already been asked to submit cases involving jail-house confessions for the review, which has not yet begun. “The stuff is just coming in,” Hecht said.

The extraordinary review was prompted by a longtime informant who demonstrated convincingly that he could gather enough information in jail about a murder case to implicate a defendant he had apparently never met.

The informant gathered the information over a jail telephone by convincing law enforcement authorities that he was a prosecutor and, at other times, a police officer who had a legitimate need to know.

The informant, Leslie Vernon White, gave the demonstration for the Sheriff’s Department, which notified the district attorney’s office and other law enforcement agencies. White, who has been convicted of several felonies, said that he had never used the method himself, but had seen others use it. Informants usually provide information to law enforcement agencies in exchange for leniency.

Los Angeles prosecutors also were ordered Tuesday to guard against the scheme by limiting immediately the amount of information they release over the telephone.

Guidelines issued by Chief Deputy Dist. Atty. Gregory Thompson bar prosecutors from giving out any information about a witness in a criminal case over the telephone.

“It is essential that we immediately preclude any breach of our office security in maintaining confidential information,” Thompson wrote.

His “special directive” said: “Detailed information on a case or prosecution strategy on a case should also never be discussed over the telephone. Only bare minimum facts on a need-to-know basis should be released telephonically.”

If a prosecutor personally knows the caller--a police officer, for example--he may give out the requested information over the telephone, provided that the caller has a need to know the information, according to the new policy directive.

But if a caller is not personally known to the deputy district attorney, then the prosecutor must obtain a call-back telephone number for verification before giving out any information, Thompson ordered.

In either case, whenever confidential information is given out over the telephone, a prosecutor now must make a record of the contents of the call, including the name of the caller. Such notations are to be either entered into the file of the case in question or sent to the prosecutor who is handling that case.

But in cases in which a caller is merely seeking information that is generally available to the public, such as the time and location of a certain court proceeding, prosecutors should cooperate, Thompson said.

“Any policy on the dissemination of information must balance both the need for security and the need for the efficient exchange of information,” he said.