Admission by Jail Informant Not Reported

When long-time jailhouse informant Leslie White told a polygraph examiner for the state attorney general’s office in early 1987 that he had committed perjury numerous times, no investigation resulted, it was learned Thursday.

The polygraph examiner said in a telephone interview that he considered White’s statements to be unverifiable.

Other officials in the attorney general’s office backed the examiner’s assessment, saying it would have been irresponsible to have alerted other law enforcement agencies about White because he revealed no specifics.

White had told the polygraph examiner, George Johnson, that he had committed perjury no more than 10 times before 1986.

‘Turmoil’ Cited

Martin Ryan, a supervisor assigned to the attorney general’s Bureau of Investigation, said Thursday: “If George was to report that this guy has perjured himself 10 times and announced that to California law enforcement, you can imagine what sort of a turmoil that would cause . . . trying to ferret out specifically what cases he was talking about. . . . “

Ryan said “a lot of manpower and energy” would have been spent without a specific direction. “We don’t know if any of this ever occurred except in (White’s) own mind, and that’s not the type of information you would put out to law enforcement to follow up on. . . . We have a responsibility in our position to deliver to law enforcement some information they can work with.”

Ironically, law enforcement agencies in Los Angeles County, where White has testified as an informant since 1977, have embarked on an even wider quest.

White has become the central figure in an extraordinary review by the Los Angeles County district attorney’s office of every jailhouse informant case of the last decade. Senior prosecutors in Los Angeles have said they want to make sure that no one was wrongly convicted based on the perjured testimony of jailhouse informants.

The district attorney’s office began its review after White demonstrated in late October that he could gather enough information by telephone from law enforcement authorities to convincingly fake the confession of a murder defendant whom he had never met. White said he had never used the technique but had seen others use it. He declined to name them.

In the 1987 polygraph, which was given to White at a Los Angeles County jail, Johnson recalled that White admitted that he had committed perjury before he was hooked to a polygraph machine.

Asked How Many Times

Johnson said he asked White how many times he had perjured himself and White said he did not know.

“And I said, ‘Well, what’s the most?’ ” Johnson recalled. “And he said, ‘I know I didn’t commit perjury more than 10 times while testifying in court.’

“I said, ‘Are you sure that’s the absolute highest maximum?’ ”

“And he said, ‘Yes, I’m sure.’ ”

Johnson said he was developing what in polygraph examiner’s parlance is known as a “control question” to ask during the actual test.

In this case, Johnson said, the relevant question dealt with White’s knowledge of a reported threat on a law enforcement agent’s life by a leader of a California prison gang.

Johnson selected perjury as his control question because he expected it to hit a nerve with White.

He wanted to produce “a probable lie” so that he could contrast White’s reactions when he answered the “relevant question” about the reported threat to the agent’s life.

Polygraphs measure changes in blood pressure, breathing and galvanic skin responses, which refers to electrical resistance within the human body that changes with stress, Johnson said.

Johnson asked White as a control question: “Other than those 10 times before 1986, did you ever commit perjury while testifying?”

White answered no, Johnson said.

He showed a greater physiological reaction--indicating greater fear--in response to the perjury question than to the relevant question, the polygraph examiner said.

Thus, Johnson said, he was able to determine that White was telling the truth about the relevant question--his knowledge of the reported threat on the agent’s life.

But Johnson said he was unable to tell whether White was telling the truth about perjuring himself.

“The only thing I know is that that was the area that he feared the most. . . . That was . . . where his basic concern was,” Johnson said.

He said there could have been a myriad of possible interpretations for White’s concern.

Among them, he said, were that White could have been on “an ego trip, that he wanted me to think he had committed perjury when he had not.” He also said that it was predictable that a long-time informant such as White might be nervous about merely discussing testimony in cases.

Also, he noted that, White could have been referring to mistakes he had made on the witness stand that were really small matters, such as being wrong about a time of day or the color of someone’s clothing.

“There is no way to really know,” he said.

Johnson said he did not ask White for details of the perjury “because those were not the issues I was testing him on.”

As a practical matter, said Johnson’s supervisor, Sam Lister, Johnson, by law, would not have been able to test White on details of his supposed perjury without first telling him that he was suspected of the crime of lying under oath and obtaining White’s written consent to take a polygraph examination on that issue.

But he could have passed the information on to other law enforcement officials.

In this case, however, as is customary, Johnson’s written report on the polygraph did not mention the control question, which was White’s perjury.

Asked if any action was taken to investigate the supposed perjury, he responded, “Not to my knowledge.”

Hugh Allen, special agent in charge of attorney general’s special prosecutions unit, which was investigating the threat against the agent’s life, said he took no action about perjury. He said he received the report from Johnson and recently reviewed it at the request of The Times, and there was no mention of perjury.

He added, “I sure don’t have any memory as to any issue of that nature.”