Judge Orders Saving of Jail Informer Data

Spurred by a controversy over the use of jailhouse informants, the Los Angeles County district attorney’s office, the Sheriff’s Department and the Los Angeles Police Department told a Superior Court judge Friday that they will preserve any records they have of such informants.

The district attorney’s office and the Police Department told the judge that they had no problems saving such records.

But the Sheriff’s Department, which operates the county’s jails, indicated that it had a problem. Los Angeles Superior Court Presiding Judge Richard P. Byrne ordered the Sheriff’s Department to save the records anyway.

Two defense lawyer groups, the California Attorneys for Criminal Justice and the Los Angeles Criminal Courts Bar Assn., had asked Byrne to order the law enforcement agencies to preserve the records for possible use in a grand jury investigation.

Computer Purges

Attorney John A. Daly, representing the Sheriff’s Department, said the department wanted to preserve the records but feared that it would have difficulty doing so. Daly, who was brought into the case by the county counsel to eliminate a possible conflict of interest, cited a fear that some relevant records might be destroyed in routine, daily computer purges of information about jail inmates who were discharged. He suggested that stopping those purges could result in a computer overload.

Byrne invited the Sheriff’s Department to seek a modification of his order if problems arise.

To be saved are all records of jailhouse informants used or consulted by the law enforcement agencies since 1977, including records of promises and payments made to them, their last known whereabouts and their cell assignments while they were in jail.

The district attorney’s office, which is conducting its own review of jailhouse informant cases, noted that it has already asked its own prosecutors and police agencies to preserve data about informants.

The district attorney’s review began in late October, when a longtime jailhouse informant, Leslie Vernon White, demonstrated that he could gather enough information to fabricate the murder confession of a defendant he had never met.