Her Job: Persuading Reluctant Witnesses to Show Up in Court

Diane Ferguson has one of the most frustrating and stressful jobs at the Van Nuys courthouse, a job that requires her to be equal parts amateur psychologist, diplomat, mommy and pest.

Ferguson is one of two witness coordinators at the courthouse, a bureaucratic traffic cop responsible for getting the scores of witnesses who have been subpoenaed to testify in Superior Court trials each week to indeed show up and take the stand.

Physically there are far more difficult jobs than this, which entails eight hours of sitting in a neat, brightly lighted office, talking on the phone and handling fairly innocuous quantities of paper work.

But few jobs in the courthouse are more emotionally frazzling than trying to coax recalcitrant witnesses to show up in court and testify against people accused of crimes ranging from murder to drug dealing.

Fearful Witnesses

About half of Ferguson’s dealings are with subpoenaed witnesses who fear retaliation from people they must testify against and therefore do everything they can to avoid coming to court, she said.

And although Ferguson realizes that the witnesses’ testimony is fundamental to the criminal justice system, she understands their fears.

“They all want to tell you their whole story: how they got involved with the case and how it’s making their lives completely miserable,” said Ferguson, a 40-year-old single mother of four who has worked in the office for 1 1/2 years.

“They’ll be crying, angry, irate, fearful--they have all kinds of emotions and they throw it off on you. Sometimes, at the end of the day, my brain feels like it’s fried. There are bad days where every time you pick up the telephone, it’s all-out war.”

Added Marie C. Villegas, 23, the other witness coordinator in Van Nuys Superior Court, “We take a lot of abuse.”

Ferguson and Villegas issue 2,800 to 3,000 subpoenas per month for witnesses in felony cases ranging from murder to rape to burglary. The witnesses come from all walks of life and economic backgrounds, from professionals to drug dealers, children to criminals and clergymen.

Vital Function

David R. Disco, head deputy of the Van Nuys district attorney’s office, called the witness coordinators a “‘vital and little-known function of the D.A.’s office.”

“We have 480 pending criminal cases in the Van Nuys courthouse. It’s just like a Rubik’s cube,” Disco said. “Each case has different dates and a different set of witnesses with their lives and their schedules and attorneys with their own conflicting schedules,” which means that cases can often be postponed.

Without the witness coordinators to keep tabs on things, witnesses would be forced to come to court repeatedly, wasting time and losing money, Disco said.

The subpoenas issued by the coordinators require witnesses to call the courthouse to confirm their availability to testify at the trial and to remain on call until they are needed to show up in court. Most ignore the request to call the court, so Ferguson and Villegas have the arduous task of calling each witness to make sure they will show up.

Track Them Down

Sometimes they track them down at a friend or relative’s house. Sometimes they cannot reach them at all. Often they reach them and make the necessary arrangements, and then the trial is postponed and it all must be done again, Ferguson said.

There are good days when witnesses readily agree to cooperate. People are eager to testify in child molestation cases, for instance, Ferguson and Villegas said.

People are also generally cooperative in drunk driving cases involving injury or death. “Witnesses will call us and say, ‘I saw this and I want to make sure this guy gets put away,’ ” Ferguson said.

The hardest sell for the witness coordinators, not surprisingly, is persuading people to testify against accused murderers, she said.

“People seem to be very afraid the person who killed someone will retaliate against them. Most are not fearful for themselves. They’re worried about their children or their mother and father.”

In the recent murder trial of Daniel Steven Jenkins, for example, almost every witness called to testify was afraid and reluctant--with the exception of police officers, Ferguson said.

Jenkins was accused of the 1985 ambush killing of an off-duty Los Angeles police officer in retaliation for the officer’s testimony as a witness against Jenkins in a robbery trial. The officer was shot in front of his 6-year-old son. Particularly alarming, authorities said, was Jenkins’ history of violent retaliation in other situations.

Jenkins and another man have since been convicted of the murder.

If, as sometimes happens, a witness calls and reports a threat, the coordinators refer the person to police.

Real Fears

Ferguson knows such fears cannot be dismissed as silly or paranoid.

“If it was me in their shoes, I would be fearful too. Sometimes I almost want to say, ‘You’re right,’ ” Ferguson said. But she added, “I try to reassure them the district attorney will make sure they’re protected. And I explain that without them we don’t have a case, that their information can be very vital to putting the person in jail.”

Ferguson and Villegas said they have never heard of any cases where a local witness was harmed to prevent his testimony. But Disco, the head of the Van Nuys district attorney’s branch office, said he knows of at least one case in which a person has been prosecuted for making threats against a witness in the Van Nuys courthouse. And he said he knows of an instance at another branch court where a witness who was scheduled to testify was killed, although he could not provide details.