Defense Lawyers Assail D.A. on Jail Informant Probe

Spokesmen for the criminal defense Bar charged Thursday that the Los Angeles County district attorney’s office has reneged on its promise to get to the bottom of allegations that jailhouse informants have perjured themselves in murder trials.

Gigi Gordon, representing the Los Angeles Criminal Courts Bar Assn., and Robert Berke, representing the statewide California Attorneys for Criminal Justice, noted that the district attorney’s office has promised for months to expedite court hearings for some of the more than 200 people who have been convicted of murder in the last decade in Los Angeles County with jailhouse informant testimony.

But now that the first three defense lawyers have filed motions to prepare for the hearings, the district attorney’s office has given notice that it will oppose the motions.

“I don’t think they’ve been dealing in good faith,” Gordon said of the prosecutors. She and Berke have been coordinating the defense Bar’s response to a scandal that broke last fall with a demonstration by an informant that he could convincingly fabricate the murder confession of a suspect he had never met.

Procedural Dispute

While a district attorney’s spokesman acknowledged opposing the defense motions, he characterized the opposition as a legitimate procedural dispute.

The defense motions seek full “discovery” about informants who testified.

Discovery is the process by which defense attorneys routinely learn of the evidence that law enforcement has gathered in a criminal case. Prosecutors are legally obligated to turn over such evidence so that defense attorneys can prepare their cases before trial.

In form letters mailed to defense attorneys for more than 150 convicts over the last few months, Chief Deputy Dist. Atty. Gregory Thompson wrote that his office would encourage them to litigate questions about the conduct of jailhouse informants in court, saying, “our office will join with you in expediting the hearing of any appropriate motion you may wish to bring.”

But, Thompson said a discovery motion filed after a conviction is not appropriate.

Gordon said the district attorney’s office has known for months that it was the defense Bar’s intention to file motions for discovery in these cases; then, if information warranted, to file writs alleging that their clients were being unlawfully imprisoned.

Thompson has acknowledged in interviews that prosecution failure to provide full discovery about informants before trial probably constitutes the defense Bar’s best chance for reversing convictions.

He said his office still wants to help the defense lawyers get information about informants, but does not want to “open up a whole new procedure in criminal law--which is post-judgment discovery . . . a vehicle that would mean there is no finality in a criminal case.”

Cites Delays

Berke also charged Thursday that delays by the attorney general’s office and the county counsel’s office in appointing a special lawyer for the Los Angeles County Grand Jury have probably ruled out an effective investigation by that body into the jailhouse informant problem.

The presiding Superior Court judge for Los Angeles County, Richard P. Byrne, said he shared Berke’s frustration over the delays, but thought that an attorney would be named within a week or two.

Two law enforcement sources said that the grand jury has recently interviewed two prospective lawyers whose names were provided by the attorney general’s office--retired California Supreme Court Justice Otto Kaus and Warren L. Ettinger, a former president of the Criminal Courts Bar Assn. Kaus, a spokesman for the attorney general’s office, and the grand jury foreman declined comment. Ettinger could not be reached.

The grand jury, whose one-year term expires July 1, decided in January that it wanted to investigate the use of jailhouse informants and has been asking a public body to provide it with a lawyer.