Illegal Use of Informers Suspected in ’87

Senior Los Angeles County district attorney’s officials suspected in 1987 that sheriff’s deputies may have been breaking the law by deliberately placing jailhouse informants in cells with defendants “from whom law enforcement could use a confession,” according to a prosecutor’s memorandum obtained Wednesday by The Times.

The memorandum, dated Nov. 1, 1988, and marked confidential, was written by Deputy Dist. Atty. Denis K. Petty, then head of the district attorney’s Long Beach office. It contained Petty’s recollection of a senior staff meeting the year before at which a plan to keep a central file on the activities of informants was rejected.

The plan had been proposed as a way of allowing prosecutors to quickly check the reliability of informants.

In his memorandum, Petty said the senior staff rejected the idea, in part, because the staff “suspected that LASD (the Sheriff’s Department) intentionally put jailhouse informants in jail cells with defendants from whom law enforcement could use a confession.”

Petty said the staff feared that the existence of a central file on informants’ activities would be discovered by defense lawyers and would somehow--he did not say how--lead to discovery of the Sheriff’s Department’s suspected practice. He said the staff feared that courts might deem the practice in violation of a series of Supreme Court decisions that bar police from using secret agents to question suspects about crimes with which they are charged.

Petty could not be reached for comment Wednesday night.

Chief Deputy Dist. Atty. Gregory Thompson said he believes that Petty’s recollection of the staff meeting was in error. He said he is satisfied that the Sheriff’s Department has no practice of placing informants in the cells of targeted defendants.

Was Not There

Thompson, who did not attend the staff meeting, said he questioned those who had attended after he saw Petty’s memo. He said no others shared Petty’s recollection.

The others, according to memos they wrote, said the plan for a central file was rejected because they feared that courts would order them to turn over the entire file to defense attorneys and that, as one put it, “would have compromised the safety and confidentiality of our informants.”

However, another, Richard Hecht, a senior prosecutor, said in his memo that “there may well have been other appropriate reasons,” but that he could not recall them.

Thompson said he wanted to know if the Sheriff’s Department was planting informants and, therefore, asked Undersheriff Robert A. Edmonds to check it out. He said Edmonds told him that he had personally investigated and satisfied himself that the department, which runs the county jail system, was not planting informants.

“I accepted that answer,” Thompson said.

Sheriff’s Department officials did not return telephone calls by The Times Wednesday night.

Thompson said he had not spoken with Petty about the memorandum but had spoken to others who had talked with Petty. He said he understood from them that Petty was no longer certain of his recollection.

Public Furor

Petty wrote the memo the day after a public furor erupted over the use of jailhouse informants with the disclosure that one of them, Leslie Vernon White, had demonstrated to sheriff’s deputies that he could gather enough information to fabricate the confession of a defendant he had never met.

In the wake of other disclosures that reflected poorly on the credibility of some veteran informants, the district attorney’s office subsequently approved the plan to keep a central file on informants’ activities.