Attorney Says Buckey Rejected Plea Bargain

The McMartin Pre-school molestation case resurfaced Tuesday as an issue in Los Angeles County Dist. Atty. Ira Reiner’s campaign for state attorney general when a defense lawyer disputed Reiner’s assertion that his office had never offered a plea bargain to defendant Ray Buckey.

Buckey’s attorney, Danny Davis, told the Los Angeles Daily Journal, a legal newspaper, that Buckey had rejected a plea bargain from Reiner’s office only days before Buckey’s retrial on eight counts of child molestation began April 10. Moreover, Davis provided the Journal with a surreptitiously recorded audiotape of the meeting at which the offer supposedly was made. The Journal published quotations from the recording in its Tuesday edition.

Reiner’s opponent in the June 5 Democratic primary, San Francisco Dist. Atty. Arlo Smith, immediately seized on the Journal report.

Reiner has repeatedly asserted that no offer was made, most recently during a television debate with Smith broadcast last weekend in the Bay Area.

“There has never been any offer whatsoever in any form, direct or indirect, to Mr. (Ray) Buckey’s attorney with respect to any disposition of the case,” said Reiner during the debate.

Reacting to the news report, the Smith campaign lost no time Tuesday in branding Reiner “a liar” and making videotape of the television debate available to news organizations.

“The question in this race will be simple. Do the voters of California want a liar as attorney general or a lawyer as attorney general?” Smith’s campaign manager, Marc Dann, said Tuesday. “Ira Reiner lied on that show.”

Reiner was unavailable for comment Tuesday. His spokesmen agreed that a meeting with Davis took place, but contended no formal offer was made and that those who attended the session never approached Reiner about it.

“There was never anything taken to Mr. Reiner. We made no offer,” said district attorney spokesperson Sandi Gibbons.

Davis declined to return telephone calls from The Times on Tuesday, nor would he make the tape recording available. Those in the district attorney’s office who participated in the April meeting would not describe it in detail.

Such negotiations, in which both sides explore potential plea bargain scenarios but do not commit themselves, are common in major felony cases.

According to John Lynch, director of central operations for the district attorney’s office, an exploratory meeting involving Lynch, other prosecutors and Davis was held just before the start of jury selection in Buckey’s retrial. He said the meeting was held at Davis’ request.

Buckey is being retried on eight charges left unresolved by a jury that last January found him not guilty of most of the charges against him and acquitted his mother altogether. They involve three children who attended his family’s Manhattan Beach nursery school in the late 1970s and early ‘80s.

“There was a request from Mr. Davis to discuss the case,” Lynch said in a written statement Tuesday. “As prosecutors, we are ethically bound to listen to any defense attorney who wants to discuss his or her case. At Mr. Davis’ request, a meeting was held and there was a discussion. We did not make any offer relative to the case and we are not at liberty to discuss anything that Mr. Davis said.”

Gibbons said the discussion was reported to Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Stanley Weisberg, who is presiding over the proceedings, and that both sides had agreed to keep its contents confidential.

In fact, several weeks ago when Buckey claimed he had rejected an offer from the district attorney, both sides promptly denied that a plea bargain had been offered or rejected.

But now, Davis told a reporter from The Los Angeles Daily Journal, the defense has decided to make public details of the meeting out of anger at how prosecutors are handling the retrial.

He was referring, apparently, to their first child witness, who testified against her wishes and who broke down during cross-examination.

On the tape, according to the Daily Journal, prosecutors discussed the possibility of Buckey being offered a no-contest plea with no additional time in prison. Buckey, who is free on his own recognizance, has already spent five years behind bars. A no-contest plea is the legal equivalent of pleading guilty.

The Daily Journal reported that on the tape, Lynch told Davis that Reiner probably would not agree to such a plea, but Deputy Dist. Atty. Joe Martinez, one of two prosecutors assigned to the case, said that “I would personally urge Mr. Reiner to take a nolo (short for nolo contendere, or no contest) plea--that’s where I’m coming from, but other than that, I couldn’t agree to anything else.”

But later in the meeting Lynch reportedly suggests that Buckey may want to consider a so-called West plea, in which a defendant agrees to plead guilty because the prosecution offer is too good to refuse. The defendant can say in court that he is agreeing for that reason, not because he is guilty.

Davis reportedly agreed to take back a proposed plea to Buckey, although he expressed concerns that Buckey might remain open to civil liability and would be forced to register as a sex offender.

At any rate, Buckey refused to enter a plea. So it was never formalized and presented to Reiner for his approval.

Prosecutor Martinez said that Davis’ tape recording of what was supposed to be a confidential meeting is a violation of the state penal code, and that his leaking it to the press breaks a promise made by all parties to each other and to the judge.

“This is nothing more than Danny Davis looking for a mistrial, should this get blown up and reach the jurors,” Martinez said.

Reiner has insisted that his decision to retry Buckey was not politically motivated. But he conceded recently that the Buckeys’ acquittals caused what he termed “a temporary slip” in his standings in the polls.

And although Dann has said that candidate Smith will not make the retrial a campaign issue, he said Smith will continue to point to “the whole McMartin experience” as a sign of Reiner’s incompetence. Reiner inherited the case from his predecessor, Robert Philibosian.