Make It a Federal Case : Grand Jury Report on Informant Scandal Doesn’t Go Far Enough

The Los Angeles County Grand Jury has failed to resolve the critical issues arising from the misuse of jailhouse informants by the district attorney’s office and the Sheriff’s Department.

Unfortunately, it now appears that only the intervention of federal authorities can restore public confidence in a criminal justice system in which officers of the law and the court have tolerated and, in some instances, possibly encouraged perjury.

What is at stake are fundamental questions of constitutional rights and the basic integrity of a court system to which the voters of California have assigned the power of life and death.

Failure to resolve these issues will open the administration of justice in this county to doubts so corrosive that their consequences are difficult to calculate.

The magnitude of the grand jury’s failure can be calculated by the conclusions it was willing to draw from an investigation that involved little more than a reexamination of facts already established by the press. According to the grand jury’s final report, “The Los Angeles County District Attorney’s office failed to fulfill the ethical responsibilities required of a public prosecutor by its deliberate and informed declination to take the action necessary to curtail the misuse of jail house informant testimony.

“The Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department,” it also concluded, “failed to establish adequate procedures to control improper placement of inmates with the foreseeable result that false claims of confessions or admissions would be made.”

But despite such damning conclusions, the grand jury was unable or unwilling to hand down one single indictment, provide the name of a single individual complicit in this affair or suggest any reform amounting to much more than a housekeeping change.

For that reason, when the new U.S. attorney, Lourdes Baird, is sworn in, she ought to undertake a thorough review of the evidence to determine whether defendants’ civil rights may have been violated in any of the more than 250 cases in which informants played a role. A federal grand jury may need to pick up where the L.A. grand jury left off. If we truly believe that the mere deferral of justice results in its denial, then what can be said of its outright subversion?