D.A. Admits Murder Trial Was Unfair : Justice: Prosecution seeks new hearing for man who was convicted. Case is the second stemming from scandal involving use of jailhouse informants.

In the second case of its kind to grow out of the jailhouse informant scandal, the Los Angeles County district attorney’s office has conceded that a convicted murderer is entitled to a new trial because prosecutors failed to disclose to the defense damaging information about an informant’s credibility.

The district attorney’s office in effect acknowledged that the lack of disclosure, which it said was unintentional, interfered with a fair trial for Arthur Grajeda. He is an alleged member of the Mexican Mafia prison gang, who was convicted in 1987 and sentenced to prison for 32 years to life for a robbery-murder in a Wilmington housing project.

At the urging of the district attorney’s office, the state attorney general’s office this week asked the California Court of Appeal to grant Grajeda’s request for a new trial. Legal experts said that the appeals court would almost certainly approve the request.

Grajeda’s lawyer, Robert Berke, said Tuesday that he was “gratified” by the “proper prosecutorial response.”

Berke filed a mammoth petition with the Court of Appeal in June, seeking a new trial for Grajeda on many grounds, including an allegation that rewards, such as furloughs from jail and dismissal of some criminal charges, were given to the informant, Edward L. Moran, but not disclosed to the defense. The defense would have been able to use such information to argue that Moran had a motive to lie, when he testified that he had seen Grajeda kill Ralph Morales in the housing project. Moran told police about witnessing the killing only after he was himself arrested on drug charges.

In urging a new trial, the district attorney’s office did not concede any of Berke’s points about deliberately hiding information about rewards. But it said that it had inadvertently violated its duty to disclose a deputy district attorney’s allegation that Moran lied in another murder case the year before.

That case involved Kevin Dykes, a Compton man who was placed in protective custody after his arrest for possession of a small amount of crack cocaine. Dykes was housed in a special cellblock because he had told police he had witnessed two other men commit a vicious murder. The cellblock where he was housed was primarily used to house jailhouse informants such as Moran. Within days, several informants, including Moran, told police that Dykes had confessed to them that he was guilty of the murder he had previously claimed only to have witnessed.

Moran, a convicted rapist, later switched sides and testified on Dykes’ behalf. He testified that Dykes had not confessed, but that he and other informants had conspired to frame Dykes for murder because they then expected to receive favors from law enforcement.

The deputy district attorney trying the Dykes case, Elliot Alhadeff, contended that Moran was lying and that the other informants, who stuck to the story that Dykes had confessed, were telling the truth. Dykes was convicted.

Moran’s flip-flop in the Dykes case should have been disclosed to Grajeda, the district attorney’s office said. But it was not because the deputy district attorney trying the Grajeda case, Scott Carbaugh, never knew of the episode.

Grajeda was legally entitled to the information under the terms of a 1989 California Supreme Court ruling, said Deputy Dist. Atty. Abram Weisbrot, a member of the special jailhouse informant litigation team who signed a letter to the attorney general’s office urging that a new trial be granted. The ruling said specific acts of honesty or dishonesty as they reflect a trait of character are admissible evidence.

The first case in which the district attorney’s office conceded that a new trial was warranted also involved what prosecutors said was an unintentional failure to disclose information to the defense. In that case, the information consisted of psychiatric evaluations and testimony in prosecutors’ files that informant Stephen Jesse Cisneros was a habitual liar. The trial for Carlos Herrera Vargas, who was convicted of murder, has not taken place.

Defense attorneys have challenged about a dozen murder convictions, including Dykes’, as an outgrowth of the jailhouse informant scandal that began in late 1988 when a longtime informant, Leslie Vernon White, demonstrated for jailers that he could convincingly fake another inmate’s murder confession and fool police and prosecutors.