Justices Limit Access to Informant Files : Law: The state high court says convicts cannot ‘fish’ for wrongdoing such as perjury. A dissent calls the ruling ‘a miscarriage of justice which may return to haunt us.’

The state Supreme Court, in a far-reaching ruling emerging from the jailhouse informants scandal in Los Angeles, on Monday drastically limited the ability of convicted criminals to get information from prosecutors about roles informants played in their cases.

In a 5-2 decision, the justices said that such defendants have no legal right to “fish” through official files to confirm “mere speculation” of wrongdoing to challenge the constitutionality of their convictions.

After their convictions have been upheld, defendants bear the burden in any subsequent appeal and must provide “some concrete information” to justify further court-ordered investigation, the court said in a 115-page opinion by Justice David N. Eagleson.

Allowing such inquiries without restrictions would have “enormous consequences,” requiring judicial reviews of countless challenges that might arise in cases where Los Angeles jailhouse informants were used over a 10-year period ending in 1988.

In a stinging dissent, Justice Allen E. Broussard accused the majority of creating a “Catch-22” situation where a defendant could not pursue a constitutional challenge without facts--but had no effective way to obtain those facts.

Broussard, backed by Justice Stanley Mosk, warned that the state now could execute the defendant without revealing that his conviction and sentence were obtained with perjured informant testimony. “This is a miscarriage of justice which may return to haunt us,” he said.

In issuing the ruling, the court upheld the conviction and death sentence of Jesse Edward Gonzalez for the murder of a Los Angeles County plainclothes sheriff’s deputy, Jack Williams Jr., during a drug raid in 1979.

Gonzalez had contended he fired on deputies because he believed that they were gang members trying to kill him. A jailhouse informant, William Acker, testified that Gonzalez told him he was alerted to the raid and planned to “bag a cop” when deputies arrived.

In August, 1989, after he was convicted and the scandal unfolded, Gonzalez obtained an order from a Los Angeles Superior Court judge granting access to prosecutors’ files that he thought could implicate Acker as a perjurer who lied to obtain favors from authorities.

The informant scandal broke in late 1988 when a longtime informant, Leslie Vernon White, demonstrated for sheriff’s officials that he could fabricate a convincing confession from an inmate that he had never met. White admitted committing perjury 12 times. Another informant admitted committing perjury five times.

A county grand jury investigation concluded that the Los Angeles County district attorney’s office had known or should have known of frequent perjured testimony by informants and “failed to fulfill the ethical responsibilities of a public prosecutor” by encouraging, rather than acting to end, the practice.

The high court ruling was one of two Monday in which the justices upheld the death penalty. In the other case, the court, in an opinion by Broussard, unanimously reaffirmed the death sentence of Stevie Lamar Fields. Fields was found guilty of the kidnaping, rape and murder of a USC student librarian, Rosemary Janet Cobb, during a string of 14 crimes in 1978.

Fields’ original sentence was one of four upheld by the court under former Chief Justice Rose Elizabeth Bird. In 1985 the Bird court, acting on a constitutional challenge brought by Fields, ordered a new inquiry into allegations that his trial counsel failed to provide a legally adequate defense.

Monday’s ruling in the Gonzalez case marked a major victory for local and state prosecutors. They had argued that Los Angeles prosecutors have been willing to turn over information after informal requests by defense lawyers.

The authorities vigorously fought any legal precedent that would allow defendants to go to a trial court for an order granting broad access to official information. Such a precedent would mire the courts in almost endless challenges, particularly in death penalty cases, they warned.

“Our system of death penalty appeals is virtually endless as it is,” said Los Angeles County Deputy Dist. Atty. George G. Size, who argued the Gonzalez case in the Supreme Court. “This would (have made) it absolutely endless.”

Defense lawyers replied that denying such access would seriously cripple efforts to challenge wrongly obtained convictions. Officials were resisting such a precedent, the lawyers said, in an effort to avoid investigations of serious police and prosecutorial misconduct.

The justices ruled Monday that the claims Gonzalez made to the high court of wrongdoing by informant Acker were legally insufficient, and that the trial court had no authority to order prosecutors to turn over their files for further investigation.

The justices said they “expect and assume” prosecutors will voluntarily disclose any such information “promptly and fully.” Defense lawyers remain free to conduct investigations on their own, the court noted.

If the court had ruled in Gonzalez’s favor, it would have opened the door for new challenges from perhaps 100 or more defendants convicted with jailhouse informant testimony from 1979 to 1988.

“The court’s ruling is that as long as the government gets away with putting on perjured testimony at trial, no one has any right to obtain evidence to prove it,” said Gonzalez’s counsel, Gigi Gordon. “In this case, perjured testimony triumphed. Period.”

She said that she would continue working on Gonzalez’s behalf in federal court. “The state of California has failed to deal with this issue and shifted the burden to the federal courts,” she said.

Quin Denvir, a key official of a statewide defense lawyers organization, California Attorneys for Criminal Justice, agreed.

“So, on the one hand, you can’t rely on them to produce it. And when you go to court . . . evidently the court is saying, ‘You can’t seek it unless you’ve got it.’ It’s the ultimate Catch-22,” Denvir said.