Victims’ Avenger : Lawyer Specializes in Making Police Pay for Acts of Brutality

John Burton got his first taste of police brutality as a long-haired flower child just out of high school in 1971.

On his way home from a party in Bradbury, he and a friend were stopped by sheriff’s deputies, who rifled through his friend’s pockets and seized several joints of marijuana. As Burton recalls it, the officers then shoved his friend to the ground, handcuffed him and, laughing, punched him in the face.

“Being a hippie . . . I knew police were kind of big jerks and everything, but I thought they operated on a certain level of principle,” Burton said in a recent interview. “I was just appalled. I thought, when I grow up, I’m going to get these guys.”

Today, hair trimmed and suits tailored, Pasadena attorney John C. Burton is getting his revenge. At 38, he is one of the youngest and most respected members of Los Angeles County’s so-called “brutality bar”--an elite corps of lawyers who make a living by forcing police agencies to pay for their officers’ misdeeds.

Burton was the lead attorney for the victims of the “39th and Dalton” raid, winning a $3.4-million settlement for the damage Los Angeles police wreaked on a suspected drug house. He is representing Bryant Allen, one of the passengers in Rodney G. King’s car the night the Altadena motorist was beaten by LAPD officers. And, in June, he filed a civil rights suit against the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department on behalf of 66 residents of unincorporated Duarte who contend their homes were trashed by deputies in raids last summer.

In recent months, Larry King has interviewed Burton on CNN, Phil Donahue has invited him to appear on his daytime talk show and Los Angeles magazine featured him and four other police-misconduct lawyers under the headline, “Who Ya Gonna Call? COPBUSTERS.”

“I don’t consider myself some reformer who is going to all of a sudden cause police departments to straighten up their acts,” said Burton, reflecting on his newfound notoriety. “But I do think we can do a lot to uncover what is really going on in American society today.

“This George Bush, kinder, gentler America, this Desert Storm, ticker-tape parade is not what’s really happening,” he said. “The Rodney King video is the real mirror of American society today. You have working-class people being driven into greater and greater poverty and despair . . . and all the government has to offer them are clubs to the head.”

To many police officials, Burton is the one wielding the club. They contend that such attorneys are merely out for the money, filing frivolous lawsuits that municipal governments are compelled to settle--not because officers acted improperly, but because it is cheaper to settle than fight.

“I personally don’t think it matters to him whether he’s right or wrong--he’s out there simply to make money,” said Monrovia Police Chief Joseph Santoro, whose city paid a $250,000 settlement last year to one of Burton’s clients--a quadriplegic grandmother who alleged that her home had been ransacked by police officers making an illegal search.

“If law enforcement’s wrong, then we need to take our lumps,” Santoro said. “But these attorneys are forcing cities to make economic decisions . . . that have nothing to do with whether the case is founded or not.”

Likewise, lawyers who defend police agencies against such suits are far from being philosophical bedfellows with Burton. But in the courtroom, they say, he is a principled attorney whose straightforward manner commands respect.

“Obviously, I don’t buy into John’s philosophy, but sometimes we need people on the fringes just to keep us awake,” said Los Angeles Assistant City Atty. Philip Sugar, who defended the city in the Dalton Avenue case. “At least John sincerely believes it. That’s not true with (some other police-misconduct lawyers) who are just interested in PR and money.”

Burton doesn’t schmooze with the wealthy and powerful, rarely even with other lawyers. He lives in Altadena and says his companions are much like his clients--unpretentious folk who make their livings with their hands, not off the labor of others.

He tends to eschew yellow legal pads in favor of milky-gray recycled paper. The only gold he flashes is the wedding band he has worn for eight years. An atheist, he says he belongs to only two organizations--the Los Angeles-based Police Misconduct Lawyer Referral Service, for which he serves as treasurer, and the Pasadena Mountain Bike Club.

“John’s concern is for his fellow man,” said Vina Camper, intake coordinator for the Police Misconduct Lawyer Referral Service, a nonprofit group that finds attorneys for brutality victims. “It’s not about success.”

Not that Burton doesn’t like to win. Under federal law, defendants in civil rights cases have to pay reasonable attorney fees if the plaintiff is successful--regardless of the amount the plaintiff recovers. In one recent case, Burton represented an Altadena man allegedly roughed up by officers. The jury awarded his client $1, while Burton, at his average rate of about $200 an hour, says he collected $26,000.

Although he won’t reveal his annual earnings, he is able to afford an office with a panoramic view in the eighth story of the polished-stone and smoked-glass Lake-Corson Building. One judgment bought him a sporty new Alfa Romeo sedan. And whenever he steps into court, he totes a laptop computer with all his files on diskette.

“That’s hardly working class,” quipped friend and admirer Hugh R. Manes, considered the dean of police-misconduct attorneys. “I don’t see him going down to the beer joint, talking with the boys, either.”

Certainly, Burton’s roots are hardly working class. His late father, Gene Burton, sold conservative sportswear from his venerable Lake Avenue dress shop for nearly 40 years. His mother, Betty, is a longtime arts patron who serves as a board member for the Museum of Contemporary Art.

Young John grew up in a huge house on Lombardy Road overlooking the Huntington Gardens in San Marino. His was a world of private schools, crew cuts, cotillions and memberships at the Annandale Golf Club and exclusive Valley Hunt Club.

“I thought everybody had maids, because everybody I knew had maids,” Burton said. “I thought everybody had a beach house in Orange County. To me this was how the whole world was. I didn’t know there was something else.”

He did, however, sense there was something unfair about the privilege he was afforded. He grew his hair long, bought a VW bus, protested the Vietnam War and rejoiced in the music of the Grateful Dead.

Over his parents’ objections, he dropped out of a private boys’ boarding school in Carpinteria and enrolled at Blair High School in Pasadena. After graduation, he headed to UC Santa Cruz for what seemed like the definitive counterculture experience. But after five semesters, he left, miserable.

“It was like going to one of those fun house halls of mirrors--I looked around and everybody looked like me,” Burton said. “In retrospect, I think I sensed the hippie lifestyle was really disconnected from the real engine of history, the productive forces that make mankind develop and live.”

Law, though antithetical to his free-spirited youth, was well suited to his sardonic wit and rhetorical skills. He got his undergraduate and law degrees at UCLA, and in 1979 gained admittance to the state bar.

Burton’s first successful venture in a police misconduct case came in 1986, when he defended a young Pasadena man who had been rousted by narcotics officers on his front lawn. A scuffle broke out that ultimately drew in the man’s girlfriend, his sister and his mother--all of whom were sprayed with Mace. Pasadena officials paid $85,000 to settle.

Most recently, he won $325,000 for John Franklin Weaver, a 38-year-old Venice sign painter who was arrested on traffic charges in 1990. Weaver, placed in an isolation cell in Los Angeles County Jail, said deputies kicked and beat him with flashlights so badly that his spleen had to be removed.

“It’s nauseating to listen to their lame excuses,” Burton said. “These guys take a badge, an oath, a gun and the power to deprive us of our life and liberty. Obviously we need to have police protection, but the founders of this country put limits on that power. If police don’t want to follow these limits . . . they should be slammed.”

Those who have been on the receiving end of Burton lawsuits contend that his politics are misdirected and that his rhetoric exacerbates societal problems while leaving the system unchanged.

“I’ve heard those words and, frankly, don’t think they’re very helpful to healing any wounds in our society,” said Thomas J. Feeley of the firm Burke, Williams & Sorensen, which serves as city attorney for several municipalities. “But I’ve always found John courteous and completely ethical . . . never personally nasty or anything like that.”

Sometimes, though, Burton’s attitude toward police does slip out. During pretrial motions for a civil rights case in U.S. District Court last month, he accused officers from the Pasadena Police Department of delaying the proceedings in order to avoid their “day of reckoning.”

“Day of reckoning?” barked fed eral Judge William D. Keller. “Come on! Save your rhetoric for the jury.”

In another instance, before the Dalton Avenue case was settled, he defiantly called Los Angeles City Councilman Robert Farrell’s urging of financial compensation for the victims a “publicity stunt” and said it was degrading to his clients to think “they’ll take a few dollars and go away.”

Eight months later, when the city offered more than $3 million, Burton’s clients took it and dropped their complaint.

“Trial lawyers will lead you to believe that only through their great skills do people get restitution,” Farrell said in a recent interview. “They forget that public officials on the other side may be as sympathetic to the issue of compensation as they are.”

Burton, a father of two whose beard is speckled with gray, gets away from it all by riding his mountain bike along the trials of the San Gabriel Mountains. He is an aficionado of jazz and believes that saxophonist Charlie Parker is the greatest musician of all time.

He recently saw Spike Lee’s provocative “Jungle Fever” but didn’t like it because, he said, Lee fails to recognize that whites and blacks may have the same interests. Burton said he hopes someday to form a labor party in which workers would rise up against what he sees as the capitalist forces that exploit everyone.

In the meantime, he will continue to fight the powers that be--a battle he says has gotten easier since the violence inflicted against Rodney King was so vividly documented by an amateur cameraman this spring.

But he fears that the increasing conservatism of the U.S. Supreme Court will eventually end his line of work. As the justices hand down rulings that expand police powers and limit constitutional protections, Burton says, it will become nearly impossible to prove someone’s civil rights have been violated.

“We’re scoring too many blows against the power of the state,” he said. “They’re just not going to let us do this anymore.”