2 Deputies Accused of Brutality Are Rehired : Law enforcement: Sheriff’s Department strongly objected to Civil Service Commission’s order.

Two Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputies, fired and charged with felony assault in the beating of a prisoner in 1986, have won their jobs back despite efforts by prosecutors and top sheriff’s officials to end their careers.

Deputies James B. Gates and Donnie R. Johnson were accused of hanging a suspected marijuana dealer upside down from the ceiling in a room at the Lennox station, striking him with their batons and sticking a gun in his mouth while threatening to kill him, court records show.

Despite the urgings of Sheriff’s Department officials not to place the deputies “right back with the public for possible future incidents,” the county Civil Service Commission concluded that there was insufficient evidence to support the charges and last month ordered Gates and Johnson back to work.

At a time of increased public scrutiny of how law enforcement agencies police their own, those on both sides say the case illustrates the system’s pitfalls.

Supporters of the two deputies contend that the Sheriff’s Department went after the wrong officers in an overzealous attempt to clean house. Civil rights activists argue that the department tried to do the right thing, but was thwarted by a system that is reluctant to punish police misconduct.

“Anyone looking at it from the inside or outside would probably be concerned and shaking their heads,” said Sheriff’s Lt. Jeff Springs, a department spokesman. “We want the community to have a very high level of faith and trust in us, but if we have to maintain people who we don’t have that kind of confidence in, what kind of confidence can the community have?”

Gates, 37, who joined the department in 1977, could not be reached for comment. Johnson, 30, who became a deputy in 1981, granted only a brief interview in which he termed the events “very bizarre.” The two deputies, once members of an elite street-crime team that aggressively targeted gangs and drugs, have been reassigned as bailiffs in the court services division.

Voluminous records, generated by nearly five years of legal wrangling, tell a story of two officers with unblemished pasts who were unable to persuade a judge, the district attorney’s office or their supervisors that they were innocent of wrongdoing. Yet, in the end, their fate was in the hands of a Civil Service hearing officer who doubted that the beating ever took place.

Criminal charges against the deputies were dismissed at a 1989 trial after the alleged beating victim was deported to his native Mexico.

Earlier testimony by the man, who suffered numerous welts and a cut of several inches across his forehead, had been ridiculed as false and inconsistent by the deputies’ attorney. Municipal Court Judge Rand Schrader, who presided over the preliminary hearing, found it “chillingly believable” and “frighteningly true.”

Later, Sheriff’s Department internal affairs investigators conducted a probe, concluding that Gates and Johnson were responsible for the beating and had concocted a story of a failed escape attempt to explain the victim’s injuries.

“By your actions, you have brought discredit and embarrassment to yourself and the department,” wrote Undersheriff Robert A. Edmonds in letters of termination to both deputies.

Sara Adler, an attorney who acts as a hearing officer for the Civil Service Commission, had the final say over the deputies’ fate. After listening to arguments from their lawyer that Gates and Johnson would never have risked their promising careers by beating a small-time dope dealer, Adler ordered them reinstated.

“There is no way to be certain that (the two deputies) did not strike (the suspect) with a baton or stick, but there is also no credible evidence that they did,” Adler wrote in a 10-page report that was adopted July 17 by the five-member Civil Service Commission.

The case that earned Gates and Johnson five years away from their jobs has been unusual from the start.

On July 19, 1986, Johnson and another deputy--both members of the Lennox station’s Street Crime Apprehension Team--were in an unmarked patrol car when they saw 22-year-old Alfredo Munoz drinking a beer in public.

When they approached Munoz--a convicted felon with at least a dozen aliases who has the phrase “Perdon Madre Mia” (Pardon Me, Mother) tattooed on his chest--they allegedly found that he was selling small plastic bags of oregano and parsley that he was passing off as marijuana.

On the way back to book him at the station, the deputies’ car collided with a bicyclist, who took off running. While the officers were chasing the bicyclist on foot, Munoz, who was in the back seat in handcuffs, managed to escape.

Five days later, an informant called the Lennox station to say that Munoz was staying with him in an Inglewood motel. Officers arrested him again, then called Johnson and his fellow team member, Gates, at home to let them know the fugitive was back in custody.

The district attorney’s office and Sheriff’s Department said the deputies retaliated by taking Munoz into a locked room, shoving him handcuffed into a chair and beating him with a 15-inch wooden club wrapped in black tape. Then they tied his legs and strung him upside down from a ceiling beam, while continuing the beating, according to court documents.

During the 20-minute assault, Gates allegedly pulled a handgun from a desk, stuck it deep in Munoz’s mouth and threatened to kill him. Afterward, Munoz was so bloody that the deputies used his shirt to wipe up the mess, then tried to hide the garment, which was later recovered under a foot of garbage in a trash can outside, the documents said.

“I saw long, red welts . . . similar to what would be caused by a nightstick,” testified Sgt. Doral Riggs, an 18-year veteran, who was acting watch commander that day. “The impression I got was these were fresh. . . . The skin felt warm to the touch (and) they were starting to swell.”

But in memos they were asked to write the day of the beating, Gates and Johnson both said they had taken Munoz into the room only to photograph his tattoos and question him about the handcuffs he had made off with in his escape five days earlier. The injuries occurred, they wrote, when Munoz darted from his chair and ran for the door.

“I quickly looked around and saw the suspect crash into the door,” wrote Gates, who was described by supervisors as one of the top five deputies at Lennox station.

The deputies’ attorney, Richard A. Shinee, argued that Munoz had told the informant at the Inglewood motel that he had recently been beaten by a street gang.

Later, Shinee and an ex-sheriff’s sergeant tried to re-create the assault and concluded that it would have been impossible to hoist Munoz over a beam in the ceiling, that his cries for help would have been heard by other deputies and that, had the beating occurred as alleged, he would have been “a bloody pulp” instead of emerging with “almost undetectable bruising and a slight cut over his eye.”

“Whatever beating Munoz received was at the hands of his own kind,” Shinee wrote in documents filed with the Civil Service Commission.

In June, 1990, a Civil Service Commission hearing officer agreed and ordered the two deputies reinstated. After reviewing objections from the Sheriff’s Department, the commission ordered another hearing.

Faced with a similar scenario in the case of two deputies fired in 1989 for burning a cross in a Men’s Central Jail module, Sheriff Sherman Block decided to rehire them rather than go through a second Civil Service hearing.

In this case, though, the department fought the decision with more impassioned pleadings. Gates and Johnson, wrote Sgt. Susan Weekly, “were not acting within the scope and authority of their positions as deputy sheriffs when they attempted to impose, upon Mr. Munoz, their own ideals of justice, their own lessons of the consequences of ‘running from the police’ or their own message of the repercussions to being ‘petty’ dope dealers in the Lennox sheriff’s station area.”

But, as in the first hearing, the firing of Johnson and Gates was overturned. Negotiations over back pay have begun, with the deputies asking for $200,000 each.