Role Denied in Shuffling of ID Photos in DNA Test : Trial: A Newport Beach criminal lawyer’s attorney tells jury someone else substituted a picture for his after a paternity exam.

Veteran criminal lawyer William Yacobozzi did not dodge a paternity suit blood test, his attorney said Thursday in denying accounts by county prosecutors that Yacobozzi sent a substitute to take the test.

However, someone else apparently switched the alleged impostor’s picture with that of Yacobozzi in his test file, attorney Grover Porter said.

Yacobozzi, 50, of Newport Beach is charged with one count of falsifying evidence, one count of conspiracy to obstruct justice and five counts of perjury. If convicted, he could face up to four years in prison and lose his license to practice law.

Prosecutors allege that Yacobozzi tried to dodge a 1988 paternity suit filed by Coleen Walters, who claimed that Yacobozzi fathered her son, now 6.

During a civil trial, Yacobozzi was required to take a blood test from the Parentage Testing Center at Long Beach Memorial Medical Center. That test found that there is a strong likelihood that Yacobozzi is the child’s father.

Yacobozzi subsequently asked the court for, and was granted, a DNA test that would precisely determine whether he could be the child’s father. The results of the March 5, 1990, test showed that he could not have fathered the child.

But as Yacobozzi’s criminal trial opened Thursday, Deputy Dist. Atty. Wallace J. Wade told jurors that the person taking the DNA test was not Yacobozzi, who sent an impostor to the hospital.

The prosecutor also contended that Yacobozzi gave the alleged impostor his driver’s license for identification.

“This individual went through procedures . . . and this person identified himself as Mr. Yacobozzi,” Wade said.

“This is what Mr. Doe looks like,” said Wade, showing jurors a glossy 8-by-10 photo of a man in a dark suit and tie similar to Yacobozzi in appearance. “And, it’s not Mr. Yacobozzi.”

During the DNA test, the subject was fingerprinted and photographed for Yacobozzi’s file. Walters’ attorney, Jeri McKeand, sparked the criminal complaint when she saw the file and reported that the attached photograph was not of Yacobozzi.

The five perjury counts stem from statements to the court in which Yacobozzi said he had taken the DNA test.

Grover, Yacobozzi’s attorney, told jurors that his client had gone through picture-taking and fingerprinting procedures during the first blood test so he knew that the same checks would take place for the second test.

It was his client--and not an impostor--who took the DNA test and, in the process, got his picture taken, Grover said.

Somehow, someone else attached a picture of the impostor with his client’s file, he said.

As for Walters’ claim that Yacobozzi fathered her son, “he never had any sexual intercourse” with her, Grover said.

Walters’ paternity suit was settled out of court in February, but details were not disclosed.