Questions Remain After Judge’s Drunk Driving Case Ends in a Mistrial

Guilty. Guilty. Ten times guilty. That’s how the vote came down in the jury room on the second floor of the Beverly Hills courthouse. But 10 votes add up to a hung jury, and Judge Edward L. Davenport walked away smiling from his trial on drunk driving charges.

Leaving the courthouse Tuesday, the Los Angeles Municipal Court judge and North Hollywood resident declined to comment on his case, which ended in a mistrial after eight days of testimony and two days of loud, frustrating jury deliberations.

“Of course,” the judge replied when asked if he was smiling. As a Los Angeles city prosecutor, Davenport once won a U. S. Supreme Court ruling that allowed police to take blood samples from drunk driving suspects against their will.

In his own case, he failed parts of the field sobriety test and refused to take other parts. Later, he dumped the contents of a jar of urine into a toilet rather than let police use it as evidence, both sides agreed.

But Davenport has hardly put all his troubles behind him.

Deputy Dist. Atty. Katherine Mader said she wants to charge him again as soon as she can, including the accusation that he refused to submit to a chemical test to measure the alcohol in his blood. If she does better with the next jury, the judge could face a 48-hour jail stay.

But for now, the months of legal maneuvering that followed Davenport’s car crash on the night of May 1, 1991, have ended in a big question mark.

“I had the gut feeling that he did do it, but the prosecution didn’t prove it to me,” said the one juror who held out for a verdict of not guilty. A 12th juror was undecided.

The holdout, who asked that his name not be used, is a musician and Beverly Hills resident who once completed the first two weeks of training to be a Los Angeles police officer. He also passed the written exam to join the New York City police.

He said his brief time in blue had nothing to do with his doubts about Beverly Hills police officers in the Davenport case.

But he was especially wary of the testimony of Gary Livitski, the arresting officer, who said Davenport failed to walk a straight line and could not say the alphabet.

Livitski and two other police witnesses said the judge was abusive, bleary-eyed and smelled of alcohol.

But the juror said the policeman, a 12-year veteran, lacked credibility.

The other jurors had no such problems, especially after Davenport took the stand in his own defense and admitted to having three whiskey-and-waters that night.

He spoke over the questions of the prosecutor and disregarded the orders of the presiding judge, Elden S. Fox, making Fox so angry that he ordered Davenport from the stand.

But Jacob Adajian, Davenport’s lawyer, said he was betting that the jurors would go along with his reading of his client as a man with a difficult personality--drunk or sober.

“We’ll concede that the judge failed one test that night, but it was not a test the police officers talked about,” he said. “It was the attitude test. He failed it from the word go, but that’s not a crime.”