Perjurer Sentenced to 3 Years : Crime: Informant blew the whistle on use of jailhouse liars-for-hire, but no law officers were charged for conspiring with him.

Leslie White, the Los Angeles County jailhouse informant who blew the whistle on perjurers-for-hire in scores of murder cases, pleaded guilty to two counts of perjury himself Tuesday and thus became the only person to go to prison in the scandal he sparked.

White was sentenced to a prison term of three years by Superior Court Judge J. Stephen Czuleger.

In a telephone interview from jail, White said he regrets that no law enforcement officials were prosecuted in the scandal.

“I was involved with law enforcement in a conspiracy to commit perjury,” he said. “Unfortunately, my co-conspirators will not be going to prison with me.”

Authorities who investigated the scandal apparently found it impossible to prove that law enforcement officials were guilty of any crimes, so they did not charge any.

In his first public remarks on the subject, Douglas Dalton, special counsel to the Los Angeles County Grand Jury that investigated the scandal, said it was impossible to prove that law enforcement officials gave informants rewards for false testimony.

“The practice (of promising rewards) was done by a wink and a nod and it was never necessary to have any kind of formal understanding,” Dalton said. “These jailhouse informants knew that if they implicated someone in a criminal case, something good would come of it. Because of that we were never able to come up with an indictment of anyone in law enforcement.”

Dalton added that an indictment of police or prosecutors would have hinged on the testimony of informants claiming they had been given secret deals.

“The only thing we had was (the word of) an informant. To base a case on the people we said were untrustworthy, we didn’t think was proper,” he said.

The grand jury settled for criticizing the district attorney’s office for ethical lapses in the misuse of jailhouse informants who testified in at least 150 cases in Los Angeles County in the 1980s.

In addition, the Sheriff’s Department was chastised for placing informants next to murder suspects in county jails “with the foreseeable result that false claims of confessions or admissions would be made.”

Along with its report on informants, delivered in June, 1990, the grand jury sent a letter “referring several matters that suggest provable criminal cases to the district attorney for consideration.”

The district attorney’s office, declaring a conflict of interest, passed the letter on to the attorney general’s office, which obtained perjury indictments of White and of a second informant, Sidney Storch.

Storch was arrested earlier this year in New York City and held without bail. He died of AIDS while in jail there, fighting extradition to California.

The grand jury’s letter to the district attorney’s office has never been made public, but has been the subject of much speculation among those following the scandal.

Dalton’s comments Tuesday indicated for the first time that no prosecutors or police officers were referred for prosecution. He expressed some frustration about that Tuesday.

“This thing--the practice--was so far beyond the informants,” he said. “We didn’t want to have the results of our investigation just charging the informants. Yet we didn’t feel we could just blindly ignore something that we did learn in that connection.”

Dalton declined to be more specific, other than to say that he had discussed White’s sentencing with the 1990 grand jury foreman, Ann Cooper, and “we both believe that Leslie White made a significant contribution to our investigation, which was instrumental in eliminating many of the abuses connected with the use of jailhouse informants in criminal cases, and we hope that full consideration was given to him for this role in connection with his sentencing.”

White’s prosecutor, Deputy Atty. Gen. Tricia Bigelow, had sought a four-year term for White, who had faced a possible seven years in prison if he had been convicted after a trial.

Bigelow declined comment when asked if any further indictments would be forthcoming. So did a spokeswoman for the attorney general’s office in Sacramento. “We can’t comment on that because we aren’t commenting on it,” she said.

White set off the scandal in late 1988 when he demonstrated for sheriff’s officials the ease with which he could fabricate a convincing confession in a murder case. He used a jail telephone and posed as a law enforcement officer to get inside information on the case of a murder suspect he had never met.

Later, White and other informants told The Times they had used this and other techniques to commit perjury numerous times.

In the current case, White was charged with committing perjury twice during a 1989 murder trial in which the defense called him as an expert witness on informants, hoping to discredit another informant who claimed a defendant had confessed to him in jail.

Under cross-examination, White lied about how many times he had committed perjury in Los Angeles. At one point he said he had done it only once, at another point, five.

He also testified that he had told the truth in 1986 when he testified that a Compton man, Kevin Dykes, had confessed a murder to him in jail.

White later filed a sworn declaration on Dykes’ behalf, saying that Dykes had never confessed to him.

Dykes is serving a prison term of 24 years to life.