Appeal Seeks to Limit Curfew Prosecutions : Riots: Lawyers ask court to excuse suspects who posed no threat to public safety. Ruling will help shape how civic crises are handled.

George Cotinola insists he was waiting for a ride to work when he was arrested. Roger Bowden was stopped while driving his van on Broadway. The police report on Marcus Bell says he was one of 16 men standing on a sidewalk on West Century Boulevard “in a public place in the hour of darkness.”

There were several thousand people arrested for curfew violations during last month’s riots. Many quickly pleaded guilty as courts made offers they could not refuse: four days in jail, time they often had already served.

But others--including Cotinola, Bowden and Bell--are contesting the charges, in part by challenging the emergency orders that imposed dusk-to-dawn curfews for five tense days in Los Angeles.

Using four cases as a springboard, the Los Angeles County Public Defenders Office has hurriedly petitioned the state Court of Appeal for a ruling on a fundamental legal issue raised by the mass curfew arrests:

Was it enough for people merely to have been caught outside after dark? Or did they have to be doing something more--to be actively impeding police or firefighters, for instance--for their presence on the street to constitute a crime?

Prosecutors and defense attorneys agree that the ruling will help shape how civic crises are handled in the future.

“When you think of all the people that were out there that were potentially subject to arrest, it makes me mad,” Deputy Public Defender Alex A. Ricciardulli said. “How about the homeless? How about people that were displaced by having their houses burned down?”

But prosecutors say the mayor must have the tools to protect police, firefighters and the public in an emergency. “Keeping people off the streets is one way of doing it,” said Assistant City Atty. Jim Kapel.

At issue is a provision in the City Administrative Code empowering the may or to declare a local emergency. The code makes it a misdemeanor to violate any emergency order “if such an act . . . imperil(s) the lives or property of other inhabitants of this city” or hinders their “defense or protection.”

Using those powers, Mayor Tom Bradley imposed a curfew on Thursday, April 30. There is no breakdown of the number of arrests for violations before the curfew was lifted May 4, but they account for a majority of the 3,200-plus riot-related misdemeanor charges filed by city and county prosecutors.

Cotinola, 31, was arrested near downtown Los Angeles at 8:30 p.m. on May 1 after he was seen walking in an alley off 11th Street, according to a police report.

The next evening, he was brought before one of the mass arraignments in Los Angeles Municipal Court, where most curfew suspects were pleading guilty and receiving 10-day sentences. Those translated into serving four days under programs used to control jail crowding.

But a guilty plea was not so simple for Cotinola. He was on parole for a drug offense; any new conviction might get his parole revoked, meaning a return to prison. So he pleaded not guilty, telling Commissioner Ralph Amado he was waiting for a ride to his job as a “swamper,” someone who unloads trucks.

“Were they working?” the judge asked. “. . . Seems to me everything was closed.”

“No, they’re working. The truck stops are working,” Cotinola said, insisting he had no intention of joining the looting around the city.

“I am just paroled,” he said. “I’m not going to do something like that.”

But bail was set at $8,000--far beyond his means--after Deputy City Atty. Laura Bloomquist told the court “we can only consider him . . . a danger to the community right now.”

Public defenders asked the Superior Court to order the release of Cotinola and three others. When judges turned them down, they turned this week to the Court of Appeal.

Like Cotinola, the defendants in the other test cases do not have backgrounds that easily evoke sympathy. As one prosecutor put it: “They don’t look like they were rushing to church”

* Bowden, 30, a Los Angeles resident, has a rap sheet dotted with arrests for car theft and burglary, along with convictions for four misdemeanors and a felony, according to court records. When his van was stopped by police just past midnight on May 4, he carried no identification and faced arrest for an outstanding jaywalking warrant.

* Bell, 28, of Gardena, was on probation for a felony conviction when he was arrested in the police roundup on Century Boulevard the evening of May 3.

* Robert Lee Brown, 31, of Long Beach, was arrested on East 101st Street the evening of May 3. He has a long record of drug-related offenses and is on parole, according to attorneys in the case.

But it is because of their criminal records that such men have the most to lose--revocation of parole or probation--from any new conviction, even for a misdemeanor curfew violation. To defense attorneys, the key common element is that none was accused of anything more than being on the streets after curfew.

Deputy Public Defender John Hamilton Scott, who helped prepare the appeals, said his office is not contesting the legitimacy of many curfew arrests, such as “where people were in or around buildings that were burning.”

“The pillagers, looters, robbers and thugs who sought to wrest control of the city from the vast law-abiding majority should be punished to the fullest extent of the law,” Scott wrote in the appeal brief filed in Cotinola’s case. But Cotinola, he added, “does not fall into this class.”

The brief’s central argument is that “mere presence on the street” should not be enough to qualify as a crime when measured against the city code.

To prosecutors, going out in public was enough to “imperil public safety.”

“In an atmosphere where firefighters require police protection . . . and where otherwise law-abiding citizens get so caught up in the fervor and mob mentality of the riots that they take their children with them to loot stores, even the seemingly innocent presence of an individual walking the city streets distracts emergency personnel from fulfilling their duties,” Deputy City Atty. Lisa A. Berger wrote in a reply brief.

Both sides say the rulings by appeals courts will have implications well beyond the four cases.

City prosecutors are anxious to get guidance from the courts on use of such emergency powers in civic crises. If the language of the code means a curfew cannot be enforced with blanket arrests, it would have to be rewritten, Assistant City Atty. Kapel said.

As public defenders see it, a victory in the appeals courts could help “hundreds of people brought in for violations of the curfew,” Ricciardulli said. “If we’re right, we might be able to move to have the convictions withdrawn for the hundreds we never got to.”