Judge Rejects Consecutive Sentences for Ex-Deputy

A U.S. district court judge refused Tuesday to go along with federal prosecutors and heap a 40-year sentence on an earlier 4 1/2-year term given a former Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputy who pleaded guilty to skimming $170,000 seized from drug peddlers.

In what was seen as a victory for the defense, Judge William J. Rea gave Daniel M. Garner a new 10-year term, but refused the prosecutors’ entreaties that the additional time for a second conviction be served consecutively after the first sentence is completed.

Instead, he directed that it be served concurrently with the earlier sentence. This means that when parole rules are taken into account, Garner can be released as early as a month after the first sentence is finished, and no later than 41 months afterward.

In a lengthy pre-sentencing argument before Rea, defense attorneys said the stealing by Garner and other deputies in the Sheriff’s Department was mitigated by an atmosphere of corruption in the department’s drug-enforcement operations that convinced the deputies that the money would be misused anyway.

But Assistant U.S. Atty. Steven M. Bauer said the Sheriff’s Department could be accused of no more than gullibility for trusting its drug-enforcement investigators too much and being “burned” by them.

Bauer had urged in a pre-sentencing report that Garner’s two terms be served consecutively.

Rea said he took Garner’s offenses seriously and that the Sheriff’s Department had to drop--or at least undertake again--many drug cases after learning about the wrongdoing of Garner and 10 other deputies convicted in the skimming operations.

Just investigating the skimming has cost the government more than $4 million, the judge said.

Rea did not explain why he refused to accept the prosecutors’ call for the long sentence, nor did he comment on assertions from defense attorney Alan Rubin that Garner was pursued vindictively because, while expressing remorse for his crimes, he would not turn state’s evidence and implicate others.

Rubin said Garner’s wife, Yhvona, also had been unfairly singled out by prosecutors and is scheduled to be sentenced next week on a conviction of laundering some of the money Garner stole. He also said prosecutors are attempting to seize Garner’s house.

“At a certain point, it becomes apparent that the government is no longer acting rationally, but out of emotion and vindictiveness,” he told the judge.

Bauer, however, said Garner should be sentenced to the longer term because as ringleader of the skimming operation he distributed the money to other deputies and sought to ensure their silence once the prosecution began.

Bauer also branded as “ridiculous, unsupported allegations” statements by Rubin and another defense attorney, Harland W. Braun, that the Sheriff’s Department had demoralized Garner and other drug-enforcement personnel by urging them to seize drug funds rather than arrest drug peddlers.

The money, Rubin and Braun said, was turned over to the CIA, where it was used to fund drug-entrapment operations in South America that misfired and spurred new drug peddling. Bauer said there was no evidence to support that contention.