D.A. Videotapes Supporters of Denny Suspects : Courts: Lawyers and friends of the defendants are angered by the surreptitious taping of people attending the hearings.

The Los Angeles County district attorney’s office has been covertly making videotapes of people who attend court hearings for the suspects accused of beating truck driver Reginald O. Denny, and those tapes are being turned over to investigators, officials disclosed Friday.

The tapes are being reviewed by the federal-local task force on riot crimes to determine if any people who attend the court sessions are pictured participating in the assaults at Florence and Normandie avenues, according to the district attorney’s office. One person who heard a description of the tapes said they show scores of people filing out of the courtroom and talking in the halls.

With intense public attention focused on the beatings at Florence and Normandie, investigators have moved quickly to arrest people suspected of causing the violence there. Five suspects have been charged in those attacks and others are at large.

“We have a lot of outstanding suspects,” said Sandi Gibbons, a spokeswoman for the district attorney’s office. “They’ve done this (videotaped people outside of courtrooms) from time to time. It’s unusual, but it’s not unprecedented.”

Nevertheless, lawyers, supporters of the suspects and constitutional law experts were sharply critical of the practice. Videotaping people who attend public proceedings could discourage them from coming to the courthouse, and could put them under a cloud of suspicion merely for exercising their right to be inside a public building, experts said.

“I am very troubled,” said Erwin Chemerinsky, professor of law at USC. “Anytime we get into this type of videotaping, we start to raise the specter of ‘1984’ and government surveillance. This idea of government surveillance in a courthouse, not for security but for investigative purposes, is very disturbing.”

Lawyer Arlene Binder--whose client, Gary A. Williams, is charged with attempting to rob Denny after he had been beaten--agreed.

“I can’t believe they do this,” she said. “Shades of Big Brother.”

The case against the Denny suspects has attracted great attention in the community where the beatings occurred, and dozens of supporters often show up for the court appearances. Family members, friends and girlfriends have attended the sessions, often wearing yellow ribbons to signify their support for the suspects.

They never have been warned that law enforcement officials were making a record of the people who attend the sessions.

“That is weird,” said Greg Colston, who helped raise Antoine Eugene Miller, one of five young men charged with participating in the beating and robbing of Denny. “How can they make tapes of me just because I come to court? That damn sure bugs me.”

Compton City Councilwoman Patricia Moore, who has attended most of the court sessions, accused authorities of making the videotapes in order to build files on African-Americans who legally protest the treatment given to the suspects in the Denny case.

“For what purpose are they doing it (making the tapes)?” Moore asked. “I believe there is a file being kept on us, and that they’re trying to show that we are trying to disrupt justice.”

Task force officials were not available for comment on the videotapes, but a person close to the investigation confirmed that the district attorney’s office had supplied investigators with tapes of people outside the courtroom where the Denny suspects were arraigned.

“They noticed a couple of gangbangers out in the hall, and they wanted to get some video of them,” the person said. “It has been done a couple of times.”

Gibbons said she is not aware of any arrests that had been made as a result of the courthouse videotapes.

Colston, among others, was not surprised to hear that the tapes have not yielded results.

“Nobody in their right mind who was in the rioting would come down there,” he said. “They might as well turn themselves in. The only people they’re taping are honest folks, who are coming to court to see their friends or their relatives.”