Ruling Unlikely to Hinder State Prosecution Efforts : Hate crimes: Victims denounce decision, but experts see little effect due to narrowly drawn California statute.

Victims of hate crimes across Southern California denounced the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling striking down a Minnesota law banning cross-burning Monday, but prosecutors said that the decision is not likely to thwart their efforts to convict perpetrators.

Because California’s cross-burning statute is more narrowly drawn than the St. Paul, Minn., ordinance invalidated by the high court, most legal experts predicted that it might survive under the new standards.

Even if the state’s law were overturned, prosecutors said, it would be no great loss. District attorneys who specialize in hate crimes say they normally use civil rights statutes--rather than the cross-burning law--to win convictions in such cases.

“I’m not worried,” said Frank Sundstedt, chief of the Organized Crime and Anti-Terrorist Division of the Los Angeles County district attorney’s office. “Once we catch these people, believe me, we’ll have an effective law to use against them.”

David Moon, who supervises hate crime prosecutions for the San Francisco district attorney’s office, agreed: “The laws we use most are not in jeopardy. I don’t view this as a serious setback at all.”

Despite such optimism, victims of racially and religiously motivated threats and violence lashed out angrily at the high court, warning that Monday’s decision would send an inflammatory message--that cross-burning and other acts of intimidation would now go unpunished in the United States.

“I’m not pleased with the ruling at all,” said Rabbi Alan Greenbaum, whose Temple Adat Elohim was one of two Thousand Oaks temples that had been spray-painted with anti-Semitic graffiti in recent years. “Nazis marching down streets, crosses burning in fields--these are not expressions without consequences. . . . They create terror in the hearts of people.”

In Huntington Beach, the mother of two Japanese-Americans who were attacked and injured by whites earlier this month worried that the ruling would lead to an “open season” by skinheads against minorities.

“It seems that we’re not going to be protected,” said the woman, who fears retaliation and asked that her name not be used. “Asians can get militant just like the white supremacists. They can get nasty. But I don’t want that to happen.”

Experts who have studied hate crimes expressed concern about the timing of the ruling--coming amid heightened racial tensions in Los Angeles and on the heels of civil unrest in cities nationwide.

“It’s unfortunate, I’m disappointed and I think it sends the wrong message at the wrong time,” said Eugene Mornell, executive director of the Los Angeles County Human Relations Commission. “I’m sure there are a number of white supremacists who will view this ruling as a license to burn crosses.”

“I think it’s opening up a Pandora’s box,” added Fred Duitsman, a Los Angeles police detective who investigates hate crimes in the West San Fernando Valley. “It is allowing people to preach hatred.”

Tzivia Schwartz, western regional counsel for the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith, warned that people not aware of the nuances of the decision could “oversimplify it and think the government has said discriminatory behavior is now OK.”

“We need to make sure that is not the message that goes out,” said Schwartz.

Prosecutor Moon expressed a similar view: “Some people, unfortunately, may assume the court is minimizing the importance of the effect of a burning cross on a black family’s lawn.”

Hate crimes--ranging from the spray-painting of racial slurs in the dead of night to vicious assaults on homosexuals--have been on the rise across the United States for several years, experts say. National and statewide statistics are not available, but in Los Angeles County, there were 670 hate crimes in 1991--an increase of 22% over the previous year.

About half of those crimes were racially motivated, while a quarter stemmed from religious bigotry, according to the Los Angeles County Human Relations Commission. Only a fraction of such crimes are solved; in 1991, the district attorney took just 21 hate crime cases to court.

In response to the rising violence, 46 states have enacted laws in recent years that make it a crime to burn crosses, display a swastika or flaunt other symbols intended to intimidate blacks, Jews or other groups.

Under the California law, it is a crime if “any person . . . burns or desecrates a cross or other religious symbol . . . or places a sign, mark, symbol, emblem, or other physical impression, including but not limited to a Nazi swastika, on the private property of another . . . for the purpose of terrorizing” the owner or occupant.

A first offense is punishable by up to one year in county jail or a fine of $5,000, while subsequent violations carry an additional one-year jail term and a $15,000 fine. The law also makes it a felony, punishable by up to three years in state prison, to engage in a pattern of such terrorism.

Prosecutors said that the California law is more narrowly drawn than the St. Paul ordinance and applies only to acts committed on private property for purposes of terrorizing victims.

State Sen. Bill Lockyer (D-Hayward), chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, said that in toughening penalties last year for hate crimes, lawmakers were aware of laws in other states that contained First Amendment flaws.

“It is possible to have very tough laws on hate crimes and avoid First Amendment problems,” said Lockyer. “I think we have done that in California.”

Times staff writers Leslie Berkman, Michael Connelly, Carl Ingram, Richard Simon and Ron Soble contributed to this story. Also contributing were special correspondents Robert Barker and Frank Messina.