Reiner Assails Kolts Report : Law: The district attorney calls the document seriously flawed. It criticizes the prosecutor for pursuing only one of 382 incidents involving shootings by deputies.

Dist. Atty. Ira Reiner, firing back at a report that criticized his office for failing to prosecute improper shootings by sheriff’s deputies, charged Tuesday that the report was inaccurate and otherwise seriously flawed.

The report, a review of the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department by Special Counsel James G. Kolts and his staff, concluded that it was “incomprehensible” that Reiner had prosecuted only one of the 382 shootings by sheriff’s deputies that had been investigated by his office over a 10-year period. Reiner has been district attorney for eight of the 10 years.

Reiner said the Kolts staff member who wrote the report failed to check his facts with the district attorney’s office, omitted a significant piece of evidence in describing one controversial shooting and was inadequately reviewed by Kolts, a retired judge.

Kolts declined to give a detailed response to Reiner’s charges, simply saying, “The report says what it says.”

But the general counsel of the Kolts staff, Merrick J. Bobb, issued a “categorical denial”of Reiner’s accusations.

“Judge Kolts read every single word of this report and would not sign off on it unless every single word was acceptable to him,” Bobb said. “Our facts were checked and double-checked and we stand with what’s said in the report.”

The Kolts report was ordered by the Board of Supervisors in December after a series of controversial shootings by deputies. The report, released Monday, found what it called a “deeply disturbing” pattern of excessive force and inadequate disciplinary procedures in the Sheriff’s Department.

The main target of the Kolts report was the Sheriff’s Department, but Reiner also came in for criticism. He was accused of a reluctance to prosecute renegade deputies.

Sheriff Sherman Block on Tuesday continued to evade reporters and decline comment on the report, but Reiner, in a Times interview, and in an appearance on KABC radio’s Michael Jackson show, strongly defended his conduct. “The single most important responsibility of every public prosecutor is the decision not to prosecute when there is inadequate evidence,” Reiner said.

Many of the shootings referred to his office involve accidents, deputies who misperceive danger and murky circumstances. These shootings might expose the county to civil liability and result in large civil damages awarded to those who are injured or their survivors, but do not reach the legal standard required to win a criminal conviction, Reiner said. (Civil judgments can be made on a preponderance of evidence, but criminal convictions require a jury to reach a conclusion beyond a reasonable doubt.)

Reiner--who faces a tough reelection challenge in November from his former chief deputy, Gil Garcetti--focused much of his criticism on the single case discussed in detail in the report.

It involved the Jan. 1, 1991, fatal shooting of a Mexican national, Pedro Castaneda Gonzalez, by an Anglo deputy, Brian E. Kazmierski. The Mexican government officially complained about the incident.

Kazmierski was outside his patrol area failing to carry out his duty orders when he shot Gonzalez in an alley, according to the Kolts report. The report said “there was slim, if any, evidence that the deputy was in danger or could have believed himself to be. The D.A. should have filed a case.”

Many facts in the matter remain in dispute, but Reiner insisted Tuesday that the key fact in the matter was that Castaneda was holding a loaded pistol in a darkened alley and had pointed it at Kazmierski.

“I would really dearly love to know why this (Kolts) staff member left that rather pertinent piece of information out of the report,” Reiner told The Times. “He may have left it out because he realized his case against us wouldn’t be so ironclad. It’s hard to believe it’s a careless omission.”

Besides, Reiner said, the staff member never called for comment from the district attorney’s staff members who reviewed the case.

Yet, he said, this had become the core of the assertions in the Kolts report that the district attorney’s office was failing to do its duty in pursuing wrongful shootings.

On Monday, when the report was released, Bobb said Reiner’s failure to prosecute more than one of the 382 deputy shooting cases meant that “the D.A.’s record is even worse” than that of the Sheriff’s Department, and he said more than one such decision not to prosecute was incomprehensible.

Reiner declined Tuesday to respond directly to Bobb’s remarks, saying he would address only less categorical criticisms made in the report.

Reiner referred to one passage in the report that acknowledged that few of a particular 29 shooting cases “appear to have been caused by the deputies’ malice or personal anger,” that some were accidental, and some resulted when deputies “created dangerous situations, where by negligence, overreaction or simply bad decision making.”

These are the very kinds of situations in which he refuses to bring criminal charges against the deputies, Reiner said. They might expose the county to civil damages and costly settlements, but they do not merit prosecutions, he said.

Meanwhile, Block concluded a two-day trip to Sacramento. A Block spokesman said the sheriff would be back in his office today, but would not say when Block would reply to the Kolts report. There were reports, however, that senior Block aides were preparing a response.

DISCIPLINE CITED

The Kolts report finds that ‘little or no discipline’ is imposed on ‘problem deputies.’ B8