Judge Removes D.A. From Bryant Case

Ruling that the Los Angeles County district attorney’s office had botched the “Bryant Family” murder case, a Superior Court judge removed local prosecutors Friday and turned over the prosecution to the state attorney general’s office.

After a hearing nearly six hours long, Judge J. D. Smith granted a motion by defense lawyers asking that county prosecutors be removed on grounds of conflicts of interest, tampering with witnesses and withholding evidence.

The judge concluded that the district attorney’s office had engaged in “intentional and deliberate” withholding of evidence, an especially serious wrong because the prosecution is asking for the death penalty for four defendants.

The district attorney’s office “has failed,” Smith said. “I can’t even begin to articulate all that is wrong with this case.”

The case involves nine alleged members of the notorious San Fernando Valley crime syndicate known as the Bryant Family, who are awaiting trial on charges of conspiracy. Four are also charged with murdering two rival drug dealers and two other people in Lake View Terrace in 1988.

Smith brushed aside requests from representatives of both the attorney general’s office and the district attorney’s office, who asked the judge not to order a change in prosecutors.

Both state and local prosecutors argued that all the problems in the case occurred under former Dist. Atty. Ira Reiner, and that recently elected Dist. Atty. Gil Garcetti had acted quickly to remove any cloud of impropriety in the case, especially by dismissing the prosecutors who had been handling the matter earlier.

Defense attorneys maintained, however, that the local prosecutors deliberately withheld evidence and pressured a key witness in the case to change her testimony, and that there remained too many conflicts of interest among county prosecutors to give the defendants a fair trial.

Smith agreed, at least in part, telling a packed downtown Los Angeles courtroom that even with the changes in the district attorney’s office, “the damage is done.”

After the ruling, Deputy Atty. Gen. Tricia Bigelow said once again that the state does not want the case and would take Smith’s decision to the California Court of Appeal, effectively staying the ruling.

Bigelow said it would be unfair to penalize the district attorney’s office under Garcetti. She said the new prosecution team he appointed is fully qualified to handle the case fairly. To force the state to prosecute the case, the attorney general’s office has said, will only prolong the already expensive and complicated proceedings.

In a statement, Garcetti referred calls for a detailed response to Reiner, who could not be reached for comment.

“When the acts and omissions occurred, which were the basis for the recusal, Ira Reiner was the district attorney,” Garcetti said. “When my Administration came in, we reviewed the case, discovered a document that had not been provided to the defense, and we provided it.”

The document to which Garcetti referred was a handwritten, four-page statement by Deputy Dist. Atty. Eduards Abele, who wrote two years ago that he was concerned that the lead prosecutor, Deputy Dist. Atty. Jan Maurizi, and Los Angeles Police Detective James Vojtecky had badgered a witness so she would change her story and bolster their case. Vojtecky and Maurizi have denied the accusation.

Top deputies to Garcetti have said they knew of the document before Dec. 17, when Smith rejected an earlier defense motion to take the case away from county prosecutors for unrelated reasons. But Garcetti’s staff decided not to release it to defense lawyers, saying later that it was irrelevant to what Smith was considering: whether to remove the district attorney’s office from the trial because of Maurizi’s claims that the Bryant Family had infiltrated her office.

Defense lawyers contended that county prosecutors should have released the Abele document before Smith rejected the defense request, so the judge could have taken it into account.