Trial May Scrutinize CHP Rules of Pursuit : Law enforcement: Attorney for man charged with murder says policy on high-speed chases--or the lack of one--is partly responsible for a teen-ager’s death on the highway.

Officially, the only defendant in a drunk-driving murder trial scheduled to start next month is Antonio D. Morales, a Ventura man accused of ramming a pickup truck into the back of a van and killing a 16-year-old girl.

But in court papers, Morales’ attorney has served notice that he hopes to put something else on trial: the high-speed-chase policies of the California Highway Patrol.

Those policies, Deputy Public Defender Richard E. Holly argues, helped cause the collision that killed Victoria Lee Gonzales of Bakersfield on Nov. 20.

The CHP officers who chased Morales at speeds of up to 100 m.p.h. before the crash “are partially responsible for what occurred,” Holly said in an interview. “Not them personally, but this policy or lack of policy.”

Gonzales was one of 10 people killed in high-speed police chases in Southern California during a two-week period last fall, prompting widespread concern about the dangers of police pursuits.

In the Gonzales case, a CHP investigation found that Officers Timothy Wilson and Brian Kennedy “were well within our policy all the way around,” CHP spokeswoman Staci Morse said.

But some police agencies have announced that they are re-examining their chase policies in light of recent appellate court decisions.

In a Gardena case, the state’s 2nd District Court of Appeal in Los Angeles ruled in December that agencies can be held liable if their policies fail to state clearly when chases should be initiated and when they should be discontinued.

Last month, the 4th District Court of Appeal in San Bernardino made a similar finding in a case involving the chase policies of police in the city of Perris.

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So far, Holly has been unable to determine just what the CHP’s policies are. In response to a court order, the agency provided an edited version of its 21-page manual on vehicle operations, arguing that deletions were necessary to protect officer safety.

But so many key elements were excised, Holly said in court papers, that the document he received “resembles a mold of Swiss cheese.”

For example, the policy lists four circumstances in which a pursuit should be aborted. One directive says chases should be halted “when the pursued vehicle’s location is no longer definitely known.” But the other three were whited out of the copy provided to Holly.

On Thursday, Ventura County Superior Court Judge James M. McNally is expected to rule on Holly’s request for an unedited copy of the CHP policies and for information on any proposed changes in light of the appeal court rulings.

Holly said he must know what the policies are so he can adequately cross-examine the two CHP officers regarding whether they followed the rules. The officers will be key witnesses at Morales’ murder trial and they may be biased, Holly said.

“In most cases, police officers are disinterested witnesses,” Holly said. “Here, they’re involved in activity which is the object of a lot of scrutiny right now.”

In testimony Dec. 10 before the Ventura County grand jury, Wilson gave this account of the eight-mile chase:

About 11:30 p.m. Nov. 20, he and Kennedy saw a white General Motors pickup truck enter the southbound Ventura Freeway at Chestnut Street in downtown Ventura.

With Wilson driving, the officers clocked the vehicle at 65 m.p.h. when it entered the freeway and followed it as it accelerated to 85 m.p.h. by the time it reached Seaward Avenue, about a mile away. Over the next 1 1/2 miles, the truck weaved onto the median several times and came close to hitting a car in the middle lane.

At the turnoff for the Santa Paula Freeway, the truck shot across several lanes and just missed hitting a big-rig truck and almost sideswiped a bridge railing, Wilson testified.

Until this point--2 1/2 miles into the chase--the officers had not turned on their flashing lights, Wilson said. There was too much traffic on the Ventura Freeway and he felt that an attempted stop would be too dangerous, he said.

But traffic was light on the Santa Paula, Wilson said, so he turned on the patrol car’s flashers and siren and accelerated until the unit was 100 feet behind the white pickup, traveling at 90 m.p.h.

The driver kept going and, during the next few miles, had several curious close calls with vehicles traveling in the slow lane, according to Wilson’s testimony. He said the truck would switch from the inside lane to the slow lane, race up behind slower-moving cars and then swerve back into the passing lane at the last minute.

Around Wells Road, Wilson decided to turn off his lights and siren “to see if that would have an effect on the truck in order to possibly slow it down,” he testified.

Three-quarters of a mile later, as the truck hit 100 m.p.h., Wilson turned his lights on again. About that time, the truck swerved into the slow lane and struck a Plymouth Voyager van at about 100 m.p.h., Wilson testified. Both the pickup and the van came to rest in a ditch on the right side of the freeway.

Gonzales, who had been sleeping in the back of the van, was thrown from the vehicle and run over. She died shortly afterward.

Wilson’s handling of the chase apparently disturbed several of the 19 grand jurors who heard his testimony. After Deputy Dist. Atty. Donald C. Glynn finished questioning the officer, the jurors posed 45 sometimes-critical queries of their own.

“Does the CHP have a policy . . . that patrol officers must follow the suspect until they voluntarily pull over, run out of gas or crash?” one juror asked.

The agency’s policies were followed, Wilson replied.

“Why didn’t you put on your emergency signals in the beginning?” another juror wondered.

He was afraid that the driver might do something to cause an accident, Wilson said.

“What training have you had on high-speed chase situations? When to put on emergency signals, etc.,” a juror asked.

“Basically, my training was received at the academy,” said Wilson, a five-year CHP veteran. About every three months, he added, officers are required to watch a videotaped refresher course on pursuit policies.

Holly said the grand jurors “had the same concerns a lot of citizens do about what kind of controls there are on these high-speed pursuits.”

Glynn said Holly will “try to create an emotional defense” by raising the same concerns among the trial jurors. Legally, he said, Morales is responsible for the death even if the trial jury finds that the officers played a contributing role.

“The bottom line is it is the defendant’s act of driving at a high rate of speed that resulted in the death of the young girl,” Glynn told the grand jury. “That the officers’ act further encouraged the defendant . . . to increase his speed. . . . That is not a defense.”

Holly said the officers’ credibility is a crucial issue, not just in their account of the chase but in their identification of Morales as the driver of the truck. Morales has steadfastly denied being the driver, Holly said, implying that the other occupant of the truck--Andres M. Seals of Oxnard--must have been behind the wheel.

Seals told the grand jury that Morales was driving. Kennedy testified that he found Morales in the middle of the front seat, almost on top of Seals, who was next to the passenger window as the truck leaned to the right. Both officers testified that they had seen two Latino men in the truck during the chase and that the driver had a hooded sweat shirt--the same type of shirt that Morales was wearing.

But the strength of the identification was undercut by Wilson’s actions immediately after the crash. If he had seen two men in the truck so clearly, one grand juror asked, why did he initially arrest Victoria Gonzales’ aunt and the aunt’s boyfriend as they staggered out of the wrecked van?

“There was a lot of confusion . . . a lot of dust,” Wilson told the grand jury, explaining why he ordered the man and woman to lie on the ground at gunpoint.

The grand jury indicted Morales on a murder charge in the incident. Morales was found to have had a blood-alcohol level of 0.22%--nearly three times the legal limit. Glynn said that will be presented at the trial to show the defendant’s state of mind and the element of malice needed for a murder conviction.

Morales, 21, remains in the Ventura County Jail with bail set at $250,000.