LOS ANGELES TIMES INTERVIEW : Gilbert Garcetti : In the Hot Seat as L.A. District Attorney

When you are a big-city district attorney, winning the high-profile cases is very important. Losing them often means losing the next election.

In Los Angeles, the district attorney’s office has had difficulty with highly publicized trials, failing to get expected convictions in such celebrated cases as “Twilight Zone,” McMartin Pre-School, Rodney G. King, Reginald O. Denny and Lyle and Erik Menendez.

No one is more aware of this than the man who currently sits in the D.A.’s office. At 52, Gilbert L. Garcetti is a career prosecutor with a quarter century of experience. In his first year as Los Angeles County’s chief crime fighter, he’s seen his troops fail to get tough convictions in the Denny case and face a hung jury in the Menendez trial. But Garcetti doesn’t think some sort of “big-case curse” haunts his office.

Garcetti, son of Mexican immigrants, was born in South-Central Los Angeles. After getting his undergraduate degree at USC on a scholarship, he earned his law degree at UCLA in 1967. He joined the D.A.’s office after taking a year to work on Democrat Eugene McCarthy’s presidential campaign. By the late 1970s, he was directing the D.A.’s Special Investigations Unit. Then he got sick.

Garcetti was diagnosed with lymphoma. His hair fell out during treatment--and was gray when it grew back. But he beat the cancer, and in 1984, when Ira Reiner was elected D.A., he made Garcetti his chief deputy. Reiner eventually demoted his deputy in a feud that resulted in Garcetti unseating his boss in 1992.

There must be days when Garcetti wonders if it was worth it. County budget cuts have made it impossible to hire enough lawyers and support staff to handle an ever-increasing caseload. His lead prosecutor in the Menendez murder trial, Pamela Bozanich, had to learn to use a word-processing program to type her own briefs, because she was told there was no money to hire a secretary. And the new “three strikes you’re out” bill signed into law last week, mandating life sentences on the third felony conviction, means public defenders may demand trials for their clients rather than accepting plea bargains. Garcetti, who opposed the bill, says it will make his job even tougher.

Yet, Garcetti seems game for the challenge. The father of a daughter in law school and a son who is a Rhodes scholar, he says he’s determined to make Los Angeles a place his kids are proud to call home. In a late-night interview after a flight back from Washington, Garcetti appeared tired, but not weary.

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Question: What about this problem of not winning the high-profile cases? Why is it so hard to get a guilty verdict when the spotlight is on?

Answer: I don’t think it is. If you look at our effort over a 10-year period, the ones that didn’t come out the way we thought they should is a very small amount. People name five big cases we lost. But we’ve had tremendous successes in big cases. The Charles Keating case, The Night Stalker case. I don’t buy that we can’t make the big case. I have been D.A. now for 14 months. I’m very proud of the effort all our lawyers have made on the so-called “high-profile” cases.

Q: What did you learn from the deadlock in the Menendez trial?

A: First is the importance of being able to directly question prospective jurors. When you have a juror who is, at best, misleading when answering a key question on a questionnaire, and we can’t examine that juror, it puts us behind the eight ball in a way the defense can never be put. The defense only needs one juror. We need all 12.

The second lesson has to do with emotion. We made a conscious decision about how the trial lawyers would handle the case. And obviously, the emotion generated by the defense convinced, or at least swayed, some jurors to the defense version of the evidence and the law. We have to appreciate and understand that there are many people who are swayed by emotion, and not necessarily by the cold facts and the law.

Q: Everybody in this state has budget problems these days--how have cuts affected your department, and the way you prosecute cases?

A: The Board of Supervisors cut us $12.6 million and that’s on top of an $11-million cut the year before. We’re short on lawyers to prosecute crimes and we’re short on investigators who can get the information we need to make the cases. Probably, right now, there are lawyers going out, late at night, looking for witnesses themselves, because we don’t have the investigators to do it. I am down by 108 lawyers when you look at who handles street crime. We used to have between 240 to 260 investigators--now we’re down to 185 or 190. So, even though I want to handle worker’s compensation fraud, and environmental crime, and home-equity fraud scams and a whole variety of other crimes, if I am forced to prioritize, then I have to put the resources into violent crime.

Cases are being dismissed because the prosecutor walks into court and is told by the witness coordinator, “We don’t have the witness.” Cases are not being prepared the way they should, so a case that should take three or four days takes a week and a half. We’re not getting, perhaps, the convictions we should. We’re simply not being as successful. Ultimately, we are not able to maximize our effort in seeking justice and protection of the community.

Q: “Three strikes, you’re out”--you opposed the law. What’s the problem?

A: Let me emphasize that I am in favor of the concept of three strikes, you’re out--when it’s properly focused toward violent, recidivist offenders. I was not in favor of the bill which passed because it isn’t properly targeted.

Think of a bulls-eye target. The bull’s eye is violent crime. The next ring out is what is defined as serious crime--things like burglary. The subsequent rings are felonies of diminishing seriousness. This bill says for the third strike, it doesn’t make any difference what part of the target you hit. That’s just crazy. But we will do it. This is now the law, and we will enforce the law.

The other problem I have is that it’s misleading. The governor and the Legislature, by passing this law, are saying, “The fear of random, violent crime that you feel every day is now taken care of, because we’re going to put these bad guys away.” Wrong. Unless part of the overall package involves early intervention and crime prevention, putting these people in prison will not reduce our fear. Because violent crime will continue, unabated.

Q: Public defenders up and down the state are saying they’re not plea-bargaining anyone now that the law is in effect. Is that just defense-lawyer posturing?

A: Part of it is. But it goes to another reason I opposed this bill--the cost. Forget about all the new state prisons we’ll have to build, and just look at the costs of trying cases. Public defenders will decline to accept plea-bargains on the second strike, or even the first. So we are now going to have many more jury trials. On one hand, I’m happy about that, because we might get better sentences as a result of going to trial. On the other hand, we don’t have the lawyers and investigators to handle our current case load, and now we’re going to have to substantially increase that load.

Q: Let’s move to gun control. In this town, weapons are available day or night, and used with great frequency. If you could mandate a solution, what would it be?

A: We know that the police are stopping citizens and finding weapons. These people should be arrested. But because of what’s happening in our society, the police turn away and tell the individual to make sure they know how to use the gun. I’m personally in favor of banning assault weapons--I see no reason why any citizen should own one. I don’t believe there is any acceptable way of going beyond that now, except perhaps licensing weapons--much like a driver’s test. Before you take possession of the gun, you should have to prove you know how to use it.

Q: There are many who believe there is a direct correlation between guns and drugs--that drugs are at the root of the epidemic of violence. Is it time to rethink the prohibition against drugs? Do we need to look at it as more of a social problem and less of a law-enforcement problem?

A: Yes, and no. To the extent that all we do is prosecute people involved in drugs, put them in prison and wait for them to come out, yes--that has to change. I support the idea of drug courts. It’s much more productive for society if we take a person who is drug-dependent and get them off drugs. That may mean a structured program rather than prison.

But I do not, and cannot, agree that we should legalize drugs. The first question I always ask is, which drugs should be legal? Cocaine? What about rock cocaine? Have you ever seen what rock cocaine does to people? It’s extremely addictive. It tears apart individuals and families. Heroin? Are we going to legalize that. Most people say, “Oh no, not that one!”

Q: Besides drugs, what else accounts for the remarkable viciousness that we see?

A: Alcohol is still probably a bigger problem than any of the hard drugs. But there are other issues. We still seem to be willing to put the guards in the prisons to watch over the violent criminals, but we don’t seem to be willing yet to zero in on that young woman who dropped out of school and is about to have a child who is at risk before his or her conception. Even once the child is conceived we don’t help that young mother and her child. When that youngster is born, we already know he or she has a better than average chance of dropping out of school. And when you also know that 82% of all the people in prison throughout this country are dropouts, it should give you an idea of the importance of keeping people in school. We don’t make the concerted effort early on. We wait for them to commit several criminal acts before we pay any attention to them.

We have so many youngsters who have no hope-- none. That’s why your life and mine are worthless to them. It’s because their life is also worthless to them. They don’t believe they are going to be around much longer. This is an accepted attitude all throughout the Latino and the African-American gangs right now. We have to give them some hope.

We have to also--and this is perhaps my most difficult personal challenge--establish the credibility of the criminal-justice system. Not just in the Latino and African-American communities, but throughout the city. There’s a loss of faith in the system. So we have to be fair, we have to be thorough. If we can’t do that, it’s not going to get better.

Q: You’ve been critical of the juvenile-justice system--what reforms do we need in dealing with underage offenders?

A: We need more ability to protect the community from serious juvenile offenders. Right now, if a juvenile is 15 years old and kills 10 people, that person gets out of jail at age 25. I can’t tell you that your family, or anyone’s family will be protected when he gets out. So on the one hand I want to extend the period of time we can incarcerate such an individual--as a juvenile or an adult.

I also want people in the neighborhood to know who the violent and criminal juveniles might be. Right now, everything is confidential in juvenile court. If someone is charged with rape, with murder, with assault with a deadly weapon, citizens have a right to know that. That’s so we can protect ourselves, but it also puts pressure on the family to do their job as parents.

When you look at this whole picture of violence the only way to address it is in a very comprehensive way. It begins with juvenile justice.

But there are also what I call cycles of violence. We are filing one domestic homicide case every nine days! Remember, nearly every person on death row grew up in a family with domestic violence or child abuse. That’s why we have targeted domestic violence as an absolute priority.

And that includes child support. We have today over 565,000 active child-support cases my office is currently handling--that’s over a million kids in Los Angeles. That’s crime prevention, because when those kids don’t get court-ordered family support, those are the kids who drop out of school, the ones we begin to see in court. We have to reach them before they get there.