D.A. to Release Nearly Everything From Files on Deputy’s Shooting

Orange County prosecutors, seeking to erase lingering suspicions in the community over the Christmas Day shooting death of Sheriff’s Deputy Darryn Leroy Robins, said Wednesday that they will make public virtually everything in their investigative files on the controversial case.

Among the investigative materials to be made available to the media on Friday or Monday is a 90-minute videotaped interview with Deputy Brian P. Scanlan, conducted hours after authorities say he shot Robins to death during an impromptu training exercise.

The district attorney’s office effectively closed its case on the shooting last week after the Orange County Grand Jury decided not to indict Scanlan.

Prosecutors said they had recommended during secret grand jury deliberations earlier this month that Scanlan be charged with involuntary manslaughter because of alleged gross negligence in the shooting. But the panel--in a rare rejection of the district attorney’s recommendation--decided against it.

Assistant Dist. Atty. John Conley said the decision to release the case files is aimed at answering community members who have questioned whether race played a part in the incident or in the handling of the investigation that followed it. Robins, 30, was black, and Scanlan, 32, is white.

“We’ve had complaints in the press from various people that have had no basis in fact, and we want to clear that up,” Conley said. “I suspect that there are some people out there who will never be satisfied, but this should satisfy reasonable observers.”

Community members on both sides of the volatile issue welcomed the decision.

“This is a very good step, an excellent step,” said Randall Jordan, publisher of a black-oriented local magazine called Black Orange, who is part of a minority coalition created in the wake of the shooting to push for more information on the case.

“That would allow the information to get out, just as we’ve been asking all along, and it would allow the average citizen to come up with an educated decision as to what happened,” he said.

“We have never said this was not an accident, but the information we had so far did not give us a good feeling about what happened. We’ve tried to be open-minded,” he said. If the information released by prosecutors “sounds fair and makes sense,” Jordan said he could “guarantee” that black leaders would accept the official explanation for the tragedy.

But at least for now, black leaders plan to press ahead with their call for a federal investigation into possible civil rights violations in the shooting. Outraged by the grand jury’s decision, black leaders plan to send a first batch of letters as early as today to the U.S. Justice Department, attacking the handling of the case by authorities.

“I don’t think that process is going to stop,” Jordan said.

Robert MacLeod, general manager of the Orange County Deputy Sheriffs Assn., said members of the local law enforcement community “will be anxious to see what information the investigation revealed. . . . They loved Darryn Robins, and they certainly want to know that the investigation was full and complete, as I’m sure it was.”

But MacLeod said that while he is certain that the new information will satisfy “a reasonable person,” he has his doubts about critics in the minority community. “The people who are using this terrible incident for their own political purposes will not be satisfied. They want to further their own agenda, and the facts be damned,” he said.

Conley said prosecutors plan to release everything in their investigative files on the case, except for personnel records deemed confidential under state law. They also will provide copies to the media of videotapes made from patrol cars that show a training session just before the shooting, the route to the hospital after the shooting, and a distraught Scanlan at the hospital imploring Robins to “pull through,” Conley said.

Authorities will allow reporters to view the videotaped interview with Scanlan, Conley said. But unlike the other pieces of evidence, he said, they will not release actual copies of that critical tape--in part because of concern for Scanlan’s privacy.

“He is unindicted . . . and we didn’t think it was fair to him to have (the tape) playing on television on channels 2, 4, 6, 8 and whatever,” Conley said.

He said prosecutors also worried that allowing a tape of Scanlan’s voluntary statement to be shown on television could “definitely” discourage officers in future incidents from cooperating in investigations and agreeing to be interviewed by authorities.