Bryant Murder Case Is Returned to D.A.’s Office : Appeal: Ruling renews a debate and leaves mixed feelings among state prosecutors.

Six years ago, when gunmen shot up a Lake View Terrace house and killed four people, police blamed the crime on the “Bryant Family,” which detectives described as a huge crime syndicate with a lock on the multimillion-dollar cocaine trade in the northeastern San Fernando Valley.

The arrests of the suspected killers set off a tortured legal process, which has continued to this day with no trial date even in sight.

In the latest action, a state appeals court has taken the prosecution’s role away from the state attorney general’s office and returned it to the Los Angeles County district attorney’s office. That renews the debate over whether the district attorney’s office acted improperly, tampering with witnesses and withholding evidence.

It also left mixed feelings in the state prosecutors’ office. The state did not want the job to begin with, but by now two of its lawyers have worked nonstop for almost a year on the complicated case, gathering evidence and plotting legal strategy in the hopes of convicting alleged drug kingpin Stanley Bryant and his associates.

Bryant and three others could face the death penalty for the charges. Another four defendants face lesser charges. All have pleaded not guilty.

The state prosecutors’ work will be mostly superfluous if their office has nothing to do with the trial. But that was the decision by the three judges of the 2nd Appellate District panel, who ruled that the trial judge overstepped his authority in ordering the entire district attorney’s office “recused”--withdrawn from the trial. The Superior Court trial judge, J.D. Smith, acted after defense lawyers accused the district attorney’s office of improprieties, including witness tampering and withholding evidence from the defense.

The defense lawyers for Bryant and other defendants had no comment Wednesday on the appellate ruling. However, some of them still don’t want county prosecutors on the case and have indicated they will appeal to the state Supreme Court, state prosecutors said.

The unanimous appellate ruling was made March 4, but neither side made public the development until this week.

In the past, state prosecutors fought against taking on the case, saying the district attorney’s office was much more familiar with the intricacies of the complex prosecution. Supervising Deputy Atty. Gen. Tricia Ann Bigelow argued in court that even if the allegations of prosecutorial misconduct were true--which county prosecutors denied--they were not sweeping enough to taint the entire district attorney’s office and all of its 900 or so prosecutors.

State Justice Department authorities said Wednesday that the appeal court’s ruling was exactly what they wanted and had requested. Nevertheless, they said, they had mixed feelings about having to give up the complex case.

“We do have two terribly disappointed lawyers who worked hard on this case, believed in it and didn’t want to see it go back,” said Chief Assistant Atty. Gen. George Williamson, who runs the state Justice Department’s criminal division in Sacramento.

“But they knew walking in that they might be bridesmaids, without guarantees. We are satisfied that the L.A. D.A.’s office can handle it. It is a monster of a case.”

Indeed, the Bryant Family case has generated tens of thousands of pages of legal documents, and rancorous arguments among defense lawyers, prosecutors and police--especially over allegations of prosecutorial misconduct.

The alleged Bryant Family crime ring was suspected of selling half a million dollars in cocaine a month in the northeast Valley in the 1980s and of masterminding the attack in which four people--including a mother and her young child--were allegedly shot to death as a way of intimidating rival dealers.

On Wednesday, Bigelow said that she still believed county prosecutors were in a better position to handle the case.

“I don’t think there is any question but that we are pleased with the decision,” Bigelow said. “It is a just result.”

The district attorney’s office had little to say. “Obviously, we will do what the court tells us to, and we are prepared to try it, if it reaches that stage,” said Sandi Gibbons, a spokeswoman for Dist. Atty. Gil Garcetti.

“We have an attorney assigned to the case and we are prepared to go to court.”

Williamson said state prosecutors started meeting Wednesday with their counterparts in the district attorney’s office to begin handing over evidence and legal strategy gathered during the past year.

In their 31-page ruling, the appellate judges in effect agreed with the state attorney general’s office, which in its appeal of Judge Smith’s ruling said he had abused his discretion by recusing the entire district attorney’s office.

Defense lawyers, the appellate panel wrote, “have not articulated how the conduct of the (district attorney’s) office will deprive them of the likelihood of a fair trial.”

Specifically, defense lawyers alleged that prosecutors tried to sway a witness into recalling events in a certain way that would bolster the prosecution’s case, and then tried to cover up the concerns of a deputy district attorney that his colleagues were violating rules against witness tampering.

In addition, they contended, the district attorney’s office withheld some information relating to the alleged witness tampering from them, indicating bad faith on the part of prosecutors and making it impossible for their clients to get a fair trial.

Prosecutors in the district attorney’s office also alleged more than a year ago that their own office and the Los Angeles Police Department had been infiltrated by members of the Bryant crime family. Such an infiltration, alleged by some county prosecutors in court documents, would have presented the district attorney’s office with a conflict of interest, because some of their colleagues could conceivably be co-conspirators with the Bryant Family defendants.

Defense lawyers countered that the allegations were floated as a way of making the defendants look worse in the eyes of potential jurors. Smith ruled in December, 1992, that he saw no evidence of such an infiltration.