D.A. Has High Rate of Success, Audit Says : Courts: Independent study challenges public perception of failure, but notes budget woes.

Despite public perceptions to the contrary, the Los Angeles County district attorney’s office has a high success rate in prosecuting crime but is hampered by inadequate financing, according to an independent audit released Tuesday.

The audit, conducted by a Santa Monica firm at the request of the 1993-94 grand jury, also found little basis for criticism that county prosecutors cannot win high-profile cases.

Describing that view as “far short of accurate,” the audit noted that while prosecutors failed to get convictions in the state trial of police officers accused of beating Rodney G. King, the murder case against the Menendez brothers and on some charges in the Reginald O. Denny case, they sent defendants to prison in the Night Stalker and Cotton Club killings and in the Charles Keating securities fraud case.

“Because expectations are absolute, it appears anything short of total success . . . gives rise to a perception of inadequacy,” the report said.

It blamed high expectations on a pervasive public fear of crime, adding that such fear is not entirely justified.

“Despite the fact that the overall crime rate is down across the country, and that no city in Los Angeles County was ranked among the nation’s 15 most dangerous cities in a recent survey,” the audit said, “that is not the perception of the average person who is constantly exposed to a media litany of violent crime reports.”

The audit, conducted by Leonard Fuller & Co., was part of a full report of the grand jury whose term ended last month. The report included the results of surveys of former trial jurors and sitting judges conducted separately from the audit by a committee of grand jurors.

In the surveys, individual prosecutors’ performances were rated from excellent to such low levels that, according to the committee, some of them should not have been allowed to try cases.

Dist. Atty. Gil Garcetti, commenting on the report, said he was not troubled by the surveys because they were “unscientific” compared to a professional review by trained auditors of management systems. He said he felt vindicated by the audit’s findings.

“The report should give the community some confidence in the professionalism . . . of the lawyers who represent the people every day in court,” he said.

The audit found that, despite a limited staff, high caseloads, low staff morale, weaknesses in some management systems and an inadequate budget, the district attorney’s office in 1992 (the most recent year studied) had a 93.6% conviction rate for the 52,905 felony cases it tried and a 99.4% rate for 173,835 misdemeanor cases.

Many of the shortcomings that auditors did find, the audit said, are traceable to “increasing demand for services with decreasing resources.

“The single most pervasive and debilitating problem affecting (the office) and the effectiveness and efficiency of its operations is its financial condition,” the audit said.

Since the 1991-92 fiscal year, it noted, the budget for the office has decreased 2.4%, from $122.6 million to $119.6 million, resulting in the loss of 51 positions for criminal attorneys. Current staffing, the audit said, has left the office with 7.8 prosecutors per 100,000 residents, compared to New York County, which includes Manhattan, which has 33.7 prosecutors per 100,000 residents.