Council to Release Details of Vote to Indemnify Police : Court: Disclosure is part of lawsuit seeking to hold panelists individually liable for deciding to pay punitive damages assessed against officers in man’s death.

Responding to a stern ruling from a federal judge, the Los Angeles City Council agreed Tuesday to release information about closed-door sessions in which council members decided to indemnify officers in a number of police brutality cases.

The rare agreement to disclose discussions that are normally kept confidential came as the latest development in an unusual and potentially far-reaching lawsuit that could result in a ruling holding individual council members financially liable for voting to pay punitive damages assessed against police officers.

But city lawyers said Tuesday the council is willing to make full disclosure because it has always acted properly, again voicing hope that the suit will be dismissed before it goes to trial.

“We don’t have anything to hide,” City Atty. James K. Hahn said Tuesday after emerging from a closed-door session on the matter with the council.

Although the trial was originally scheduled to begin this week before U.S. District Judge J. Spencer Letts, the case has been continued until Feb. 6 to allow more time to comply with the plaintiff’s discovery motions.

Lawyer Stephen Yagman, who is suing 10 current and former council members on behalf of the 4-year-old daughter of a police shooting victim, contends in the trial that the council’s tradition of indemnifying police officers ordered to pay civil brutality judgments fostered a policy of more police misconduct.

Plaintiff Johanna Trevino’s father, Javier, was one of three robbers slain by police as they fled a MacDonald’s restaurant in Sunland in 1990. A fourth man was critically wounded in the shootout, which police said ended a series of armed robberies.

Yagman won a jury verdict of $44,000 in punitive damages against the nine officers involved in the shooting, as well as then-Police Chief Daryl F. Gates. Jurors specified that they wanted the officers to pay the damages themselves, not have them covered by the city.

When the council voted to indemnify the officers anyway during an April 15, 1992 closed session, Yagman sued again, this time saying that their action made the council members themselves liable to pay the Trevino girl punitive damages for the death of her father.

Yagman hailed Tuesday’s disclosure agreement as unprecedented and said it could reveal what happened in as many as 44 police brutality suits that cost city taxpayers tens of millions of dollars.

But Yagman also said he is highly skeptical of how much information he will actually receive, suggesting that council members might claim memory lapses and city clerks could say crucial tapes and documents have been lost.

“I don’t think I’m going to get anything,” Yagman said after a closed-door hearing in Letts’ chambers.

Letts on Monday strongly urged the council to be more forthcoming about the 1992 vote that prompted Yagman’s suit, and he chastised the city attorney’s office for advising the council members to invoke executive and attorney-client privileges to avoid answering Yagman’s questions.

After the council agreed Tuesday to comply, another hearing was convened before Letts, apparently to iron out how many brutality suit discussions the council would reveal.

Yagman said the city wanted to limit the disclosures to the 1992 verdict underlying the Trevino case, but that he wanted to prove a pattern of rubber-stamping such indemnification decisions by looking at similar cases dating back to 1978.

A private attorney for the council, Skip Miller, declined to discuss what was said in Letts’ chambers. Miller agreed the council will release information on closed-door sessions about police punitive damages, but he said the number of relevant cases is closer to 11 than the 44 cited by Yagman.

The material on confidential discussions that the council turns over to the court will be sealed by the judge, not made part of the public record.