Judge Throws Out Evidence in Police-Pornography Case : Courts: Flawed search warrant weakens charges against ex-officer Walter Bentley Jr., accused of taking child-sex magazines from evidence lockers for personal use.

Saying he was troubled by a flawed search warrant, a Superior Court judge on Friday decided he had no choice but to throw out key evidence against a retired Los Angeles police officer accused of taking child pornography from police evidence lockers for personal use.

The ruling by Judge Robert J. Perry undercuts the charges against Walter Ray Bentley Jr., whose lawyer successfully argued that police failed to explain in the affidavit requesting the warrant why they needed to search his home in Granada Hills--where investigators found dozens of illegal magazines, many of them stamped as Los Angeles Police Department evidence.

As a result, prosecutors are being forced to re-examine the case, saying they may have to drop the charges.

“The ruling today clearly places this case in jeopardy and we have a number of options to study over the next month,” Deputy Dist. Atty. Alan Yochelson said after a hearing in Los Angeles.

The choices facing prosecutors include dismissing the charges or refiling them and appealing Perry’s ruling, Yochelson said. He called the mistake by police an “accidental oversight” during the preparation of a complicated search warrant involving four locations and several cars.

But Bentley’s attorney, Darryl Mounger, expressed confidence that the felony charges against Bentley--one count of receiving stolen property and one count of possessing child pornography--would be dropped.

“This case for all intents and purposes is over,” Mounger said.

Bentley, 47, is also charged with 11 counts of illegally accessing police computer files in a separate case that gave rise to the discovery of the child pornography in his bedroom closet.

Rather than face departmental charges stemming from the investigation, which began as an internal police matter, Bentley resigned last March after 23 years of service.

About 120 magazines and several 8-millimeter films were found during the search on June 9, 1993. The original purpose of the search was to look for evidence that Bentley had been leaking confidential criminal records to two private investigators in the San Fernando Valley, including a retired deputy LAPD chief.

Although some material for the computer case was taken from Bentley’s home--including two personnel rosters containing officers’ names and serial numbers--the bulk of the evidence was seized elsewhere and remains available for use by the prosecution.

Yochelson on Friday declined to speculate on the future of the computer case against Bentley, saying he would have to discuss that matter, as well as the pornography charges, with his superiors.

The other men involved in the computer case have already been convicted and sentenced in separate plea agreements.

Former Deputy Police Chief Daniel R. Sullivan--who once headed the department’s Valley Bureau--pleaded no contest in September to five misdemeanor counts of unlawfully possessing confidential criminal histories. He he was fined $5,000 and placed on a year’s summary probation.

Earlier this week, Thomas Whiteaker, who runs a Mission Hills investigation firm, pleaded no contest to five identical charges and received the same sentence.

Police say they have videotaped evidence of an on-duty Bentley phoning his home for messages and then signing on to a nearby LAPD computer using various officers’ serial numbers and passwords, allegedly to fill requests for confidential criminal background information.

Mounger tried Friday to suppress the surveillance videotapes, saying police violated Bentley’s right to privacy at his workplace by setting up hidden cameras without first obtaining a search warrant.

Perry rejected the argument, agreeing with Yochelson that Bentley worked in an open office setting without an expectation of privacy, and that the surveillance began as an internal police probe that did not require the same legal safeguards as a criminal investigation.

But Perry said he was “very concerned” by the lack of any reference to Bentley’s home in a lengthy affidavit in which police explained why they needed to search several locations in connection with the case.

In addition to Bentley’s house on Ludlow Street in Granada Hills, officers combed through a Police Academy office where Bentley was assigned and the private offices of Sullivan and Whiteaker.

The search warrant itself listed the Bentley home’s address, according to Yochelson, but in the crucial supporting affidavit, police forgot to specify the location again and to spell out exactly why they needed to conduct a search there.

“I have no doubts that this was his home and that there was probable cause that illegal activity was going on,” Perry said. “The problem I have with this case is that I am not at all satisfied with the affidavit. . . . There is nothing in the affidavit to indicate why they wanted to search his home.”

Before the hearing, Mounger said Bentley had saved the magazines and films, which depicted underage girls in various sex acts, as “memorabilia” of his assignments at the Juvenile Division. He had plans to use them in training courses he sometimes led, Mounger added.

But Detective Bill Dworin, who heads the LAPD’s sexually exploited child unit, said Bentley’s job in the Juvenile Division had been more administrative than investigative, and that the few classes he taught had focused on physical, rather than sexual, abuse of children.

Bentley had easy access to the lockers where the unit kept evidence, however, Dworin said.

“He’s never handled a case in our unit,” Dworin said. “All that stuff was taken for his own personal use.”