Deputies Used Excessive Force, Jury Concludes

In a stinging rebuke of the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, a civil court jury declared Monday that a swarm of deputies brutalized 36 party-goers during a 1989 bridal shower at the Cerritos home of a Samoan American family.

Jurors, who viewed a videotape of the incident made by a neighbor, held Los Angeles County and two dozen individual deputies liable for using excessive force, making false arrests and injuring party participants while responding in riot gear to complaints from neighbors.

As members of the Arthur Dole family held hands and stifled tears in a crowded Downtown courtroom, Superior Court Judge Robert R. Devich announced that the next phase of the trial--focusing on monetary damages--will begin Wednesday morning.

At the start of the massive trial in early February, lawyers for the Doles had bandied about a figure of $20 million in damages from the county, which is already facing a dire budget crisis.

Garo Mardirossian, lead attorney for the plaintiffs, said Monday that it will be up to the racially mixed 12-member jury to decide the severity of the punishment. He emphasized, however, that one plaintiff alone, David Dole, suffered severe head injuries and a broken hand from being beaten with a police baton. “His left frontal lobe has atrophied,” said Mardirossian. “What’s that worth? Is that worth millions of dollars? I think it is.”

As Dole left the courtroom with several relatives, he said: “Thank God. This shows my family and friends and everyone at the gathering were just having a good time. And it says this could have happened to any family, anywhere.”

Paul Paquette, a lawyer for the Sheriff’s Department, expressed shock at the verdict but refused detailed comment until the conclusion of the trial. “We were extremely surprised about the jury,” he said.

Sheriff Sherman Block had no immediate comment, saying he had not yet read the verdicts and adding that jurors must still determine damages and whether the department’s action represented an unlawful pattern of conduct.

The trial stemmed from a melee at a February, 1989, shower at the home of Arthur Dole for his daughter, Melinda Dole Paopao.

Sheriff’s deputies, saying they received a call about people fighting in the street with sticks and knives, responded in force. Family members and friends at the party greeted them by throwing rocks and bottles, they claimed. Nearly three dozen arrests were made.

Family members countered that the deputies, garbed in riot gear, overreacted and severely beat several participants.

Criminal charges were eventually dropped against several party-goers who had been arrested. After a trial three years ago, a criminal court jury that had viewed the videotape acquitted all other members of the Dole family and their friends.

More than 80 witnesses, including 24 deputies individually named in the lawsuit, have already been called during the ongoing civil trial. Jurors again viewed the videotape, which Mardirossian has characterized as proving the deputies were “overzealous” in attempting to break up the shower.

*

In the upcoming damages phase, jurors will be asked to determine if the Dole family was subject to malicious prosecution.

“Our faith in the justice system has come true,” said Mardirossian on Monday afternoon. “But the case isn’t over yet. There’s a lot left to go on. We have to let this process work its way through.”

He predicted that the damages phase of the lengthy trial could take 10 additional court days.

With jurors asked to issue nine separate verdicts on the claims of 36 individual plaintiffs, it took Devich and his clerk more than 90 minutes to read the verdicts Monday afternoon.

For all but two plaintiffs, the jury found that deputies had acted with excessive force. The jury found that various deputies had injured or caused damage to, conspired to violate the civil rights of and arrested or detained without probable cause all 36 plaintiffs.