Grand Jury a Tool of D.A., Ex-Member Says : Justice: He says panel spends too much time on indictments and not enough on government misdeeds. Others dismiss the petition as baseless.

As a Los Angeles County grand juror, William D. Mitchell wanted to help blow the whistle on government wrongdoing. Instead, he ended up squealing about the grand jury itself.

A panel of 23 volunteers charged with indicting criminal suspects and investigating government corruption, the grand jury looks powerful on paper but acts like a tool of the district attorney’s office, Mitchell claimed.

Echoing a common gripe among grand jurors, Mitchell complained in a petition filed with the Court of Appeal this week that the panelists spend so much time on indictments they have little opportunity to ferret out official misdeeds.

Mitchell’s petition also accuses the district attorney’s office of opening jurors’ mail, circulating a confidential citizen complaint, withholding documents needed for investigations and interrogating jurors about their secret votes. He asks the appeals court to stop such meddling.

County officials--and some former grand jurors--dismissed the 150-page petition as baseless. But Mitchell said only court action can restore the panel’s power to expose government blunders.

“You go into this with a civic-minded perspective--here’s Joe Blow finally empowered with a chance to dig out the [wrongdoing] you know is there and report it to the public,” Mitchell said. “Then you go through one disappointment after another.”

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A district attorney’s spokeswoman and the Superior Court judge who oversaw the 1994-95 grand jury on which Mitchell served declined to comment.

But Assistant County Counsel Frederick Bennett brushed off the petition.

“I don’t think there’s any merit at all in the allegations he’s made,” Bennett said. “I expect [the petition] to be summarily dismissed.”

One of Mitchell’s colleagues on the jury, retired minister James Froede, agreed. “We didn’t have any interference in any way from anyone in the district attorney’s office or the courts,” he said. “There was no control over us.”

But Mitchell, 40, who is now looking for work as a paralegal, said he felt manipulated at every turn--starting with the grand jury’s schedule. Prosecutors take up about 80% of the grand jury’s time with indictment hearings. Three or four days a week, the jurors hear testimony about drug deals, murders or other crimes, and decide whether the evidence merits an indictment. Only after the hearings can they probe government agencies.

“You can’t investigate if you don’t have the time,” Mitchell said.

Several counties--including Santa Barbara, Riverside and San Bernardino--have solved that problem by establishing two grand juries: one to hear criminal indictments and one to work full time exposing government misdeeds. Los Angeles relies on a single panel to handle both tasks. Grand jurors are chosen by lottery from among a pool of volunteers.

Because the job requires a full year of work, at a salary of only $25 a day, most of the volunteers are retirees. And because they serve just a one-year term, many grand jurors complain that they barely have time to launch an investigation before the final report is due at the printer.

Most jurors spend two months visiting agencies and interviewing department heads before they even decide what topics to investigate. Mitchell’s panel looked into the shortage of shelters for domestic violence victims, the county’s water conservation policies and the proper use of money the city of Los Angeles long ago loaned the Airport Commission.

“Jurors did a lot of work with the time they had, but is that really getting at wrongdoing in the city?” Mitchell asked.

The grand jury’s emphasis on indictments rather than investigations began about five years ago, when California voters approved the speedy trial initiative known as Proposition 115. The measure allowed prosecutors to go to the grand jury for indictments rather than staging costly and time-consuming preliminary hearings.

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“There doesn’t have to be anything sinister going on to explain” the steady squeezing of the grand jury’s watchdog function, USC law professor Erwin Chemerinsky said. “If any of us were grand jurors, we’d rather be playing detective instead of returning routine indictments. But the district attorney’s office needs indictments. It does not need watchdogs.”

Mitchell’s petition accuses the grand jury’s legal adviser, Deputy Dist. Atty. Terry L. White, of restricting watchdog probes by withholding documents from him--including a letter to the grand jury alleging a conflict of interest in the district attorney’s office.

The complaint echoes a report that former grand jurors Richard Mankiewicz and Don Dodd released after their term ended in June, 1994. The grand jury, they wrote, has become “pretty much a flunky of the district attorney.”

Mankiewicz and Dodd emphasized this week that they never encountered the kind of juror manipulation that Mitchell describes in his petition.

But Mankiewicz said the district attorney’s staff, working through the jury foreman, dictated how the grand jury should organize itself. And both he and Dodd complained that indictment hearings kept them too busy to look into issues they deemed important, such as alleged mismanagement in the county administrator’s office.

“The district attorney’s office and the courts, for political and practical and budget reasons, feel they must keep control over the grand jury,” said Tom Yacenda, another juror in 1993-94. “It’s much safer for them to have the grand jury do nothing than to step on too many toes or break down too many doors.”

By stalling inquiries, the panel’s legal adviser can sidetrack potentially explosive investigations, Yacenda said. Without access to independent advice, jurors cannot tell whether they are being stymied for valid legal reasons or on a prosecutor’s whim, he added.

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Another member of the 1993-94 grand jury, who asked not to be named, said the district attorney’s representative once withheld documents he needed to investigate water agencies.

“He interfered with our doing a good job with our report,” he said. But the juror described the dispute as mainly a personal feud, not an orchestrated blockade.

Mitchell had his own dispute with the presiding judge and legal adviser who worked with the grand jury.

During much of his term, Mitchell was awaiting trial on charges of possessing a concealed gun. That case was dismissed. But while charges were pending, the presiding judge barred Mitchell from indictment proceedings.

Focusing instead on the jury’s watchdog role, Mitchell said he hit roadblock after roadblock as he attempted to launch investigations, some without the consent of other jurors.

By statute, the grand jury can investigate only city or county agencies. So the panel’s adviser rejected Mitchell’s requests to look into the financial policies of the county employees retirement association and to examine alleged wrongdoing by a contractor handling parking enforcement.

The various restrictions, Mitchell complained, precluded the jury from real dirt-digging.

County officials counter that many of Mitchell’s requests were out of line. He demanded the power to subpoena documents and examine police personnel files. But even the grand jury cannot compel agencies to turn over confidential records, they said.

Many grand jurors chafe under such limitations, defense lawyer Brian Lysaght said. But few go as far as Mitchell.

“The grand jury was supposed to be a real independent way of looking at things, but now it’s nothing more than a tool of the prosecution,” Lysaght said. “It’s surprising and unusual that one of the grand jurors has gotten irritated enough to do something about it.”