Another One Slips Through the Cracks : A court in Van Nuys might have kept serial murder suspect off the streets

The story of how serial murder suspect Glen Rogers was able to escape serving extensive jail time in Los Angeles County--a development that left him free to allegedly kill a number of women--is another harsh and poignant reminder of the flaws in the criminal justice system. But Rogers’ record of recent run- ins with the law, as traced in The Times by reporters Nicholas Riccardi and Leslie Berger, is more than an indictment of how the system functions. It’s also a powerful reminder to a public that demands tougher laws and tougher sentences for criminals: You get what you pay for, and a refusal to foot a bigger bill for more jail space, courtrooms, prosecutors, jurists, deputies, public defenders and all the other apparatus of the criminal justice system can have fatal consequences.

Rogers was in a courtroom in Van Nuys last September after he was arrested on a spousal battery complaint by a woman with whom he lived. Because he had a prior conviction, having pleaded no contest just a few months earlier to assault with a deadly weapon, and because he was on probation, Rogers could have been returned to jail for as long as 2 1/2 years. Instead he was sentenced by Municipal Court Commissioner Rebecca Omens to two days in jail, a $100 fine and participation in a domestic violence program, the standard sentence in misdemeanor spousal assault cases.

This apparent leniency may have resulted from one of those nightmarish oversights that plague a criminal justice system teetering under the weight of too much work and too few resources. Omens may simply not have known about Rogers’ record, on the basis of which she could have sent him back to jail. Faced with hearing literally hundreds of cases a day and so spending no more than a few minutes on each, bench commissioners typically rely on others in the system to bring anything unusual in cases to their attention. Richard Schmidt, supervisor of the city attorney’s office in Van Nuys, says the prosecutor in Rogers’ case--also, no doubt, overworked--might have missed the earlier conviction. And so Rogers escaped long jail time. Four weeks later he allegedly strangled a woman he picked up in a Van Nuys bar. He is then believed to have fled the area, allegedly committing other killings before being captured in Kentucky last Monday.

These sorts of failure are tragic and infuriating. They happen too often and seem to have become virtually predictable as crime has increased and court cases have multiplied. The remarkable thing is that Rogers doesn’t seem to have done anything to manipulate the system. He just passively took what it gave, and so was able to stay free when the law and good sense said he should have been locked away.