Suit Says Police Violate Suspects’ Miranda Rights : Law: Los Angeles and Santa Monica officers are accused of interrogating people--with management approval--after their requests for a lawyer.

Lawyers for civil rights organizations said Wednesday that police officers in Los Angeles and Santa Monica have intentionally deprived criminal suspects of their constitutional rights by continuing to question them even after they request the chance to consult with a lawyer.

Those allegations are contained in a lawsuit filed in federal court Wednesday. They are part of what lawyers from the groups--the American Civil Liberties Union, the California Attorneys for Criminal Justice and the Criminal Courts Bar Assn.--said was a broad pattern of improper and illegal interview techniques sanctioned and even encouraged by supervisors in the Los Angeles and Santa Monica police departments.

“It is official policy [in those departments] to treat Miranda with a wink and a grin,” ACLU legal director Mark Rosenbaum said in a prepared statement announcing the filing of the lawsuit.

In 1966, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Miranda vs. Arizona that police must inform suspects that they have the right to remain silent and to consult with an attorney. If a suspect invokes the right to speak with a lawyer, the interrogation is supposed to stop.

“The Miranda law states that absolutely no questioning will take place after a lawyer has been asked for--period,” Rosenbaum said. “It’s not ambiguous about that.”

But detectives in both departments, Rosenbaum said, commonly “go outside Miranda” by pressing suspects for information even after they have requested to speak to an attorney--falsely promising them that anything they say will not go on the record. Rosenbaum and other lawyers said that practice has violated suspects’ rights, but that the police departments have encouraged detectives to do it anyway.

Bolstering their case, Rosenbaum and other attorneys produced an excerpt from a training manual used by Santa Monica police and the LAPD in which detectives are encouraged to question suspects even after they have invoked their so-called Miranda rights by asking to meet with a lawyer.

Interrogations are supposed to stop at that point, but the manual produced by the lawyers at a news conference recommends that officers keep grilling a suspect, if only to clear other unsolved cases for which the suspect might not be charged.

That approach, according to criminal defense lawyer William Genego, is unconstitutional and can end up being used against the suspect in violation of his rights. Among other things, it can discourage the suspect from testifying in his own defense for fear of contradicting his earlier statements.

Officials with the LAPD and Santa Monica police had no comment on the lawsuit, filed Wednesday morning and assigned to U.S. District Judge Irving Hill.

The plaintiffs are seeking damages for two men who were interrogated and who say their rights were violated. They are also asking Hill to issue a court order forcing the departments to change their interview techniques.

Rosenbaum and the other lawyers played an excerpt from a taped interview of James McNally, questioned by Santa Monica police in 1993 and later convicted of manslaughter.

“They really mess up the system,” one detective told McNally after he asked for a lawyer. “I want to know what you’re going to tell me in court.”

“These are the cases we know about,” said Rickard Santwier, president of the Criminal Courts Bar Assn. “What about all the others?”