City Council OKs $3.5 Million in Shooting Case

A divided Los Angeles City Council voted Tuesday to pay $3.5 million to a felon who was paralyzed by a police officer’s bullet in 1993--one of the largest legal settlements in city history.

The settlement was triggered by a surprising jury verdict in December that awarded $4.9 million to the man, who brandished a gun at police and pleaded no contest to criminal charges stemming from the incident. The City Council--which chose to go to trial rather than settle the case for $750,000--reluctantly agreed Tuesday to pay nearly five times the original proposed settlement amount because attorneys said an appeal likely would fail.

“It just infuriates me that juries could be awarding these kinds of judgments,” said acting Council President Joel Wachs, one of two members who voted against the settlement.

“My gut says you’ve got to protest these things because juries have to become more responsible and realize the consequences of their actions,” Wachs said. “It just encourages everybody, including criminals, to keep on suing the city, and it’s costing the city an incredible amount of money that the city really needs to put more police on the street. I don’t know how far we’ve gone that criminals can pull guns on cops and get money.”

The little-publicized case involves Clarence Watson, who was 26 when LAPD Officers Clifford Bernard and Noe Rodriguez tried to pull him over Jan. 14, 1993, near St. Andrews Place and 45th Street. According to city documents, Watson pointed a gun at the officers, then led Bernard in a foot pursuit while Rodriguez tried to cut the suspect off with his car.

The altercation ended after Bernard shot Watson five times, knocking him to the ground and the gun from his hand with the first two shots, and later hitting him twice in the back, with one bullet lodging in Watson’s spine.

“It is a lot of money, but I wouldn’t trade it for being paralyzed and in a wheelchair for the rest of my life,” Watson’s attorney, Daniel Rodriguez, said of the settlement.

“When you start the case and you look at it on paper everybody says you ought to believe the police officer. But that wasn’t the only evidence. The physical evidence clearly indicated that the officer was being less than truthful,” Rodriguez said. “A police officer was responsible for putting a young man in a wheelchair for the next 40 years of his life by shooting a man in the back twice while he was unarmed. It makes me sick.”

LAPD investigators ruled that the shooting was an acceptable use of force, though they said the officers violated policy by separating during the chase. Neither was disciplined. Rodriguez left the Los Angeles Police Department in 1993.

At City Hall, officials said Tuesday that they had little choice but to approve the huge settlement, noting that it is a savings from the $4.9-million jury verdict and that thousands of dollars of interest would accrue each month during any appeals process.

“We took the lesser of two evils,” said Councilman Richard Alatorre, whose Budget and Finance Committee screens proposed settlements.

“Is anybody on the council happy about settling? No. But the choices are pretty stark,” agreed Budget and Finance Committee member Mike Feuer. “It comes down not to the facts, but to how much you want to pay.”

Some worried that the jury’s action is a troubling indication of the public’s attitude toward police and that the verdict could have a chilling effect on officers in the field.

“Not only does the police officer lose faith in the system, but it seems like society is the biggest loser because of the overall effect of an award like this. It tells the crooks they get good money for shooting at police officers,” LAPD spokesman Lt. Anthony Alba said. “Officers are involved in a shooting, and it is in policy, but yet the civil case results in a huge award for the person who actually precipitated this event. It’s just confounding to a reasonable and prudent person as to how and why this happens in our society.”

The Watson award ranks among the highest ever paid by the city of Los Angeles in a police case.

A jury ordered the city to pay Rodney G. King, the motorist whose 1991 beating by LAPD was the focal point of citywide riots the next year, $3.8 million. In 1994 the City Council awarded $4.5 million to a teenage girl who was molested by a police officer while he was ostensibly searching her family’s home. The city also paid $3.5 million each to two men imprisoned for 17 years for a murder they did not commit.

The city paid a total of $8.8 million in legal settlements in 1994, down from $19.6 million in 1992.