Efforts to Protect Witnesses Fall Short in L.A. County

Two Los Angeles County women were shot to death in separate incidents in 1994 after police received warnings that they were in danger of retaliation related to murder prosecutions.

One of them was an eyewitness to a gang-related murder, the other was the mother of a key witness.

In the wake of their deaths, a sickened police official began a campaign to require police to do more to protect endangered witnesses and their family members.

But two years later, efforts to strengthen the county’s witness protection program have gone nowhere, even though officials at every level of the criminal justice system have recognized an acute need for reforms.

The witness protection problem is particularly severe in Los Angeles County, where authorities say witness intimidation and killings have helped fuel a cycle of violence in which more and more people are too frightened to testify, allowing more killers to go free.

Efforts to expand the existing program have stalled for two primary reasons. Officials fear that public agencies will lose costly lawsuits if they assume too much responsibility for the safety of witnesses who are later wounded or killed. And they fear that the cost of relocating and sustaining all witnesses who want help will be too high.

To shore up the current system, police have resorted to makeshift methods, ranging from giving witnesses money out of their own pockets to stashing them in abandoned government housing.

Sergio Robleto, the retired commander of LAPD’s South Bureau homicide division, said he has been campaigning for reforms because the situation is “scandalous.”

The sad truth, Robleto said, is that police routinely urge witnesses to risk their lives by cooperating, but are instructed to refrain from promising them protection. “For God’s sake,” he said police are told, “don’t ever use the words ‘I will protect you,’ or ‘I will try to protect you,’ because you have incurred liability.”

Liability is a real concern. Records show that shootings and other attacks have led to hundreds of thousands of dollars in taxpayer payouts to Los Angeles County witnesses and their survivors in recent years.

Police officials say that several witness killings occur each year in the county--enough to frighten many would-be witnesses out of cooperating.

Unlike the federal witness protection program offering relocations, new identities, long-term financial support and help in obtaining jobs, the small county-run program will pay only the first and last month’s rent on a new apartment for a witness who needs to move in order to survive.

Each year, the program helps relocate about 400 endangered witnesses, victims and family members in about 150 Los Angeles County cases--mostly involving murders.

With grants averaging less than $1,500 per case, the program gets by on less than $200,000 a year in state and court funding.

Its restrictions prevent some endangered witnesses from using it. For example, accomplices who want to turn state’s evidence are not eligible for assistance. Nor are witnesses who are cooperating in cases where charges have not yet been filed.

The program even restricts how witnesses and their belongings can be moved to a safer location. “Our program won’t allow for a moving company,” said its administrator, Alan Tomich, assistant chief of the district attorney’s Bureau of Investigation. “It will allow for U-Haul.”

Last year, a study by a district attorney’s committee concluded that the program is so encumbered by “unrealistic restrictions imposed by the state” and so under-funded that it “hampers providing protection for witnesses who are under threat.”

Working at the request of the county Board of Supervisors, the committee suggested legislation that would expand the scope of the program. It would, for example, allow authorities to sell houses for witnesses who face a loss of equity if they flee, and to help witnesses find new jobs.

The recommendations also would relax requirements that any threat to a witness must be documented before protection can be provided. “In gang-affected areas, threats are often not communicated directly and, hence, not documentable,” Tomich’s committee noted.

A spokeswoman for Supervisor Yvonne Brathwaite Burke, whose motion requested the study, was unable to answer questions last week about what actions, if any, were taken by the board. Tomich said: “I never heard a thing.”

Some homicide investigators work around the program’s money shortages and its ban on providing funds to a witness until a case is actually filed in court. During investigations, they sometimes tap their own agency’s funds. They sometimes urge endangered witnesses to stay with out-of-town relatives.

One Compton investigator, Marvin Branscomb, testified that he gave more than $2,000 of his own money to the star witness in the case of two murdered police colleagues so that the witness could eat, get a place to stay and get a haircut. “The department didn’t issue funds . . . for him to survive,” Branscomb said. He later asked the witness to repay him out of reward funds, he said.

Robleto, the former South Bureau homicide commander, said that a few years ago he managed to get the government to donate a moving van that detectives still use several times a year to help witnesses move.

Robleto also forged a relationship with a special agent for the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, which allowed South Bureau detectives to stash endangered witnesses and their families in vacant federal housing units.

But the special agent was transferred, and her replacement demanded that the city of Los Angeles sign a formal agreement assuming liability for any damage to HUD property or other problems arising out of the arrangement.

In a 1995 letter, Chief Willie L. Williams said city officials were refusing to sign the agreement and that, as a result, “ongoing, long-term witness relocation efforts have been placed in jeopardy.” The letter sought intervention by U.S. Atty. Gen. Janet Reno.

A spokesman for Williams said the chief did not recall if he got a response. A HUD spokeswoman declined to comment. Justice Department officials did not respond to an inquiry last week.

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Cities in Los Angeles County have paid out hundreds of thousands of dollars after the families of slain or wounded witnesses brought suit, alleging that authorities have been negligent in protecting them.

Just how far authorities must go to protect witnesses and families is an unsettled legal question. At a minimum, police have a duty to warn witnesses if they learn of actual threats against them.

Prosecutors have been given immunity from suits related to attacks on witnesses. But some judges have called for legislation making prosecutors, as well as police, liable for recklessly endangering a witness.

One judge issued such a call after a 1992 tragedy in Pomona. Police had allegedly assured a 16-year-old gang member that he would not be identified if he told them who had committed a murder. Then a prosecutor read the youth’s statement in court. The youth was killed a week later in retaliation.

Judge Benjamin Aranda, writing a concurring opinion for the state Court of Appeal in October, said the prosecutor had “deliberately and intentionally violated the detectives’ guarantee.”

“The death of this boy shocks the conscience,” Aranda wrote. “In order to obtain a conviction, the life of a witness was deliberately put in jeopardy, if not outright sacrificed by the prosecution.”

A recent study by The Times of five years of homicides in the county concluded that only one in three killings leads to a conviction. In interviews, judges, prosecutors and police said that poor protection of witnesses is an important reason.

“There is no dispute about the inadequacy of the [current witness protection] program,” said Deputy Dist. Atty. Jennifer Lentz, a gang prosecutor who has seen witnesses in her own cases slain in apparent retaliation. “The problem is finding funding for it.”

Lentz is currently prosecuting a man for the death of Albert Sutton, who was killed in 1992 before he could testify against gang members he said killed his brother.

In another case Lentz was prosecuting, Gloria Lyons was shot to death before she could testify that she had seen a gang member kill someone over $5 worth of rock cocaine.

And in 1994, Georgia Jones was shot to death less than two weeks after she testified in that same case.

Homicide detectives had put Jones up in a hotel. But against their advice and without their knowledge, she returned to the neighborhood where she had frequently wandered the streets as a cocaine addict and where the slaying had taken place.

On the morning of her death, Jones twice called police to report that a neighborhood man was bothering her and had punched her in the jaw.

Jones told the patrol officers who responded that she was a protected witness, according to Lentz. Neither Jones nor the patrol officers notified the homicide detectives, who had been worried about her.

About three hours later, Jones was shot to death.

While questioning an eyewitness to Jones’ murder, police detectives did a balancing act--making sure they warned him of the dangers without scaring him off. They struggled to assure him that they would help protect him, without providing a guarantee.

“People, when they testify, they get shot and stuff,” Det. Thomas Mathew told the witness, according to a transcript in court files. “But it’s not all the time. We have hundreds of murders that we go through, that nothing happens. There’s that one time that something does happen. I can’t guarantee [things] like that won’t happen. OK?”

With help from the eyewitness, authorities were able to charge a local gang member. His trial began last week.

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A month after Jones was murdered, Viola Woods--the mother of a key witness in another gang murder case--was shot to death elsewhere in South Los Angeles.

Twelve days before she was killed, her son said he received a written death threat that mentioned his mother. The son notified a police agency of the threat but officials say police did not find and warn his mother.

Woods’ son, Calvin Cooksey, had led police to the gun that was used to kill two Compton police officers in February 1993.

The police put Cooksey up at a Ramada Inn, and repeatedly advanced him money while the case was going on. Records show he remained there until he had an altercation with a security guard and was asked to leave.

In a pending lawsuit, Cooksey contends that the police assured him that he would be protected and so would other family members, including his mother. The police deny any such assurance was made; they have described Cooksey as someone who continually demanded money and became difficult to work with.

In July 1994, while Cooksey was staying in Azusa, he called police there in the middle of the night and said he had found a threatening note that mentioned his mother.

Cooksey contends in the lawsuit that the authorities acted outrageously by not protecting him and his mother, even after the note. In pretrial testimony, a detective referred to suspicions that the note had been created by Cooksey.

Whether Woods’ death was retaliation is in dispute. She was the victim of a drive-by shooting in Watts just after police broke up a party. Some of those on the street were gang members. Although the case remains unsolved, police theorize that Woods was killed by a stray bullet meant for a gang member.

Cooksey contends otherwise. He says police reports indicate that the gang members pointed her out to the driver, and then she was shot.

“My mother died because [police] didn’t do their job right,” he said in an interview. “I’ve got a dead mother, and they’re calling me a liar.”

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After the deaths of Woods and Jones in the summer of 1994, Robleto launched his campaign to require police to protect witnesses and make it a crime for police to refuse to help witnesses in need.

His proposals resulted in a change in the LAPD manual, requiring officers to bring “information affecting the safety of a witness” to the attention of the detective investigating the case.

Robleto has joined forces with Brian Andelin, a former attorney for Cooksey, who is pushing for an expanded, state-run witness protection program, featuring a formal contract between the witness and the state. The proposal would impose a duty on the state to “provide reasonable safety for the witness and his family.” It would also give public employees immunity from civil lawsuits that challenge their selection of witnesses to protect.

“We’ve got to change the rules,” Robleto said.

As the rules stand, courts expect police to alert witnesses when they learn of a threat.

But courts have been reluctant to require police to actually protect a witness--unless the police have in some way guaranteed such protection. And it is unclear whether police have any duty to warn family members of witnesses.

In answering Cooksey’s lawsuit, Deputy County Counsel Peter Glick wrote: “A duty to relocate and protect all family members of witnesses to crimes would create more problems than it would solve.”

The courts have given prosecutors blanket protection from such lawsuits, ruling that they cannot be liable, no matter how reckless their actions.

For example, a state Court of Appeal decision in February never reached the question of whether prosecutors were reckless and therefore liable for the death of a 14-year-old boy who was murdered after they calmed his fears and convinced him to testify in a gang murder case. The court cited prosecutorial immunity.

The boy, Eduardo Samaniego, was not a gang member; the day of the preliminary hearing against the murder suspect, he and other youths expressed concern that they might be harmed if they testified. The deputy district attorney told them that he had never heard of gang members retaliating against someone who was not in a gang.

No one informed the witnesses that a gang member, who also had cooperated with police, had already been threatened because of his cooperation.

Eight months after he testified at the hearing--and before the murder suspect could be tried--Samaniego was killed.

Timothy Hanigan, the attorney for the Samaniego family, settled the remaining part of the lawsuit against the Pomona Police Department. He said he believes the courts erred by giving prosecutors immunity.

“They have created a loophole big enough to drive a truck through,” Hanigan said. “When the issue of danger comes up, the police can tell witnesses to discuss it with the district attorney. And the district attorney is free to say anything.”