Gunman Gets Life in LAPD Case

An armed robber who initiated a deadly gun battle with Los Angeles police two years ago in Newbury Park was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole on Wednesday.

And as two members of the controversial undercover police unit involved in the shooting looked on, a Ventura County judge slammed Robert Wayne Cunningham with an additional three life terms for attempting to kill the detectives and their partner.

Cunningham received another 51 years on lesser charges ranging from robbery to using a gun in the fight with police.

“Mr. Cunningham should never walk again in a free society and I will do everything I can to make sure that doesn’t happen,” Superior Court Judge Steven Z. Perren said during the sentencing hearing.

At one point, one of the officers lashed out at Cunningham, a 33-year-old Reseda resident, and accused his attorneys of miscasting the LAPD’s Special Investigations Section as a group of assassins.

“If we had been a death squad, you wouldn’t be here today,” Det. Phil Wixon yelled at Cunningham, his voice cracking with emotion.

“I could have pulled the trigger with this finger,” Wixon said, raising his hand and pointing it at the defendant. “But I didn’t because I am a professional police officer.”

Wixon, a senior member of the Special Investigations Section, or SIS unit, was shot during the June 1995 gunfight with Cunningham after a surveillance operation that led Los Angeles police into Ventura County.

Wixon and his partner, Lawrence Winston, urged Perren to hand down the stiffest possible sentence for the man they said felt no remorse for instigating a deadly confrontation with police.

“Mr. Cunningham started a gun battle,” Winston said. “We finished a gun battle.”

Cunningham’s sentencing brought his criminal case in Ventura County Superior Court to an end, although a civil rights lawsuit against the Police Department is pending in U.S. District Court in Los Angeles. Filed in November, that lawsuit seeks to disband the SIS or force new regulations on the undercover unit.

Both cases have raised questions about the tactics of the SIS, which has drawn notoriety over the past decade for following known criminals and not arresting them until after crimes have been committed.

During the seven-week trial, Cunningham’s public defenders told the jury that the undercover police unit provoked the shootout in Newbury Park. They said the police fired at Cunningham and his cohort, Daniel Soly, after the pair robbed the South West Liquor and Deli.

Soly, a then-26-year-old West Hills resident, was shot 27 times during the gunfight and killed. Cunningham, accused of emerging from a car sunroof and starting the shooting at police, was shot in the back and paralyzed from the waist down.

During the trial, Cunningham took the witness stand in his own defense and told the jury that police--who were following them in unmarked cars--started the gunfight. He testified that one officer delivered an execution-style shot to his partner as he lay dying in the car.

But the jury did not believe his story, which contradicted the testimony of the unit’s detectives.

Even though he did not shoot Soly, the jury found Cunningham guilty of first-degree murder in December on the grounds that he provoked the shooting in which Soly was killed. The jury also convicted him on three counts of attempted murder of a police officer and lesser charges of robbery, burglary and conspiracy to commit a robbery.

Directing his comments to the officers in the courtroom Wednesday, Perren said there was no question in his mind that Cunningham was responsible for the shootout. “It is an issue of a bandit who decided to wage a gun battle with authorities of law,” the judge said. “He tried to kill them. Period.”

Portions of the sentencing hearing--attended by five jurors, Cunningham’s family and a Hollywood screenwriter--had less to do with Cunningham’s crimes than the policies and tactics of the Los Angeles Police Department. Throughout the criminal proceedings, defense attorneys tried to put the SIS on trial and accused its detectives of exercising “vigilante” justice.

At least 23 people have been killed and others seriously injured during shootings involving the SIS, attorneys said. Most recently, detectives from the unit killed three suspected robbers and wounded a bystander during a Feb. 25 shootout in a Northridge neighborhood.

Two days later, at the request of the U.S. attorney general’s office, the FBI opened a preliminary civil rights investigation of the incident, and LAPD officials said they are conducting an internal investigation.

In his testimony, Det. Winston said that 98% of the SIS unit’s practices result in arrests without incident and suggested that civil rights attorneys were seeking an “almighty bucket at the end of the rainbow.”

“Every member of SIS resents being called a death squad,” Winston said. “We resent being called assassins.”