Records on Deputy Coroner Are Sought

The district attorney’s office has been ordered by a judge to produce years of records about its repeated use of a deputy coroner as an expert witness amid questions about his credibility.

Norwalk Superior Court Judge Dewey L. Falcone’s order could affect the outcome of an unknown number of murder cases. It also casts a focus on the district attorney’s responsibility to share its reservations about witnesses and evidence with defense lawyers.

The judge’s decision to issue the order comes months after a deputy district attorney filed an internal memo alleging “serious errors” in the testimony and reliability of Dr. James Ribe. The senior deputy coroner, who has a solid reputation as a forensic pathologist, has been called as a witness in numerous murder trials, including that of photographer Charles Rathbun, convicted last year in the slaying of Hermosa Beach model Linda Sobek.

In a March 24 memo to William Hodgman, director of the district attorney’s bureau of special operations, Deputy Dist. Atty. Daniel Wright expressed concerns about Ribe’s reliability after the pathologist changed his testimony in a 1996 murder case prosecuted by Wright. That case resulted in the conviction of Robert Cauchi, 35, of Van Nuys for the torture and murder of his 4-year-old stepdaughter.

Wright later won plaudits from his superiors for winning the case, one that, according to an internal district attorney’s office newsletter, was “almost derailed by the surprise reversal of opinion by the coroner.”

Citing the Cauchi case, the Rathbun prosecution and another trial in which Ribe changed testimony, attorneys for a Huntington Park couple charged with starving their 3-year-old son to death asked Falcone for an order to obtain the district attorney’s records on Ribe. The sweeping order, to be answered by Monday, covers trial testimony by Ribe since 1990, copies of all coroner’s reports relating to his testimony and all internal memos or complaints about Ribe’s credibility.

Ribe, who performed the autopsy on the toddler in the Huntington Park case, could not be reached for comment.

The attorneys for defendants Edith Arce and her husband, Rene Urbano, did not comment about the court order. The district attorney’s office and prosecutor Wright, who wrote the internal memo about Ribe in March, declined to comment.

Deputy Dist. Atty. Dinko Bozanich, who is prosecuting Urbano and Arce, said he did not object to the court order because of his own concerns that the district attorney’s office is not routinely sharing all of its information about expert witnesses with its prosecutors.

In fact, court records show, it was Bozanich who broached the subject of Ribe during an Oct. 30 court session that followed a conversation with his opposing counsel, Deputy Public Defender Cathy Garner and Deputy Alternate Public Defender Richard Caillouette Jr.

“There are two obligations here,” Bozanich, a frequent critic of Garcetti’s administration, said Thursday in an interview.

“The office failed time and again to fulfill its obligation to the defense . . . to disclose the material that bears upon [Ribe’s] reliability.

“The office also failed trial deputies like myself,” Bozanich said. “I am not going to be blamed for not turning over something to the defense when I didn’t have it. How can I make an intelligent decision on how to prosecute a case when my own office has information that the credibility of a centerpiece witness may be so impaired it may not only be worthless to put him on but damaging to the prosecution?”

Bozanich, who said he learned about Ribe’s involvement after reading the district attorney’s newsletter praising Wright, says the district attorney had an obligation to alert prosecutors to cases and internal memos that raise questions about using Ribe as a witness.

“He is putting [deputy district attorneys], including me, at risk of getting blindsided,” Bozanich said. “I don’t need that kind of handicap. It’s tough enough to win in court.”

Meanwhile, defense attorney Mark Werksman, who represented photographer Rathbun, said he intends to monitor the case to determine if the records will open the door to challenging the conviction of his client in the highly publicized slaying of Sobek.

“I am gathering as much information as I can about it,” Werksman said. “Obviously, I am concerned about whether information about Ribe’s inconsistencies or the D.A.’s lack of confidence in his reliability was not disclosed to me.

“If the D.A.’s office does have a lack of confidence in his reliability, I want to know why. And I want to know if it means things were concealed from me . . . if there are grounds for revisiting the case on the basis.”

Unlike the two other cases in which Ribe’s testimony changed during the course of the trial, Werksman noted that the deputy coroner’s decision to alter a finding concerning sexual assault in the Sobek case occurred before the trial began--and was fully disclosed by prosecutor Stephen Kay, as required by law, so the defense could be prepared.

“In a way, I think it reflects well on Ribe’s professionalism that he will change his mind,” said Werksman, a former federal prosecutor. “There are some who are so caught up in advocacy, they will stick to an opinion even if they don’t believe it anymore.”

On the other hand, Werksman said, the full consequences of Ribe’s testimony--in the Rathbun case and others--will not be known until the district attorney’s records are released.

“Is this the tip of the iceberg? Are we going to find out that for years, the D.A.’s office has been experiencing these flip-flops?” Werksman asked.

“The jury knew about the flip-flop in one instance, in our [Rathbun] case. But what would have happened if they had heard that over the years there had been, say, 10 flip-flops?” Werksman said. “Would the jury still have convicted him?”