D.A. Gets Extension on Records

The district attorney’s office was given three more weeks Monday to turn over all its records about the testimony and forensic work of a veteran deputy coroner whose credibility figures in a pending murder trial and could be a factor in other cases.

Superior Court Judge Dewey L. Falcone granted the delay after the supervising attorney for the district attorney’s Norwalk office said he needed more time to assemble the internal records, including memos, on the senior deputy coroner who has had some involvement--as a supervisor and/or case pathologist--in an estimated 3,800 autopsies since 1993.

Although only a small percentage of those cases are said to involve homicides in which criminal charges were filed, the history of findings by Deputy Coroner James Ribe have become an issue in the pending murder trial of Rene Urbano and Edith Arce. Specifically, attorneys for the Huntington Park couple question whether Ribe’s decision to revise his findings in several other murder cases could bear on the prosecution of Urbano and Arce, who are charged with the starvation death of Arce’s 3-year-old son.

Although Ribe was unavailable for comment, the two top coroner’s officials Monday defended his record in the office and his willingness, in some cases, to change his findings based on new facts.

“Dr. Ribe is a man of great integrity and impeccable character who has dedicated his life to this office, giving us reliable medical investigation. . . . I have absolute confidence in his work,” said Coroner Lakshmanan Sathyavagiswaran.

Coroner’s Director Anthony Hernandez said: “I fail to see in the cases cited any problem at all with [Ribe] changing his mind. He is perfectly entitled to do that . . . [and] if Dr. Ribe makes a change, it will be because he has a clear reason for it.’

Last week, Falcone ordered the district attorney’s office to produce years of records about its use of Ribe after defense attorneys for the Huntington Park couple became aware that the deputy coroner had changed his testimony in at least three murder cases. The defense attorneys learned that Ribe had come under fire about one of those cases from its prosecutor and in a district attorney’s office newsletter.

Deputy Public Defender Cathy A. Gardner and Deputy Alternate Public Defender Richard Caillouette Jr., are attempting to determine if Ribe’s history can be used to discredit his testimony in the Huntington Park case.

Deputy Dist. Atty. Dinko Bozanich, who brought the other murder cases to the court’s attention, said he still intends to call the deputy coroner as an expert witness.

Meantime, Stephen Kay, the veteran deputy district attorney who used Ribe in prosecuting Charles Rathbun in the 1995 slaying of model Linda Sobek, defended Ribe’s professionalism.

“Having worked closely with [Ribe], I have just the highest regard for his competence and his ethics,” Kay said. “I found him to be clearly the most brilliant forensic pathologist I have ever worked with . . . in 30 years as a prosecutor.”