Bar Robber Who Survived Police Shootout Sentenced

April Jenkins beamed a triumphant, toothy smile Wednesday as a judge sentenced her brother to 11 years in prison for a barroom robbery.

“Thank you, Jesus,” she said. “Michael’s coming home.”

Last month, Michael Rochelle Smith faced the possibility of spending the rest of his life in prison on murder charges for his accomplices’ deaths at the hands of LAPD detectives. Now he could be home in as little as four years.

In between, an aggressive defense by his lawyer, Deputy Public Defender James Coady, paid off with an acquittal on one murder charge and a hung jury on another.

“From the start it felt wrong that he had been charged with the murders,” Coady said, pointing out that his client did nothing more than run from the getaway car when police trapped it in a cul-de-sac. “He should have been charged with the robberies and this case would have been settled a long time ago, like any other case.”

But this was not any other case.

It involved a controversial elite Los Angeles Police Department unit that has been criticized for a decade for allowing suspects to commit serious crimes before arresting them, and for a comparatively high percentage of shootings during arrests.

The February 1997 shooting, for which Smith was charged, only added to the accusations of street justice against the Special Investigations Unit.

Smith had walked into the Police Department and fingered his associates as possible suspects in a number of robberies across the San Fernando Valley.

Deputy Dist. Atty. Carol Fisch had prosecuted Smith under the legal theory that holds all members who join to commit crimes responsible for each other’s acts.

After declaring a mistrial on the charges the jury could not resolve, Superior Court Judge Kathryne Stoltz dismissed those counts, noting that the 6-6 split left little hope that a new trial would produce a verdict.

“It was an uphill battle with those murder charges,” Fisch said.

A Municipal Court judge had dismissed the murder counts at a preliminary hearing, saying there was insufficient evidence to support the charges. Fisch refiled them.

Fisch said talking to the jurors after the trial convinced her that some had “an agenda” and that a different jury would have convicted Smith on all counts.

Instead, he was convicted of robbing 15 people at a San Fernando Valley blues bar and attempting to rob another three. Stoltz sentenced Smith to the maximum possible prison term, 11 years.

Stoltz, agreeing with Fisch, said she believed the sentence was too light and criticized the state law that limited her to imposing an 11-year term, rather than the 21 years she said Smith deserved.

Smith, who has been in jail since the night of the robberies, will get over 2 1/2 years credit. He is eligible to serve only half of the remaining 8 1/2 years in prison because the jury did not find him to be armed during the robbery.

“Michael knows that this time, God let him off, but he has to rehabilitate himself,” Jenkins said.

But she and Smith’s other relatives also criticized the police for three deaths they said could have been prevented.

“If they knew who they were looking for, why didn’t they go knock on their door?” asked Debra Lyons, Smith’s mother.

SIS detectives followed Smith, Kim Benton, Eric Fields and Kirk Deffenbuaugh to the ClassRoom Bar in Northridge on Feb. 25 and waited outside during the robbery. When the robbers took off, the detectives followed them to a cul-de-sac and boxed them in.

There, police said Fields pointed his gun at the undercover officers, who responded with repeated shotgun blasts.

Smith immediately ran for cover. The remaining robbers, who stayed in the car, were killed.

Defense attorney Coady accused the officers of executing the robbers without provocation and making up the story about the gun later.

Before the trial, Coady said he would prove his client was set up, by introducing evidence of several other incidents in which SIS detectives killed suspects after watching them commit crimes.

A number of the elite unit’s shootings have resulted in federal civil rights lawsuits. One, involving a 1990 shooting after a holdup at a Sunland McDonald’s, ended with a verdict against the officers, who the jury found wrongfully shot three robbers to death.

Other lawsuits against the unit and department are pending, including five involving the shooting for which Smith was charged. The Smith case is also the subject of an investigation by the U.S. attorney’s office.

But Coady never told the jury about the other shootings. Instead, he pointed to physical evidence which he said proved two of the robbers in the Smith case were shot while holding their hands up in surrender.

Some of the jurors told Coady they simply didn’t believe the officers. Fisch said she was told the jury hung up because some of the jurors believed the shooting was “overkill.”