Prosecutor’s Convictions Span the World

It’s a long way from prosecuting killers and kidnappers in Compton to punishing genocide in East Africa. But the suffering of victims and the mindless nature of violence often are much the same, Pierre-Richard Prosper says.

Once an assistant Los Angeles County district attorney, Prosper has just wrapped up more than two years as a prosecutor with the U.N. International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda.

He won conviction last month of one of the highest-ranking officials arrested for the slaughter of more than 800,000 Rwandans during ethnic fighting in 1994. The tribunal in this northern Tanzanian town on Friday sentenced Jean-Paul Akayesu, a Hutu and former mayor of the Taba district of central Rwanda, to life in prison.

Despite the vast distance from Los Angeles to the tribunal courtroom, Prosper, the 35-year-old son of Haitian immigrants, said there was much that bound the two experiences together.

The common thread is “the vulnerability of the victims to the acts of violence and lawlessness, the deep sense of disbelief that these events are happening to them--that they are the victims of such horrendous crimes,” he said.

“The only difference is the number of people killed or affected by the crime,” he said.

After graduating in 1989 from Pepperdine University’s School of Law, Prosper moved quickly from assistant district attorney to a federal prosecutor tracking some of the world’s most notorious drug cartels, and then was singled out by the State Department to become a war crimes prosecutor. The characters and the country have changed, but the challenges and emotional intensity remain the same, Prosper said.

The conviction of Akayesu on nine counts of genocide, incitement to genocide and crimes against humanity was important because it meant justice for people who were skeptical of authority and afraid to testify.

“I was the person [to whom] they were looking to bring justice,” he said. “I’m the one they put all their hopes into.”

The conviction also was a milestone because it established rape as an act of genocide when aimed at a particular ethnic group with the intent of causing such mental and physical distress that it put the group’s survival in danger.

Prosper sought seven life sentences for Akayesu. The tribunal ordered him to serve three life sentences for genocide and crimes against humanity, plus 80 years for other crimes.

The sentences are to be served concurrently, amounting to a single term of life in prison.

Prosper said he was satisfied.

“I feel it was a fair and just sentence, which took into account the gravity of the offense and the role of the accused in the crimes,” Prosper said. “As I walk away and look back, I feel that a mission has been accomplished.”

Prosper won life sentences against more than a dozen criminals while working for the Compton and Inglewood area branches of the district attorney’s office. Later, Dave Demerjian, chief deputy in the hard-core crime division of the district attorney’s office, hired him to work in neighborhoods like Watts, East Los Angeles and South-Central. There, he prosecuted gang-related homicides and brought to trial crimes punishable by life imprisonment without parole or the death penalty.

Reflecting on those times, he recalled one case in particular: that of a drive-by gang-related shooting in which two teenagers were gunned down in front of a bus stop. The shooter was never found, but Prosper got the driver convicted and jailed for life.

The senseless nature of the crime, and the willingness of young gang members to blindly follow a leader, bears a striking similarity to the actions of many Rwandans. During a three-month frenzy in 1994 they unquestioningly heeded orders to kill fellow Rwandans.

“This is where the parallel can be drawn,” Prosper said. “People are vulnerable to manipulation and propaganda, and this can be found in all segments of any population regardless of color or economic status--provided that the individual concerned is misguided enough to adhere to the doctrine.”

Prosper’s colleagues say that, while prosecuting gang members in Los Angeles, he mastered the art of steering people away from given beliefs, winning their confidence and persuading them to testify--often in the face of great risk.

“You have to have what I would call ‘street smarts’ and good intuition,” Demerjian said. “I think he is good at reading people. The witnesses and the victims trusted him.”

Prosper said the art of persuasion boils down to being compassionate toward victims and witnesses.

“You have to understand their fear, their concern, their pain,” he said. “If you [do], then it opens up the door.”

It also gives vent to a flood of emotions, as Prosper found out while interviewing victims of the Rwandan genocide, which was aimed at ethnic Tutsis and moderate Hutus. Many would break down recounting the physical and mental torture they endured; others, traumatized by their experience, would simply try to block it out.

Like people living in crime-ridden neighborhoods of Los Angeles, many Rwandans are suspicious of authority.

However, Prosper said, the Los Angeles community and authorities operate in a system that favors law and order. In Rwanda during the genocide, “the authority was the criminal enterprise,” he said.

Prosper had a minor role prosecuting another case at the tribunal, but he was a key figure in the Akayesu case. The hardest thing was to actually bring the case to trial.

Witnesses were fearful. Many wanted to testify, but none wanted to go first.

“They didn’t know what the [U.N. court] system was like, if their safety would be guaranteed, and what the reaction would be when they got back to Rwanda,” he said.

Prosper had to convince the 24 witnesses that their names would not be used and promise them transportation to the tribunal under cover of darkness. The intense fear was something he was familiar with from his days in Compton courtrooms. Witnesses would feel threatened and clam up on the stand, particularly in gang-related cases, where Prosper himself was often glared at or verbally lambasted by friends or relatives of the defendant.

Prosper grew up in Saratoga County near Albany, N.Y., the son of two doctors who moved to the United States in 1959. On completing a bachelor’s degree in Romance languages at Boston College, he entered Pepperdine’s law school and later started his career as a prosecutor.

In addition to taking on L.A.’s gangs, Prosper also, as a federal prosecutor, investigated drug cartels responsible for much of the narcotics traffic into the United States.

It wasn’t until he saw slides of massacre sites taken during a colleague’s trip to Rwanda that the horror of that tragedy hit home.

“It was really shocking and sobering,” Prosper said. “I had never seen anything like that before. I didn’t know that human beings had the ability to do that kind of thing. It really woke me up. The feeling I had was that something had to be done; someone had to do something.”

He had no inkling at the time that the “someone” would include him in a team of about half a dozen international prosecutors plus judges from Senegal, Sweden, South Africa, Tanzania, Bangladesh and Russia.

With his knowledge of French--an essential skill in the former Belgian colony of Rwanda--his experience in criminal prosecution and his youthful ability to work hard in often-harsh African conditions, Prosper was “the right mix for the right job at the right time,” said David Scheffer, the U.S. State Department’s ambassador-at-large for war crimes issues.

Prosper admitted that it was not an easy decision to pack up and leave Santa Monica, even though he already had spent five weeks as a legal consultant assessing Rwanda’s postwar criminal justice system and helping the State Department develop plans for addressing Rwanda’s legal issues.

In the end, Prosper let his gut decide.

“It was something I had to do--and an incredible life experience to be able to do something, make a difference and contribute,” he said.

A little anxiety and fear of the unknown were ever present, Prosper acknowledged. He worried about overall security conditions and whether his team would actually be able to bring justice.

With his stint at the U.N. court at an end, Prosper said, he intends to relax and digest his experience before deciding what to do next.

“I really need to take some time to reflect what the assignment has done to me as an individual,” Prosper said. “I know that it has changed me, that I have grown from this experience.”