Judge Deals Blow to Use of Jailhouse Informants

In an aftershock from a jailhouse informant scandal that rocked the courts a decade ago, a judge on Thursday overturned a jury’s finding that a reputed gang member personally shot to death a man and a pregnant woman while robbing a Pasadena drug house in 1981.

The judge let stand first-degree murder convictions against 40-year-old Anthony Stacey, ruling that there was ample evidence from witnesses other than a jailhouse informant to show that Stacey was involved in the robbery murders and the murder of a viable fetus.

But Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Patricia L. Collins said that the jury’s conclusion that Stacey was the shooter, which led to his conviction of murder with special circumstances and a sentence of life in prison without possibility of parole, was based on the testimony of an informant who has since shown a “proclivity to lie.”

Collins said the prosecution at Stacey’s trial illegally hampered defense efforts to show the jury that the informant, who testified that Stacey confessed to him in jail, was a liar.

Specifically, she found that the prosecution failed in its obligation to disclose data--not in its possession, but readily accessible to it--that the informant, Charles E. Jones, had a long criminal record and extensive experience trading information with Kentucky authorities in return for favors. She found that such evidence, in the hands of Stacey’s defense attorney, would have been “reasonably likely to destroy [Jones’] credibility” with jurors.

The practical effect of the ruling for Stacey is limited. If the district attorney elects not to retry him on the special circumstance allegations, Stacey would probably be resentenced to the statutory terms of 25 years to life for the first-degree murders of LeRoy Kelley, 20, Debra Jones, 19, and her unborn child. The only difference would be that he would be eligible for parole.

Kelley and Jones were shot in the head when several armed men forced their way into their house to steal cocaine and cash.

The prosecution of Stacey, a reputed gang member, for their murders illustrates the trickiness of relying on career criminals’ accounts of jailhouse confessions. Critics say jailhouse informant testimony is tainted and unfairly influences a jury because most such informants routinely demand favors for their help while claiming, as Jones did, that they are acting solely as good citizens, appalled by the brutality of others’ crimes.

A scandal over informants fabricating jailhouse confessions erupted in 1988 after The Times disclosed that a longtime informant, Leslie Vernon White, demonstrated for sheriff’s deputies that he could easily gather enough detail about another inmate’s murder case to convincingly fake his murder confession, then trade it to police and prosecutors for favors. The Los Angeles County Grand Jury launched a probe, and the Legislature passed a law requiring that jurors be warned to view informants with suspicion. A few other convictions have also been overturned.

But informants are still sometimes used when the district attorney’s office says it is convinced that their accounts are adequately corroborated. For example, a jailhouse informant played a key role in last year’s trial of the man accused of murdering entertainer Bill Cosby’s son, Ennis Cosby. That informant provided letters that he said defendant Mikhail Markhasev wrote confessing to the crime. The informant later claimed he forged the letters, and the case now is on appeal.

“They just shouldn’t be using jailhouse informants, period,” said Gigi Gordon, a defense lawyer who helped build a database of informant cases after the controversy broke out in the 1980s. “These people are not good citizens who come forward as a civic duty.”

Stacey’s case was pursued for years by Santa Monica lawyer Robert Berke, who filed the writ of habeas corpus petition on which Collins ruled Thursday. Berke said he is grateful for a partial victory but intends to continue pressing for relief by asking the state Court of Appeal to order an entirely new trial.

Berke said he believes that jurors, who requested that the informant’s testimony be read back to them while they were deliberating, regarded it as pivotal.

Berke has extensive experience with informant cases. In 1991, he won freedom for a man serving a life term for a conviction based partly on the testimony of a jailhouse informant who received a favor that was not disclosed to the jury.

Deputy Dist. Atty. George Palmer, who heads the district attorney’s appellate section, said Thursday afternoon that he had not yet seen the decision in the Stacey case, and therefore could not comment.

The Stacey case sparked controversy within the district attorney’s office. It raised such troubling questions that a prosecutor who investigated it for two years recommended conceding defeat last spring.

When overruled by her superiors, Deputy Dist. Atty. Imogene Katayama refused to continue contesting the case and was replaced. She would not comment, and Palmer declined to release her 52-page memo on the case.

The other key evidence against Stacey came from an accomplice in the triple killing. The accomplice testified in return for immunity that Stacey was the shooter. California law requires corroboration of an accomplice’s account.

Collins ruled that the prosecution produced ample corroboration that Stacey was among the armed men who broke into the house.

But she said the only corroboration that he pulled the trigger in the fatal shootings came from informant Jones.

The prosecution never provided the defense with Jones’ full criminal record, though the trial court ordered the prosecution to disclose it. The key information withheld from the defense was Jones’ FBI rap sheet. Prosecutors ran only a California rap sheet on the informant, who was under arrest on his own murder charge and using the alias Michael Hayes.

The California rap sheet included a reference to a Kentucky arrest. But prosecutors did not follow up on it--as Collins ruled Thursday that they had a duty to do--by running an FBI rap sheet that would have disclosed many more Kentucky arrests and led to interviews with Kentucky authorities that would have disclosed Jones’ long informant history.