Rivals Lay Some Blame for Rampart on Garcetti

Dist. Atty. Gil Garcetti must shoulder some of the blame for the unfolding Rampart police scandal, his challengers in the 2000 election said Wednesday.

“This is the issue in this campaign,” said Deputy Dist. Atty. Steve Cooley, one of the candidates in the March primary. “There’s some responsibility in our office because we prosecuted those cases.”

Barry Groveman, a corporate lawyer who is also running, said the ongoing investigation into allegations that officers from the Los Angeles Police Department’s Rampart station shot, beat and framed innocent men is “just the latest scandal in a legacy of failure” by Garcetti.

Cooley and Groveman said the district attorney should have made sure his office spotted problems in cases while they were being prosecuted--by, for example, more closely scrutinizing police testimony.

“They’re the ones that put the cases forward. Had they been doing their job and given the cases proper scrutiny, instead of cleaning up the mess there wouldn’t be a mess,” Groveman said.

Cooley said Garcetti failed to “exercise prosecutorial oversight.”

The district attorney, who is seeking a third term, declined to respond to his opponents’ attacks. Garcetti campaign spokesman Bill Carrick said Groveman and Cooley were simply using “inflammatory rhetoric to pump up their campaigns.”

A dozen police officers have already been relieved of duty in the Rampart scandal. The district attorney’s office has obtained the release of four inmates because of tainted convictions and has persuaded judges to dismiss the convictions of seven others no longer in custody.

More than 3,000 cases may have to be reviewed in the unfolding investigation.

Groveman and Cooley said the police scandal warrants a review by independent prosecutors, which they vowed to seek if elected.

Groveman said the review of problem cases now being handled by seven lawyers in the district attorney’s office should be turned over to a specially appointed prosecutor or handled by another agency, such as the attorney general’s office.

“How does [Garcetti] properly investigate something that might involve his own negligence?” Groveman said.

Groveman said that, if elected, he would immediately ask the Board of Supervisors for more resources to probe the Rampart scandal. Without more money, he said, the investigation “will drain resources for the main prosecutorial functions.”

Cooley would have the district attorney’s office review the questionable cases, but said he would seek an investigation by outsiders into how the district attorney’s office failed to “put in place policies and procedures that could have prevented” the conviction of innocent men.

He said he believed that a review of possibly tainted cases could be conducted within the district attorney’s current budget.

Cooley and Groveman criticized Garcetti for his 1996 decision to discontinue Operation Rollout, a program that investigated police shootings. Both said the program might have prevented some of the abuses in the current scandal.

Garcetti, who has said he stopped Operation Rollout for lack of funding, said Wednesday that the program will be revived in January.

The district attorney and his opponents agree that the police controversy has damaged the justice system. Garcetti said prosecutors might now be losing cases because some jurors no longer believe police testimony. “We’ve always had jurors who look at the testimony of officers with skepticism. This gives them additional ammunition,” he said.

Asked if the Rampart investigation would outlast his term of office, Garcetti said, “I plan to be here a long time.”