Grand Jury Challengers Would Bar Local Judges

Lawyers challenging the ethnic composition of the Los Angeles County Grand Jury want to disqualify all 428 Superior Court judges from the case, arguing in court papers filed Monday that the judges cannot be impartial about a jury selection process in which they participate.

Alleging abuse of the grand jury, attorneys for Jaime Alejandro Mares last month had asked Superior Court Judge Thomas L. Wilhite Jr. to dismiss Mares’ indictment, saying the way grand jurors are selected systematically “excludes the fair and proportional representation” of Latinos and other minorities. Wilhite had been scheduled to hear arguments this morning.

In seeking to disqualify the Los Angeles bench, attorneys Victor Sherman and Charles Lindner now are looking for a judge from outside Los Angeles to decide whether Latinos and other minorities have been discriminated against during grand jury selection.

Wilhite can either step aside or fight the disqualification motion, which would send the matter to the 2nd District Court of Appeal, a court spokeswoman said.

If Wilhite and his colleagues on the Superior Court bench agree to recuse themselves, the state Judicial Council would appoint an outside judge to hear the entire grand jury challenge.

“Here, sitting judges of the Los Angeles County Superior Court are the very parties whose conduct in selecting the grand jury pool is being challenged as discriminatory,” the lawyers argued in court papers. “These judges could be likened to parties, as well as possible witnesses with personal knowledge in the case.”

Presiding Judge Victor Chavez declined comment, citing the pending litigation.

In Los Angeles, each Superior Court judge can nominate two people for the grand jury, and members of the community can volunteer for one-year terms, which are as time-consuming as a full-time job. The nominees and volunteers are then interviewed and screened by a committee of about a dozen judges for the $25-a-day posts.

Although Latinos make up more than 40% of the population, and about 25% of potential jurors, not a single Latino is included among the 23 members and four alternates on the 1999-2000 grand jury, court papers say.

“As all of the judges in the Los Angeles County Superior Court are involved in the selection process, there is reasonable doubt that they would be impartial,” the attorneys stated in their court papers. “Therefore, disqualification of the entire bench would be in the furtherance of justice.”

Several Superior Court judges said in interviews with The Times that they have tried to encourage members of minority communities to participate in the grand jury, without much success.

Sherman’s client, Mares, was indicted in June on charges of killing two people, including Los Angeles Police Officer Brian Brown. Mares’ alleged crime partner was killed by police in December 1998 after a short chase near Los Angeles International Airport.

Sherman contends that the indictment violates his client’s constitutional rights because the grand jury is not representative of the community.

Lindner represents Regina Vartanova, who was indicted with 48 other alleged members of an insurance fraud ring. In court papers, Lindner contends that he and his client can show that “the grand jury pools were drawn from those niches of the county heavily populated by elderly affluent whites.”

The challenge is the latest and most ambitious in a series of legal motions dating back 30 years. It comes as the bench is narrowing its list of candidates for next year’s grand jury.

A group of criminal defense lawyers unsuccessfully challenged the ethnic makeup of the grand jury during the 1990s. At that time, a number of judges in the criminal courts resisted a move to choose jurors for criminal grand jury matters from a more diverse pool of trial jurors drawn from voter registration and Department of Motor Vehicle rolls.

Other counties in California have quelled similar challenges by impaneling separate grand juries, chosen from the pool of regular trial jurors, to hear criminal cases.