Jurors Were Confused by Police Lingo, Lawyer Says

Defense attorney Barry Levin says he will never forget the moment he began to suspect the worst: The jurors deliberating the fates of three Los Angeles police officers had been confused by police lingo.

His hair, he said, began to “stand up on the back of my neck” as he rechecked a computer-generated police report that had been given to jurors and reread the tiny line on the top. It said, “AD w/GBI.”

His attention had been attracted to the abbreviation because he had been firing questions about it.

To Levin, a former police officer representing one of three defendants, it was simple. That line was “cop speak” for section 245c of the penal code, assault with a deadly weapon likely to produce great bodily injury.

But to the jurors, he began to fear, that line meant something entirely different.

He feared the jurors were taking literally the abbreviation of the crime--”w/GBI”--on the police report. He thought the jurors believed that the police officers, in reporting the incident, had claimed they suffered great bodily injury when a pickup truck carrying gang members Raul Munoz and Cesar Natividad struck them in the alley.

The officers, however, never claimed such severe injuries and the prosecution never contended that they had.

Judge Jacqueline Connor also began to suspect a problem. She even contacted attorneys on both sides during the final day of deliberations to alert them.

The jurors’ questions to the judge indicated they too were focused on the “great bodily injury” issue.

At first, Connor refused their request for a rereading of relevant sections of the transcript, saying it was irrelevant. Then she had second thoughts. But before a rereading could be arranged, the jurors sounded the buzzer: They had reached a decision. The defendants were guilty of conspiracy to obstruct justice by framing gang members.

The problem became clear after the verdicts, when jurors agreed to talk to prosecutors and defense attorneys about their decision. Defense attorneys, incensed by the verdict, walked out in frustration. But Scott Ross, an investigator for Harland Braun, a defense attorney, stayed and affirmed suspicions about the jurors’ deliberations. He later gathered the affidavits. “I went to Harland and said, ‘We have a problem,’ ” he said.

Connor said she had made a fatal error by denying the jurors’ request.

“Had the read-back been provided, the jury would have heard the response by Sgt. Ortiz that the only charge intended was 245c and that both Mr. Munoz and Mr. Natividad were charged with that same crime,” she wrote in her opinion.