Council Votes to Provide Lawyers for Perez in 2 Lawsuits

Acting on a request from Los Angeles Police Chief Bernard C. Parks, the Los Angeles City Council agreed in closed session Wednesday to provide legal representation in two lawsuits to former officer Rafael Perez, the main informant in the Rampart police corruption case.

Parks, who personally made the request behind closed doors, is seeking representation for the jailed officer-turned-informant because Perez has admitted no wrongdoing in those two cases, City Hall sources said. In fact, the council decided not to pay for Perez’s lawyers in two other lawsuits in which Perez has admitted wrongdoing, including shooting an unarmed man and planting a gun on a parolee.

However, Perez’s attorney, Winston Kevin McKesson, said his client is entitled to be defended by the city in every case in which he is sued arising from his conduct as a police officer.

“It is our position that he was on the clock of the LAPD, that he was within the course and the scope of his duties when these things happened,” McKesson said.

McKesson said Perez “will avail himself of every legal remedy” to make sure the city represents him.

City officials are willing to provide attorneys for Perez mainly because it ultimately could reduce the city’s liability in those cases, sources said. But city officials also are willing to help the former officer, who is cooperating with authorities to obtain a lighter sentence in his own drug case, because they want to show that he can be a credible witness.

Additionally, the Police Department wants Perez’s continued cooperation because he is the main source of information in the expanding Rampart scandal.

But the city is reserving its right not to pay a judgment awarded against Perez if a jury decides that the former anti-gang officer was acting outside the scope and course of his official duties.

To date, what has become known as the Rampart corruption scandal includes allegations of bad shootings, beatings, drug dealing, evidence planting, false arrest, witness intimidation and perjury. So far, more than a dozen officers have been relieved of duty as a result of the ongoing probe, which so far has been fueled largely by information from Perez. Several City Hall sources said no one wanted to help Perez per se, but their interest mainly was to protect the city from potentially huge liability and to preserve Perez’s credibility as a potential witness in criminal cases against other officers.

Council members expressed “an enormous amount of angst,” as one source put it, about having to provide anything to Perez.

But council members, sympathetic to Parks’ arguments, were swayed to vote unanimously to pay for Perez’s defense. That defense will be handled by outside counsel rather than the city attorney’s office, sources said.

But McKesson said he was surprised that the city was refusing to represent Perez in those cases in which he has implicated himself in crimes or misconduct, some of which have led to the freeing of unjustly convicted men.

“He told the truth. He did the right thing,” McKesson said. “This almost makes it seem like he would have been better off lying.”

Most notable is the city’s refusal to represent Perez in a civil suit filed by Javier Francisco Ovando, a 22-year-old former gang member who was left paralyzed when he was shot by Perez and his then-partner Nino Durden in 1996. Ovando was sentenced to 23 years in prison after the officers testified that he had attacked them and that they shot him in self-defense.

Perez has since said that Ovando was unarmed when he and Durden shot him, and that he and his former partner planted a gun on him to cover their tracks.

The city also declined to represent Perez in a civil suit stemming from a 1996 arrest in which he has admitted planting a gun on a man who was on parole and barred by law from possessing a weapon.

The city will represent Perez in a suit contending that he framed a man in a 1992 drug case--a charge Perez denies--and in a suit filed by a man who claims Rampart officers attempted to frame him for murder.

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Times staff writers Scott Glover and Matt Lait contributed to this story.