Civil Rights Lawyers Form a Gathering Storm for L.A.

Just how great a problem Los Angeles will confront in defending itself against lawsuits spawned by the Rampart police corruption scandal is illustrated by a meeting held Saturday afternoon at Johnnie L. Cochran Jr.’s mid-Wilshire law office.

Among the two dozen attorneys gathered at the 10th floor suite were some of the city’s most accomplished civil rights lawyers--including Mark Rosenbaum of the American Civil Liberties Union and Connie Rice of the Advancement Project--as well as a bevy of skilled veterans of the police “brutality bar,” including Cochran, R. Samuel Paz, Antonio Rodriguez and Carol A. Watson, as well as Carol Sobel, who has spearheaded major employment discrimination litigation against the LAPD.

While no formal agreements were concluded, the lawyers discussed how they may use the courts and other means to bring about what they regard as meaningful police reform, according to more than half a dozen attorneys at the session. Cochran said he expected the group to meet again later this month.

“If we band together, we can get a lot done,” said Cochran, who filed his first misconduct suit against the LAPD in 1965.

There already are more than 15 civil damages suits on file stemming from the Rampart scandal, with many more expected. It also is possible that there will be an attempt to consolidate those cases, though there are difficult legal procedural hurdles to overcome. In addition, it appears probable that lawsuits seeking structural reform of the LAPD will be filed.

The array of legal firepower convened by Cochran and Paz adds to the city’s mounting woes in the widening scandal. To a degree, the pooling of resources parallels the entente forged between private plaintiff lawyers and public prosecutors leading to multibillion-dollar settlements against the historically invulnerable tobacco industry.

Some of the lawyers at the meeting, such as Gregory W. Moreno of Montebello, already represent several Rampart victims, including Javier F. Ovando, who was permanently crippled by Rampart officers. Law professors Laurie Levenson of Loyola, a former federal prosecutor, and Erwin Chemerinsky of USC, who has been asked by the Police Protective League to formally critique the LAPD’s internal inquiry report, offered other expertise. Winston K. McKesson, the defense lawyer for Rafael Perez, the former officer who is at the center of the scandal, also spoke at the three-hour gathering.

Rodriguez said most of the people at the meeting have been battling with the LAPD for years and hope that the Rampart scandal serves as the catalyst for real change.

“This is a situation that is tailor-made for reform” because of the breadth of the illegal police conduct already revealed, Rosenbaum said. That the appropriate city officials failed to “clamp down” on the Police Department, despite warnings from the Christopher Commission and community leaders, made the Rampart scandal “the natural and foreseeable result,” Rosenbaum said.

That contention may be debatable, but there is broad agreement that the Rampart scandal is the worst in city history and that it will be very costly.

Cases Called City Nightmare

Chief Deputy City Atty. Tim McOsker told the City Council in closed session Feb. 2 that the city ultimately will have to pay as much as $125 million to settle lawsuits stemming from the 99 cases already conceded by Chief Bernard C. Parks to have been tainted--a number that virtually all observers expect to grow.

Significantly, attorneys with considerable experience in suing the police and their adversaries who defend law enforcement are in rare agreement that the Rampart-generated damage cases are a nightmare for the city. To both sides of the aisle, they represent an entirely different challenge than the city usually faces in defending police misconduct allegations.

In the typical case, a plaintiff accuses an officer of mistreating him in some way--often with few or no witnesses--and the trial becomes a credibility battle. The police win most of them.

But in the Rampart cases, the plaintiffs will come into court under dramatically different circumstances, said Rodriguez, who has filed two Rampart-related suits. First of all, those cases, if they are not settled, will come to court after months and months of publicity about Rampart police lawlessness.

In some instances, the defendants will include an officer who has been convicted of or charged with an array of crimes, including illegal shootings, planting of evidence, falsifying police reports and, perhaps worse, perjury. In other instances, the officer, even if not charged with a crime, will have been fired or suspended from the department because of misconduct.

Normally, when the city defends a police misconduct case, its arsenal includes a credible client and the weight of the city attorney’s office, sometimes aided by private lawyers, lined up against attorneys from small law firms.

“Here, you have the district attorney acknowledging that there was wrongful, unlawful conduct that deprived someone of their civil rights. From a plaintiff lawyer’s perspective, you can’t get a better situation,” said Dan Stormer, a Los Angeles attorney who has won major police misconduct cases but was not at the Saturday meeting.

Los Angeles attorney George Fransell, who has been defending police officers for 40 years, agreed: “Absent a technicality, you will be left with one issue--just how much damages.” Added attorney Steven D. Manning, who also specializes in representing law enforcement agencies: “If you have a cop who has been fired for falsifying evidence, you have a big problem.”

And Thomas D. Hokinson, who heads the city attorney’s liability division, said officers with criminal convictions could be “a real problem” for the city in defending these cases.

City Has Possible Defenses

That is not to say that the city is without defenses or plans to surrender. Already, the city attorney’s office has filed papers saying that some cases were filed too late to meet statute of limitations requirements.

Government lawyers may argue that the city’s liability should be limited because the plaintiffs have not proved a pattern and practice of misconduct. However, as allegations of widespread wrongdoing continue to mount, that contention may be difficult to sustain.

In some instances, the city may claim that an individual who had a criminal record before the case at issue and no demonstrated earning power is entitled to minimal damages for time spent in prison after being incarcerated as a result of falsified evidence. The city also may argue that the individual went to jail after pleading guilty upon the advice of a defense lawyer.

Nonetheless, many lawyers said a number of the Rampart cases that, according to both the district attorney and the police chief, involved clearly illegal conduct would be worth more than than that of Rodney King. He received $3.8 million in damages from the city stemming from a severe beating by police officers in a case where his initial conduct--leading police on a high-speed chase--was illegal and dangerous, said Paul Hoffman, former legal director of the ACLU.

Hoffman contrasted the King case to that of Ovando, who was shot, permanently crippled, framed for assaulting police and sentenced to 23 years in prison.

Although police say that Ovando is an 18th Street gang member, he had no criminal record when he was shot. “That case is worth $25-$30 million alone,” said Hoffman, who has written law review articles on police misconduct.

Among the other cases that could generate high damages is the one that Paz filed on behalf of the family of Juan Saldana. That victim died in 1996 in one of three shootings in which former officer Perez says he or fellow anti-gang CRASH officers in the Rampart Division unjustly wounded or killed suspects. Perez has said that as Saldana lay bleeding to death in the hallway of a Mid-City apartment building, officers delayed calling an ambulance while they planted a gun near where he had fallen and concocted a story to justify the shooting.

“The level of legal and moral culpability” in such a case is at “the extreme end of the spectrum,” said Hoffman, who was not at the meeting but has been closely following the Rampart situation.

Some of the lawyers at the meeting are discussing how to fashion a broad-gauged lawsuit that could play a role in changing LAPD practices. Two federal court decisions issued in prior years--one in Los Angeles and one in Philadelphia--place substantial hurdles in the way of lawyers seeking to use the courts to achieve such a goal.

Nonetheless, Rosenbaum said he thought those rulings could be overcome because of the sweep of police lawlessness already revealed. “This is not a case of a few bad apples; it is the case of a poisonous tree,” he said.

Chief’s Statement Admissible in Court

Parks clearly would disagree. However, he already has told the City Council that the LAPD was negligent in the way it hired and supervised officers in recent years.

Some lawyers at the meeting said that statement, which would be admissible in court, could provide significant ammunition to the claim of plaintiffs’ lawyers that the city had a pattern and practice of deliberate indifference to officer misconduct. That could heighten the level of damages that the city has to pay and buttress the argument that the LAPD should be subjected to broad, court-ordered reforms, they say.

Moreover, the department’s Board of Inquiry report on the scandal, in which Parks states “we as an organization provided the opportunity” for corrupt officers to carry out criminal acts, will further complicate the city’s legal position. The report cites failures from top to bottom, including failures to check out the background of recruits, “a breakdown” in front-line supervision and failures to monitor officer misconduct.

Any coalition that emerges from the meeting apparently will not include one of the area’s most prominent police misconduct lawyers--Stephen Yagman of Venice, who already has filed several Rampart-related cases but was not invited to the meeting. Yagman and Cochran have been at odds for years and there is no prospect that they will work together, although the two frequently have leveled similar criticisms of the LAPD.

Santa Monica attorney Brian Lysaght, whose firm specializes in complex civil litigation, said the firm is looking into the possibility of filing a Rampart-related class-action suit. Lysaght acknowledged that because the Rampart victims had suffered a variety of injuries, it might be difficult to form a class that would comport with the federal rules of civil procedure, but he said he did not think this is an insurmountable obstacle.