Records, Ideology at Stake in Cooley-Garcetti Contest

Every once in a while, an election comes along that offers a choice between two candidates so philosophically and stylistically polarized that it represents a referendum on the very nature of the office they seek.

The race for Los Angeles County district attorney is not quite one of those campaigns. But it’s close.

The two candidates, incumbent Dist. Atty. Gil Garcetti and his challenger, Head Deputy Dist. Atty. Steve Cooley, are polar opposites in many ways, politically and personally, and their campaign has been a nine-month grudge match between two deeply antagonistic men.

The two rivals have participated in 15 head-to-head debates, an endurance feat unmatched in local political annals. Those debates are where their differences have taken shape and hardened.

But they are also where the campaign has shown itself to be something other than a pure ideological struggle, because much of the discussion has pivoted on Garcetti’s record and, to a much lesser extent, on Cooley’s.

Both men have spent their entire professional lives in the district attorney’s office, Garcetti for 32 years, Cooley for 27.

Garcetti has had by far the more prominent--and controversial--career.

He has held high-profile management jobs since the mid-1970s, when he was chosen to head the powerful and politically sensitive Special Investigations Division.

That job, Garcetti said in a recent interview, was “the best training that I received or that anyone could receive in becoming the D.A.”

SID’s mandate is to prosecute political corruption and police abuses. Under Garcetti, the office prosecuted City Councilman Art Snyder on drunk driving charges--the case ended in a hung jury--and named school board member Roberta Weintraub as an unindicted co-conspirator in the forgery of election petitions.

But it was police, not politicians, who were the hot issue during Garcetti’s tenure at SID.

He was in that position in January 1979, when Los Angeles police shot and killed 39-year-old Eula Love of Watts after a dispute over an unpaid gas bill. After a lengthy investigation, his division decided not to file charges, prompting widespread public outrage.

In response, Garcetti and then-Dist. Atty. John Van de Kamp launched the “roll-out” program, under which prosecutors were sent to the scene of every shooting involving a police officer.

Over the next four years, until Robert Philibosian took over as district attorney and reassigned him, Garcetti supervised well over 400 investigations into police shootings. Of those, only two led to criminal charges against officers, and just one resulted in a conviction.

In defense of that record, Garcetti says most police shootings are justified, and those that aren’t are extraordinarily difficult to prosecute. And he says that, despite the small number of prosecutions, he developed a reputation among police as a “headhunter”--someone who was out to get them.

“I thought by and large he did very well, particularly under the pressures he was under,” said Van de Kamp, one of the city’s most popular and respected modern prosecutors. Although he is supporting Cooley in this year’s election, Van de Kamp has praised many aspects of Garcetti’s record.

In 1995, as district attorney, Garcetti disbanded the roll-out program, saying the office could no longer afford its cost of slightly more than $1 million a year. “I had to cut something; I had no choice,” he said recently.

The D.A.’s overall annual spending rose by $10 million that year and by roughly $25 million over the next four years, but Garcetti did not reestablish the program until early this year, and then only after Reps. Julian Dixon (D-Los Angeles) and Lucille Roybal-Allard (D-Los Angeles) had secured a $1-million federal grant earmarked for roll-out.

After his stint in SID, Garcetti went on to become chief deputy district attorney--the No. 2 job in the office--under Dist. Atty. Ira Reiner, who unceremoniously dumped him in 1988.

Reiner never said why, but the embarrassing setback fueled Garcetti’s determination to drive Reiner from office, which he did in 1992, with help from numerous disgruntled deputy D.A.s, among them Steve Cooley.

Cooley had also been on a management track, although his assignments tended to be closer to the trenches and out of the public eye. In 1983 and 1984, he headed the office’s Major Narcotics Section, where he won praise and internal recognition for his aggressive prosecutions of major methamphetamine producers.

He was rewarded with the position of head deputy in the Antelope Valley--a new position that made him, in effect, the district attorney of a large, remote chunk of the county.

He remained in the Lancaster office until 1993, winning some big cases--including the “Mrs. R’s Daughter” rape case, which became a made-for-TV movie--before being promoted to the much more powerful and prestigious position of head deputy of the San Fernando Branch.

There, Cooley established a record of relative flexibility in prosecutions under the three-strikes law. Garcetti is now using this record to attack him as soft on crime.

The three-strikes law, passed by California voters in 1994, mandates a 25-years-to-life term for anyone who commits a felony after being convicted of two serious, violent felonies, regardless of how long ago they were committed.

A Los Angeles Times investigation in 1996 found that, under Cooley, the San Fernando Branch had the highest rate of plea bargains in three-strike cases of the 13 branches in the district attorney’s office that were examined.

He defended that record, saying he found that only about 40% of the cases eligible for three-strikes treatment really deserved it. The rest, he said, were cases in which the third felony was nonviolent.

Cooley’s insistence on what he calls “a dose of proportionality” in applying the three-strikes law has blossomed into what may be the single most serious difference between the two candidates.

He has proposed that his policy in San Fernando be expanded into a countywide standard, under which most cases involving nonviolent, nonserious third felonies would be handled as second strikes.

Garcetti has called for a much more stringent reading of the law. Even if the suspect has committed a relatively minor crime the third time around, he should be imprisoned under three strikes if he is a continuing danger to the community, he says.

As an example, Garcetti has pointed time and again to a hypothetical case of a violent gang member, with two violent prior felonies, who is caught stealing a compact disc from a record store.

In such a case, he tells audiences, “I’m going to use that law to protect you” by sending the gangster away for at least 25 years.

However, asked repeatedly for more than two weeks to provide a real-life example of a dangerous felon who has been sentenced justifiably on a third strike for a relatively minor crime, Garcetti’s campaign was unable to come up with a single case.

Public defenders, on the other hand, were quick to provide examples of third-strike prisoners prosecuted by Garcetti’s lawyers who had not shown themselves to be serious threats to the community.

Deputy Public Defender Irene Nunez described one client, Scott Benscoter, who is serving a 25-to-life sentence because he stole a pair of Nike sneakers from an outlet store. His prior felonies were both residential burglaries, neither involving violence, she said.

Deputy Public Defender Geralyn Busnardo cited several similar cases, including one involving a client, Arthur Gibson, 58, last arrested for a violent crime in the 1960s. She said he received 25-to-life for possession of rock cocaine.

Busnardo said she thought the district attorney’s office under Garcetti was abusing the three-strikes law.

“I just don’t believe that somebody who’s a petty thief or who’s a drug addict should spend the rest of their life in prison,” she said.

“That’s very Third Worldish to me. I don’t see where that separates us from the cultures that cut off people’s hands for stealing. At least those people are set free.”

But Garcetti has received substantial support from crime victims groups that endorse his application of the three-strikes law.

Bob Nicholas, president of Citizens for Law & Order Inc., a statewide victims rights group, said he didn’t “know of anything out of line” in the way Garcetti administered three strikes. “The evidence is a lack of evidence,” he said.

Garcetti Emphasizes Prevention Efforts

On the other side of the political spectrum, Garcetti also wins high marks from many in his office for what they consider his progressive reforms.

In particular, he has been praised for increasing the hiring and promotion of women, gays and lesbians, African Americans, Latinos, Asian Americans and others. And he has refocused the office, with a priority placed on crime prevention programs that he says are his greatest achievement.

These programs have aimed to keep children in school, teach them the rudiments of the criminal justice system, counsel them on tolerance, and inform women about the risks of “drug rape” and how to handle stalkers, among other things.

Cooley has argued, however, that Garcetti has never sought to determine whether the programs were actually achieving their goals. Officials running the programs have acknowledged that most of their evidence of success is anecdotal, and there has been no systematic effort to track the programs’ impact.

The incumbent’s bad blood with Cooley dates to 1995, when prosecutors struck a plea bargain with Brian John McMorrow, the grandson of a major Garcetti contributor, allowing him to receive a 16-month sentence for attempted vandalism.

McMorrow could have been eligible for a 25-years-to-life term under the three-strikes law had he been prosecuted for attempted arson, the crime for which he had been arrested.

Cooley, enraged, complained to the state attorney general, demanding an investigation. The attorney general’s office looked into the matter and said it could find no grounds for action against Garcetti.

But the McMorrow case turned two men who had been friendly, if distant, colleagues into sworn enemies. Cooley, along with a cadre of other senior prosecutors, began to decry other examples of what they considered to be Garcetti’s favoritism for wealthy campaign donors.

Cooley can recite the cases like a catechism: Guess Jeans, whose owners contributed $220,000 to Garcetti’s campaigns, and who were the beneficiaries of vigilant prosecutions for trademark infringement; Lockheed Martin IMS, which donated $15,000 to Garcetti just after being awarded a $2.5-million contract to run the D.A.’s child support enforcement computers; Robert Rosenkrantz, a killer from a prominent family whose parole Garcetti didn’t initially oppose; and the list goes on.

Garcetti has explanations for all of these purported examples of favoritism, although they haven’t mollified his critics. He considers Cooley and his supporters to be a crowd of disgruntled conservatives--mostly white, mostly male--who simply can’t tolerate the direction in which he has taken the office.

After Cooley strongly supported challenger John Lynch against Garcetti in the 1996 election, he was transferred--punitively, he believes--to what was a relative backwater, the Welfare Fraud Division downtown. There, working six floors beneath Garcetti’s executive office, he won praise for turning around a sleepy department and sharply increasing prosecutions.

But just as Garcetti never got over his demotion under Reiner, Cooley never forgave Garcetti for the transfer downtown or for what he considers the D.A.’s many lapses in office.