Prosecutor Urges Jurors to Believe Gang Members

In a rare role reversal, a prosecutor in the Rampart police corruption case urged jurors on Monday to believe the word of gang members over Los Angeles police officers.

“Gang members may scare you,” Deputy Dist. Atty. Laura Laesecke told the panel during closing arguments in Los Angeles Superior Court. “What should scare you even more is dishonest cops.”

“Just putting on a uniform and wearing a badge and driving a patrol car doesn’t make a person trustworthy and honest,” she added. “You have seen to some extent in this courtroom how dishonest cops can manipulate the system and twist the truth so that it is unrecognizable.”

Sgts. Edward Ortiz, 44, and Brian Liddy, 39, and Officers Paul Harper, 33, and Michael Buchanan, 30, are charged with conspiring to obstruct justice. They are accused of framing gang members by planting evidence and lying on police reports after gang sweeps in April and July 1996.

“Dishonest cops. Those are harsh words,” she continued, telling jurors that the four suspended Rampart CRASH officers on trial had “lost their moral compass.” The defendants, she argued, abused their power and the public’s trust when “they began to think of themselves as above the law.”

The case is expected to go the the jury today after the four defense attorneys complete their arguments. Some court observers say that prosecutors have already won a victory of sorts by stalling the verdict until after the votes for district attorney have been cast. Their boss, incumbent Dist. Atty. Gil Garcetti, is trailing in a tough race to keep his office and could ill afford what legal observers believe would be another high-profile loss on the eve of the election.

Laesecke, a former hard-core gang prosecutor, told the jurors that the gang members who testified for the prosecution were more worthy of belief than the officers who arrested them.

“Who are our witnesses? They are gang members,” Laesecke acknowledged, unable to tell the jurors that legal complications had stripped her witness list of rogue officer Rafael Perez and four female eyewitnesses with no gang ties or criminal records.

“As bad as gang members are, what should scare you more is dishonest cops,” she said during a two-hour closing argument that continues today.

“When a gang member walks in here, dressed in baggy clothes with tattoos and a shaved head, you know what you’re buying into,” the prosecutor added. “A dishonest cop--how do you tell a dishonest cop from all the others?”

Calling corrupt officers “a cancer,” Laesecke told the jurors, “You’ve got to take out the bad to let the system work.” She argued that the defendants, who worked together in Rampart’s elite CRASH unit, were guilty both of fudging the facts and completely fabricating events.

She noted that the case had placed her in a difficult position--proving that the officers’ version of events did not occur.

“How do you prove that something didn’t happen?” she asked. “It’s the lack of evidence that proves something in this case.”

She was talking about a string of prosecution witnesses--police and gang members--who testified that they did not see Buchanan and Liddy struck by a pickup driven by “Prieto” and “Joker,” gang members fleeing an April 26, 1996, raid of a gang meeting. Nor, in a separate incident, did other officers and gang members see Allan “Clever” Lobos run with a gun as Rampart CRASH officers swept a July 19, 1996, parking lot memorial service for a gunned-down gangster named “Frosty.”

But absent from the prosecution’s case was star witness Perez, 33, a disgraced Rampart CRASH officer who was caught stealing about $1 million worth of evidence cocaine and turned informant in exchange for more lenient treatment. Perez was never called to testify after his lawyer said he would refuse to answer questions about a former girlfriend’s accusation that he and onetime partner David Mack had killed drug dealers and buried their bodies in Mexico.

The last testimony jurors heard involved a common act of youthful deception by one of the defendants. Prosecutors produced a copy of a fake identification card that Buchanan had obtained 11 years ago, when he was 19.

Introduction of the fake ID card was intended to impeach Buchanan’s credibility. “You lied?” Deputy Dist. Atty. Anne Ingalls asked sharply.

“I sure did,” Buchanan responded.

He acknowledged that he used the fake ID to “partake of some of the privileges” of being 21; in other words, to get into nightclubs. He testified that he disclosed during a background check when he was hired by the LAPD that he used a fake ID.

Under questioning by his attorney, Harland W. Braun, Buchanan testified that the information never was given to any defense attorneys during the 100 or so criminal trials in which he testified for the prosecution.

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RAMPART LITIGATION

A deal would settle 29 Rampart suits for total of $10.9 million. B2