Jurors Begin Deliberations in Rampart Officers’ Trial

The evidence is in, the judge has instructed the jury on the law, and the lawyers have had their last word. Now it’s up to a jury to decide whether the first criminal charges to arise from the Rampart police corruption scandal will stick.

An ethnically diverse jury of five Latinos, two Filipinas, two whites and three African Americans was given the case by Superior Court Judge Jacqueline Connor late Wednesday afternoon after nearly two days of final arguments from lawyers on both sides. Jurors deliberated for an hour before adjourning for the day.

The trial, now in its fourth week, gave the seven women and five men on the jury a glimpse into gang life and culture--as well as the LAPD’s inner workings, including its mounds of paperwork and bureaucracy, its tactics and a bond among officers that is so strong, prosecutors contend, that a code of silence hampered them in their attempts to prove a corruption case.

The trial also exposed a deep resentment some officers harbor toward the district attorney’s office for filing charges against the defendants: Sgts. Edward Ortiz, 44, and Brian Liddy, 39, and Officers Paul Harper, 33, and Michael Buchanan, 30. They are accused of conspiring to obstruct justice by framing gang members and lying on police reports and in court.

“This is not right,” said one officer called by the prosecution to testify against his colleagues. Other officers acknowledged friendships with the defendants. And nearly all the LAPD witnesses that prosecutors called had memory lapses when asked about events that occurred more than four years ago.

The prosecution says the officers were following the code of silence.

The defense, however, says the witnesses didn’t see or hear anything because they arrived too late at crime scenes or were too far away from the action to notice it.

The charges were filed based on the confessions of rogue officer Rafael Perez. But Perez was not called as a witness because he said he would take the 5th Amendment and refuse to answer questions about murders that a former girlfriend has told police he participated in.

“Wouldn’t you have felt a lot better if he’d come in [to testify]?” Harper defense attorney Joel Isaacson asked jurors as he went over a litany of evidence that he said was lacking. “They didn’t even bring him in.”

Without the testimony of Perez--and of five civilians whom prosecutors were barred from calling because their status as potential witnesses was improperly concealed from the defense until the eve of trial--the prosecution largely seemed to boil down to a case of whom jurors believed: police officers, or gang members and their associates.

In a reversal of usual positions, prosecutors urged jurors to believe gang members such as Raul Munoz, whom officers Buchanan and Liddy are accused of framing.

The officers accused Munoz and a companion of deliberately running into them with a pickup truck in a Los Feliz alley in their haste to flee a 1996 police raid. Munoz and the companion pleaded guilty to the attack--Munoz explaining in court that even his own defense attorney had not believed him when he proclaimed his innocence. The other gang member, Cesar Natividad, did not testify. Their convictions were overturned after Perez said they were framed.

In her final argument to the largely middle-class jury, whose members range in age from 23 to 57, Deputy Dist. Atty. Anne Ingalls tried to take apart Buchanan’s and Liddy’s account of the pickup truck incident.

She ridiculed Liddy’s testimony that he saw the pickup hit Buchanan, then come at him, but did not fire his drawn gun because he was afraid of missing the truck and hitting innocent people. “If Buchanan really had been hit,” she said, “Liddy would have filled that truck full of holes.”

Grappling with the difficulty of proving a negative--that Buchanan was not hit by the truck--Ingalls cited for jurors the testimony of another police officer, gang members and gang associates who said they had seen the truck moving in the alley but had not seen it hit Buchanan or Liddy. She argued that common sense says they would have seen such remarkable events.

Presenting herself as an embodiment of quiet reason, Ingalls humanized herself by introducing details of her personal life, such as: “I’m married to a cop. . . . I have a lot of pride in any cop who puts on his uniform and tries to do the right thing.”

Where, she asked, did the officers start to go wrong?

She then ran through a number of possibilities, asking if they had started by fudging probable cause to stop a car, saying that its taillight was out or that there was some other defect when all they were really operating on was a hunch. Or did they start by saying that someone had given them permission to search a home when they had not?

She said she understood how frustrating it would be for police officers trying to bust gang members to have cases against the gang members thrown out of court for legal technicalities, and how that might inspire police to cheat to make sure it did not happen again.

She suggested that such behavior might be subtly encouraged by a Police Department overly concerned about arrest and case-filing statistics and that it might be especially easy to get away with in the neighborhoods policed by Rampart officers, where many residents are recent Central American immigrants who bring a fear of police with them from their countries.

She suggested that some of the officers might simply have been irritated by gang members who defied them by running--displaying, as she put it, “contempt of cop.” She said she too wanted to “get” gang members, even naming several who figured in the trial. “But let’s get them fair and square.

“We fear gang members,” she said. “But we should fear dishonest cops. These defendants are guilty.”