Rampart Trial Magnifies the Justice System’s Flaws

The Rampart trial is in its second week now. The standing-room-only crowd has thinned out. Any citizen with a passing interest could have stopped by the Criminal Courts Building the other day and gotten a ringside seat at Los Angeles’ latest criminal justice implosion. Few bothered, which was too bad. Rampart is something every citizen should look at, up close.

Every citizen should, for instance, get a gander at the similarity between the selective memory loss, under oath, of police officers and that of gang members. Every citizen should see, also, the various incarnations of that term, “gang member,” as defined by police. The “gang members” called so far have ranged from a federal prison inmate to a little mustachioed man named Mervin Sanchez who has a clean record and works the graveyard shift at a Ralphs in Palm Springs.

Every citizen should check out Superior Court Judge Jacqueline A. Connor, who has excluded five (count ‘em) witnesses to alleged police corruption. On this afternoon, she was adjusting her reading glasses and considerately remembering that the defense needed to come in late the following day. Connor, like the biggest chunk of the judiciary in this “tough-on-crime” era, is an ex-prosecutor. Depending on your perspective, her solicitousness toward the defense has been either that rarest of entities--true presumption of innocence--or a glimpse of the tenderness with which judges now tend to view cops in L.A.

And every citizen should see the accused cops in person--two clean-cut young officers, two veteran sergeants (one red-faced and thick-necked, one graying and trim). It was said that they all had bad colds. They shifted in their seats and passed notes to their lawyers and blew their noses and exchanged meaningful glances. The charges against them are a banal assortment of alleged conspiracies and corner-cutting frame-jobs featuring people with names like “Termite” and “Tiny” and “Diablo” and “Frosty.” The jury, when it wasn’t nodding off, kept squinting in confusion.

“The fat dude told me that if I didn’t snitch, he was going to put a gun on me,” a shackled PCP addict named “Chano” testified at one point, nodding toward Sgt. Brian Liddy. Depending on your perspective, his account either was Rampart in a nutshell or a lowlife’s con job. The exquisite discomfort of wondering just what, here, was the whole truth should have been shared by every citizen.

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Some of this trial’s murkiness stems from the absence of Rampart’s notorious star witness, Rafael Perez, who, as it now turns out, probably won’t testify. Something about some bodies in Tijuana that wouldn’t be covered by his grant of immunity should they be brought up in the courtroom. Something about the possibility, if he took the 5th, of a mistrial.

It was Perez who fingered his former compadres in the LAPD’s anti-gang unit, who snitched on the four men who sat sniffling in court this week. The other witnesses were there, more or less, to corroborate his claim that the defendants planted a loaded gun in the car trunk of one gangbanger, falsely accused two others of trying to run them down with a pickup and capped a gang sweep by pressing a handcuffed homeboy’s fingertip onto a recovered gun.

Without Perez, the case has crumbled. Legally speaking, it seems bound for an acquittal, at least in the state courts. But civically, its sheer murkiness speaks volumes about the gap between the simplistic rhetoric of criminal justice and its reality. Look, the courtroom scene says. Get an eyeful of what “tough-on-crime” comes down to in practice. Which are the “good guys”? Which are the “bad guys”? How can you tell?

Of course, most citizens don’t want that eyeful. They are getting tired and scared of Rampart. It is the alarm that won’t stop ringing, the brush fire that won’t be contained. Whether Perez’s confessions are ever proved in their entirety seems almost beside the point now. Rampart has revealed the shame in our paranoia, exposed more than we want to see of law enforcement’s vast, weak, neglected middle. It is the payback for all those years of wedge politics and facile “toughness” and cheap rhetoric.

The public has always known there’s a price to be paid for sending the message that the end justifies the means in certain quarters. People know who ultimately was responsible for lengthening the watchdog’s leash. The charges pending this week in the criminal courthouse may never be proved. But they’d never have been brought had we, the citizens, been guilt-free.

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Shawn Hubler’s column appears Mondays and Thursdays. Her e-mail address is shawn.hubler@latimes.com.