Judge Removed From Case Over Remark

A Los Angeles federal judge has been removed from a criminal case because of a remark he made questioning the credibility of defendants who choose to take the witness stand.

During a pretrial conference in his chambers Feb. 1, U.S. District Judge J. Spencer Letts told defense lawyers and prosecutors:

“In my experience, innocent people, such as there are, don’t testify. Guilty people do often. Innocent people don’t because, by definition, there is a hole in the government’s case.”

Moments later, according to the court transcript, Letts caught himself, telling the assembled lawyers, “What I just said, I want to take back because they [the defendants in the case] may be contemplating testifying. . . . I don’t prejudge that they can’t be telling the truth.”

But the damage was already done.

Acting on a defense motion, fellow U.S. District Judge Florence-Marie Cooper took the highly unusual step of removing Letts for the appearance of bias.

In her ruling Friday Cooper wrote that Letts’ remark “would create a reasonable doubt in the mind of the average person” about his impartiality.

Cooper also discounted Letts’ “somewhat ambiguous” subsequent statements, in which he tried to take back his comment.

Letts, a federal judge for 16 years, declined to comment Tuesday on his removal from the bankruptcy fraud case against John and Letantia Bussell, married physicians from Beverly Hills.

As a result of his disqualification, the case has been reassigned through a random selection procedure to Chief U.S. District Judge Terry J. Hatter Jr. The Bussells’ trial had been scheduled to start March 27, but it is now expected to be delayed.

This is not the first time that Letts has been embroiled in controversy.

In 1999, without admitting any wrongdoing, he removed himself from hearing a major lawsuit against the Los Angeles Police Department after being accused of making hostile remarks about police officers.

Lawyers for the city accused Letts of having told the mayor of Torrance: “Police officers always lie. The officers that are good at lying get away with it, and the ones who aren’t get caught.”

In a written opinion, replete with expressions of personal hurt, Letts accused the city’s lawyers of effectively hounding him off the LAPD case “through the use of things taken out of context, omissions and outright falsehoods.” Three previous attempts to disqualify him from the case had failed.

When he finally stepped down from the case, Letts said the bias allegations were “calculated to produce extraordinary waste of lawyer and judicial resources” and to “deflect attention away from the true issues of the case.”

In the Bussell case, defense attorneys Nathan Hochman, Bryan Altman and Peter Morris said Letts “could not have been clearer that he views people who testify as guilty and not innocent.”

They said the Bussells had planned to take the stand in their own defense, but felt intimidated from doing so after reading a transcript of Letts’ remarks during the Feb. 1 in-chambers meeting.

“The Bussells’ ability to decide to testify has thus been compromised,” the defense lawyers argued.

The Beverly Hills couple are charged in a 17-count indictment with concealing millions of dollars in assets when they filed for personal bankruptcy in 1995.

Morris said Tuesday that he and his co-counsel were “shocked” when they heard Letts’ comment. “Judge Cooper’s decision recusing Judge Letts was a true act of justice,” he said.

Assistant U.S. Attys. Paul G. Stern and Ranee A. Katzenstein, who are prosecuting the Bussells, argued in a lengthy brief that Letts’ remark did not warrant his removal from the case.

“Read in its full context,” they contended, “Judge Letts’ statement hardly shows bias or partiality, let alone deep-seated antagonism” for the defendants.

Letts, 66, was appointed to the federal court by President Ronald Reagan in 1985. A graduate of Harvard Law School, he worked as a corporate lawyer before his appointment to the bench.