L.A. County Settles Suit by Legal Newspaper

Los Angeles County decided Monday to pay $40,000 to a legal newspaper to settle a lawsuit against the district attorney’s office over a 2002 search warrant that investigators executed at the paper’s downtown Los Angeles headquarters.

The search, part of a broad probe into corruption allegations involving the city of South Gate, shut down the Metropolitan News-Enterprise for three hours and drew fire from 1st Amendment experts.

Roger M. Grace, the paper’s owner and editor, sued Dist. Atty. Steve Cooley, alleging that the search warrant was too broad and that Cooley libeled him in a statement saying Grace “refused to cooperate” with a judge’s order.

As part of the settlement, Grace said, the district attorney’s office agreed to tighten its policy on searching media-owned businesses. The new policy, he said, limits searches to cases in which documents were evidence of a crime committed by the person who possesses them or involved classified documents or child pornography.

“What happened on May 2, 2002, could not happen again,” Grace said. “They simply failed to follow the law, which is rather shameful on the part of the district attorney’s office. They should have known better.”

Although Cooley has long defended his office’s handling of the case, Grace released a statement signed by the district attorney that acknowledged “less intrusive methods could have been used.”

A district attorney’s spokeswoman declined to comment.

Officials with the district attorney’s office had argued that investigators had properly obtained a judge’s permission to retrieve evidence that would show whether a law firm had paid for a legal notice in the paper about a South Gate recall election.

In August 2003, a Los Angeles County Superior Court judge dismissed Grace’s libel claim.

But county lawyers acknowledged in a memo to the county claims board that a judge might still “find the scope of the search warrant too broad.” They estimated that Grace could be awarded as much as $81,000, including attorney’s fees, if he won.

Also on Monday, the claims board approved a $70,000 settlement of a lawsuit involving a March 2004 shooting in Carson by sheriff’s deputies.

Ricardo Oliva was shot while working on a building near the scene of a fatal shooting involving sheriff’s deputies. Deputies saw Oliva, a roofer, and mistook a mop he was using on a roof for a weapon, county attorneys wrote in a memo to the claims board.

“The sheriff’s deputies, believing Mr. Oliva was a sniper involved in the shooting that had just occurred, fired at him, striking him twice in the arm,” wrote Assistant County Counsel Roger Granbo.