New Venue Is Possible in Rampart Case

A Superior Court judge Thursday suggested that the entire Los Angeles bench might have to be barred from presiding over the resolution of criminal charges against four police officers in the Rampart scandal.

Judge Larry Fidler said he was prepared to disqualify all Los Angeles County judges from hearing the case.

He noted that a former deputy district attorney, who is now a judge, is listed by the prosecution as a possible witness to acts allegedly committed by two of the four officers. The four officers have been charged with conspiring to obstruct justice by framing people they arrested.

Fidler, the supervising criminal court judge, suggested that it might be inappropriate to ask one Los Angeles judge to evaluate the credibility of another who was testifying as a witness.

He told defense attorneys representing the officers that he would grant a recusal motion if they made one.

The attorneys seemed taken aback. None took him up on the offer immediately. All said they wanted time to evaluate it.

Disqualification of the county-wide bench happens from time to time--50 times in Los Angeles in the last year, state court officials said. A similar conflict of interest arose, for example, in the case of former Black Panther Party leader Geronimo Pratt during his successful effort to overturn his murder conviction. A key witness at Pratt’s hearing was the deputy district attorney who had prosecuted him and later became a judge. Like most where conflicts arise, Pratt’s case was transferred to an Orange County judge.

Shifting the case to Orange County could place it in the hands of a more conservative group of jurors and perhaps a more conservative judge.

Just how that would affect the case is unclear. In Pratt’s case, a conservative Orange County jurist freed him.

Rather than focus on the court’s invitation to switch jurisdictions, the defense attorneys spent their court time Thursday on a procedural battle. They raised a ruckus about the way the district attorney’s office revised the list of charges against three of the officers, and added a fourth officer-defendant to the case.

Defense attorneys alleged that the prosecutors had a nefarious purpose in revising the case: to delay a preliminary hearing and what the defense contends would be inevitable dismissals for lack of evidence. Defense attorneys charged the prosecution wants the delay until after November’s election so that Dist. Atty. Gil Garcetti, who is running for a third term, will not lose face.

The case prosecutor, Deputy Dist. Atty. Laura Laesecke, strongly disputed that, saying it was her decision to file the superseding complaint. “I’m not running for election. I’m not doing this for the benefit of anyone,” she said, adding that she decided to consolidate new charges with old for the sake of efficiency.

The probable effect of adding new charges, both sides conceded, would be to delay a preliminary hearing for months as the attorney for new defendant Michael Buchanan comes up to speed.

Barry Levin, the attorney for Sgt. Edward Ortiz, said that his client, even though free on his own recognizance, had a right to have his preliminary hearing go forward as scheduled Tuesday so that he could clear his name. A defendant in California has a right to demand a preliminary hearing within 10 days of being charged.

The chief witness against Ortiz, former Rampart CRASH officer Rafael Perez, is not expected to testify at the preliminary hearing, Levin noted. Instead, prosecutors have said in court that they intend to take advantage of a commonly used constitutional amendment, approved by voters a decade ago, that permits law enforcement officers to provide hearsay testimony at preliminary hearings. That would allow someone familiar with Perez’s statements to testify about them without exposing Perez himself to cross-examination unless and until the case reaches trial.

Although they won’t have Perez himself to kick around, defense attorneys boasted that they will still be able to undermine him. “This is an extremely weak prosecution case that we believe cannot get by a preliminary hearing,” Levin said.

Another judge, Michael E. Pastor, who was set to handle the preliminary hearing Tuesday, seemed irked that prosecutors were upsetting a schedule that had been difficult to arrange. He denied the prosecution’s motion to substitute a new criminal complaint against the officers, filed this week, for the original complaints. He said he was considering ordering prosecutors to hold preliminary hearings on both complaints.

Complaints About Bail

In the midst of the procedural squabbling, some details emerged that hint at the high emotional and financial toll the case is already taking on defendants.

Defense attorneys complained that their clients have lost thousands of dollars in nonrefundable bail bond fees because the district attorney’s office, knowing that they would be freed on their own recognizance ultimately, nonetheless made them post bail to gain their initial releases from custody.

“I have personal and secondhand knowledge of the proceedings in these cases being used in [an] extremely, almost violent . . . extortionist manner,” said attorney Paul DePasquale, who represents Sgt. Brian Liddy. He said he was referring not only to punitive initial bails but to the harsh and embarrassing manner in which search warrants and arrest warrants had been executed.

Prosecutor Laesecke, alluding to the search warrant served on Liddy’s home, observed: “It’s unfortunate that Mr. Liddy answered the door in his boxers” and was belligerent and that an intoxicated male relative was present. She said that authorities treated the officers the same way they treat every criminal suspect.

Laesecke opposed a defense motion to release Buchanan on his own recognizance. She said she had evidence that the officer, who is currently free on $125,000 bail, had made a terrorist threat against an LAPD officer who was investigating him. She said a civilian heard him making statements “to the effect, ‘Let’s get Greg, drag him down here and use his head as a footstool.’ ”

Pastor delayed a decision on Buchanan’s bail.

The judge whose testimony could lead to the disqualification of the entire Los Angeles bench is former Deputy Dist. Atty. Mark Arnold. He allegedly received false statements from Buchanan and Liddy as he interviewed them in 1996 to prepare to try two men they claimed had assaulted them. The men were convicted but have since had their convictions reversed.

After that case was finished, Arnold was named a judge in what was known until January as the Torrance Municipal Court. Then the Torrance court and the more than two dozen other Municipal Courts in Los Angeles County were consolidated into one administrative entity known as Los Angeles Superior Court.

“We have one unified court,” Fidler said. “If we are called upon to make a credibility finding on one of our own, we’re not going to do it”--if asked to refrain by the defense.

Fidler also Thursday granted a writ of habeas corpus petition filed by the district attorney’s office to reverse the 1997 rock cocaine sale conviction of Glenda Velasquez, 27.

Facing a possible sentence of more than six years in prison, Velasquez had pleaded guilty to selling the drug to Perez’s then-partner, Officer Nino Durden, in return for a sentence of six months in jail and three years on probation.

Case came to light when Perez, seeking to win himself a reduced sentence for stealing cocaine from a police locker, began to reveal information about himself and his former colleagues. He told authorities that Velasquez had been framed.

Squez became the 85th person to have a conviction set aside in the Rampart scandal at the request of the district attorney’s office, and about the 100th overall.

She was not in court to hear the good news. She had stopped reporting to probation authorities in 1998 and a bench warrant had been issued for her arrest. Her attorney said he did not know where she was. Fidler canceled the warrant.