Wednesday, March 1, 2000


Civil Rights Lawyers Form a Gathering Storm for L.A.


By HENRY WEINSTEIN, JIM NEWTON, LA Times Staff Writers

Just how great a problem Los Angeles will confront in defending itself
against lawsuits spawned by the Rampart police corruption scandal is
illustrated by a meeting held Saturday afternoon at Johnnie L. Cochran
Jr.'s mid-Wilshire law office.
Among the two dozen attorneys gathered at the 10th floor suite were
some of the city's most accomplished civil rights lawyers--including Mark
Rosenbaum of the American Civil Liberties Union and Connie Rice of the
Advancement Project--as well as a bevy of skilled veterans of the police
"brutality bar," including Cochran, R. Samuel Paz, Antonio Rodriguez and
Carol A. Watson, as well as Carol Sobel, who has spearheaded major
employment discrimination litigation against the LAPD.
While no formal agreements were concluded, the lawyers discussed how
they may use the courts and other means to bring about what they regard as
meaningful police reform, according to more than half a dozen attorneys at
the session. Cochran said he expected the group to meet again later this
month.
"If we band together, we can get a lot done," said Cochran, who filed
his first misconduct suit against the LAPD in 1965.
There already are more than 15 civil damages suits on file stemming
from the Rampart scandal, with many more expected. It also is possible that
there will be an attempt to consolidate those cases, though there are
difficult legal procedural hurdles to overcome. In addition, it appears
probable that lawsuits seeking structural reform of the LAPD will be filed.
The array of legal firepower convened by Cochran and Paz adds to the
city's mounting woes in the widening scandal. To a degree, the pooling of
resources parallels the entente forged between private plaintiff lawyers
and public prosecutors leading to multibillion-dollar settlements against
the historically invulnerable tobacco industry.
Some of the lawyers at the meeting, such as Gregory W. Moreno of
Montebello, already represent several Rampart victims, including Javier F.
Ovando, who was permanently crippled by Rampart officers. Law professors
Laurie Levenson of Loyola, a former federal prosecutor, and Erwin
Chemerinsky of USC, who has been asked by the Police Protective League to
formally critique the LAPD's internal inquiry report, offered other
expertise. Winston K. McKesson, the defense lawyer for Rafael Perez, the
former officer who is at the center of the scandal, also spoke at the
three-hour gathering.
Rodriguez said most of the people at the meeting have been battling
with the LAPD for years and hope that the Rampart scandal serves as the
catalyst for real change.
"This is a situation that is tailor-made for reform" because of the
breadth of the illegal police conduct already revealed, Rosenbaum said.
That the appropriate city officials failed to "clamp down" on the Police
Department, despite warnings from the Christopher Commission and community
leaders, made the Rampart scandal "the natural and foreseeable result,"
Rosenbaum said.
That contention may be debatable, but there is broad agreement that
the Rampart scandal is the worst in city history and that it will be very
costly.

Cases Called City Nightmare
Chief Deputy City Atty. Tim McOsker told the City Council in closed
session Feb. 2 that the city ultimately will have to pay as much as $125
million to settle lawsuits stemming from the 99 cases already conceded by
Chief Bernard C. Parks to have been tainted--a number that virtually all
observers expect to grow.
Significantly, attorneys with considerable experience in suing the
police and their adversaries who defend law enforcement are in rare
agreement that the Rampart-generated damage cases are a nightmare for the
city. To both sides of the aisle, they represent an entirely different
challenge than the city usually faces in defending police misconduct
allegations.
In the typical case, a plaintiff accuses an officer of mistreating him
in some way--often with few or no witnesses--and the trial becomes a
credibility battle. The police win most of them.
But in the Rampart cases, the plaintiffs will come into court under
dramatically different circumstances, said Rodriguez, who has filed two
Rampart-related suits. First of all, those cases, if they are not settled,
will come to court after months and months of publicity about Rampart
police lawlessness.
In some instances, the defendants will include an officer who has been
convicted of or charged with an array of crimes, including illegal
shootings, planting of evidence, falsifying police reports and, perhaps
worse, perjury. In other instances, the officer, even if not charged with a
crime, will have been fired or suspended from the department because of
misconduct.
Normally, when the city defends a police misconduct case, its arsenal
includes a credible client and the weight of the city attorney's office,
sometimes aided by private lawyers, lined up against attorneys from small
law firms.
"Here, you have the district attorney acknowledging that there was
wrongful, unlawful conduct that deprived someone of their civil rights.
From a plaintiff lawyer's perspective, you can't get a better situation,"
said Dan Stormer, a Los Angeles attorney who has won major police
misconduct cases but was not at the Saturday meeting.
Los Angeles attorney George Fransell, who has been defending police
officers for 40 years, agreed: "Absent a technicality, you will be left
with one issue--just how much damages." Added attorney Steven D. Manning,
who also specializes in representing law enforcement agencies: "If you have
a cop who has been fired for falsifying evidence, you have a big problem."
And Thomas D. Hokinson, who heads the city attorney's liability
division, said officers with criminal convictions could be "a real problem"
for the city in defending these cases.

City Has Possible Defenses
That is not to say that the city is without defenses or plans to
surrender. Already, the city attorney's office has filed papers saying that
some cases were filed too late to meet statute of limitations requirements.
Government lawyers may argue that the city's liability should be
limited because the plaintiffs have not proved a pattern and practice of
misconduct. However, as allegations of widespread wrongdoing continue to
mount, that contention may be difficult to sustain.
In some instances, the city may claim that an individual who had a
criminal record before the case at issue and no demonstrated earning power
is entitled to minimal damages for time spent in prison after being
incarcerated as a result of falsified evidence. The city also may argue
that the individual went to jail after pleading guilty upon the advice of a
defense lawyer.
Nonetheless, many lawyers said a number of the Rampart cases that,
according to both the district attorney and the police chief, involved
clearly illegal conduct would be worth more than than that of Rodney King.
He received $3.8 million in damages from the city stemming from a severe
beating by police officers in a case where his initial conduct--leading
police on a high-speed chase--was illegal and dangerous, said Paul Hoffman,
former legal director of the ACLU.
Hoffman contrasted the King case to that of Ovando, who was shot,
permanently crippled, framed for assaulting police and sentenced to 23
years in prison.
Although police say that Ovando is an 18th Street gang member, he had
no criminal record when he was shot. "That case is worth $25-$30 million
alone," said Hoffman, who has written law review articles on police
misconduct.
Among the other cases that could generate high damages is the one that
Paz filed on behalf of the family of Juan Saldana. That victim died in 1996
in one of three shootings in which former officer Perez says he or fellow
anti-gang CRASH officers in the Rampart Division unjustly wounded or killed
suspects. Perez has said that as Saldana lay bleeding to death in the
hallway of a Mid-City apartment building, officers delayed calling an
ambulance while they planted a gun near where he had fallen and concocted a
story to justify the shooting.
"The level of legal and moral culpability" in such a case is at "the
extreme end of the spectrum," said Hoffman, who was not at the meeting but
has been closely following the Rampart situation.
Some of the lawyers at the meeting are discussing how to fashion a
broad-gauged lawsuit that could play a role in changing LAPD practices. Two
federal court decisions issued in prior years--one in Los Angeles and one
in Philadelphia--place substantial hurdles in the way of lawyers seeking to
use the courts to achieve such a goal.
Nonetheless, Rosenbaum said he thought those rulings could be overcome
because of the sweep of police lawlessness already revealed. "This is not a
case of a few bad apples; it is the case of a poisonous tree," he said.

Chief's Statement Admissible in Court
Parks clearly would disagree. However, he already has told the City
Council that the LAPD was negligent in the way it hired and supervised
officers in recent years.
Some lawyers at the meeting said that statement, which would be
admissible in court, could provide significant ammunition to the claim of
plaintiffs' lawyers that the city had a pattern and practice of deliberate
indifference to officer misconduct. That could heighten the level of
damages that the city has to pay and buttress the argument that the LAPD
should be subjected to broad, court-ordered reforms, they say.
Moreover, the department's Board of Inquiry report on the scandal, in
which Parks states "we as an organization provided the opportunity" for
corrupt officers to carry out criminal acts, will further complicate the
city's legal position. The report cites failures from top to bottom,
including failures to check out the background of recruits, "a breakdown"
in front-line supervision and failures to monitor officer misconduct.
Any coalition that emerges from the meeting apparently will not
include one of the area's most prominent police misconduct lawyers--Stephen
Yagman of Venice, who already has filed several Rampart-related cases but
was not invited to the meeting. Yagman and Cochran have been at odds for
years and there is no prospect that they will work together, although the
two frequently have leveled similar criticisms of the LAPD.
Santa Monica attorney Brian Lysaght, whose firm specializes in complex
civil litigation, said the firm is looking into the possibility of filing a
Rampart-related class-action suit. Lysaght acknowledged that because the
Rampart victims had suffered a variety of injuries, it might be difficult
to form a class that would comport with the federal rules of civil
procedure, but he said he did not think this is an insurmountable obstacle.


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