Bar Launches Probe on Use of Jail Informants

The State Bar of California has opened an investigation into whether Los Angeles County prosecutors have used the testimony of jailhouse informants known to have been unreliable, officials said Tuesday.

The law requires that an attorney call only witnesses he believes are telling the truth, officials said.

Trev Davis, the Bar’s assistant chief trial counsel, said the organization began its investigation in response to recent newspaper accounts that an informant had been used repeatedly as a witness by Los Angeles deputy district attorneys, despite his reputation as unreliable.

That informant, Leslie White, recently demonstrated that while in jail he could gather enough information about a murder case to implicate a defendant he had never met.

White gathered the information over a jail telephone by persuading law enforcement authorities that he was a prosecutor or a police officer.

In response, the Los Angeles County district attorney’s office this month began its own extraordinary review of every case in the last decade in which one inmate testified that another had confessed to him in jail.

Davis identified the central question of the Bar’s inquiry as follows: “Is the thrust of getting a conviction so great that you go out and use someone (as a witness) whom you know to be unreliable?”

She said Bar officials are “really concerned” that if such practices were followed, wrongful convictions could have resulted.

She said Bar officials had no evidence of such occurrences.

“It’s really premature to even talk about it,” Davis said, predicting that the investigation would be a long one.

She said Bar investigators have just begun to learn which informants have been used, in what cases, which deputy district attorneys used them and what was known about the informants’ backgrounds.

James Bascue, who as chief trial counsel is Davis’ boss, removed himself from the probe because he is a senior Los Angeles County deputy district attorney on long-term loan to the State Bar, officials said.