Groveman: Close Tainted Cases, Prosecute ‘Bad Apples’

Question: Why do we need a new D.A. in Los Angeles County?

Answer: Go tell senior citizens that crime is down. Go tell welfare recipients that crime is down. Go tell kids being intimidated by gangs at school that crime is down. And we ought to be focusing on the unserved felony warrants. At a time when crime is supposed to be down, why is it that the [number of] unserved felons in this county are on the rise? There are over 90,000 unserved felony warrants, and it’s been steadily increasing over the last four years.

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Q: What are the mechanisms to get the rate of serving up?

A: Well, first of all, it’s leadership. There are well over 200 investigators at the command of the district attorney’s office. I think they’re underutilized.

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Q: But does that apply now? When you’re going to need every one of those 200 investigators to resolve the hundreds of possibly tainted cases in the Rampart scandal?

A: Everything is about priorities. You know, there’s a Guess jeans prosecution unit going after counterfeit jeans. I think that’s less important than “roll-out” [a program whereby deputy district attorneys respond to scenes of police-involved shootings]. I think that’s less important than beefing up the Rampart number [of deputy district attorneys]. LAPD has 59 police officers assigned to the unserved felony warrant section. If you add six [D.A. investigators], that’s a dramatic increase. And we’re not talking about misdemeanor warrants here, and we’re not talking about traffic tickets. These are felony warrants. We can’t talk about crime rates if we don’t collect our unfinished business. There are communities where the crime rate will drop and social disorder will be relieved if people see that convicted felons or charged felons are arrested.

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Q: That’s not the business of sheriff’s deputies?

A: It’s the business of everybody. It’s the business of the D.A., the sheriff and the police to deal with problems that are not being solved.

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Q: Compared to your two opponents, you served in the D.A.’s office considerably less time. And you focused on environmental issues while you were there instead of the bread-and-butter criminal felonies. Can you explain why you’re more qualified than the other two?

A: I think I’m more qualified and uniquely qualified. First of all, I’ve spent almost 10 years as a prosecutor, in two offices. I prosecuted hundreds of cases, hundreds as a trial deputy, as a filing deputy, as a head of a division. I oversaw the filing of hundreds of cases. I tried well over 50 jury trials.

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Q: But that was in the city attorney’s office.

A: Yes.

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Q: Have you prosecuted a felony?

A: I didn’t try a felony in the [D.A.’s] office, but I’ve defended felonies on the outside. Just two years ago, I had a very complex felony trial against the office, an 18-count felony case. I’ve tried all those cases and I also led a very complex grand jury investigation in the D.A.’s office, the Wilco Dump scenario [a toxic waste dump discovered in Lynwood during excavation for the Century Freeway that cost the state $27 million to clean up]. But I won’t be trying cases in the D.A.’s office. Nor has Gil. We’ll be selecting the best people. And you can say the same thing about them in the sense that they probably never tried a child molestation case, which I’ve done, many of them. I guarantee they haven’t done an environmental crime, but yet they can pick the best lawyer to do the environmental crime. That’s what leadership is. Both of them have had experience in the office, but they’ve only had one job their entire professional career in the office. I have the experience of the insider, but I have the perspective of being on the outside. I understand how to manage a budget. I made a payroll.

The D.A.’s office is in discord. It has a total lack of leadership. The integrity issues in that office, the issues of training that I think are lax; you need not look much further than the case in the Valley where the drunk driving enhancement charge was not filed [against an eight-time drunk driver convicted of killing a 22-year-old in a traffic accident while intoxicated. The omission meant the defendant received a shorter sentence than he might have under a 1997 law aimed at repeat drunk drivers]. That’s serious to the people whose son was killed, and they forgot to file the enhancement.

The jailhouse informant scandal--Gil Garcetti was chief deputy, he was in senior management. This whole Rampart thing--he’s only one of many that could have fixed it, but he’s certainly one.

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Q: What exactly should the D.A. have done that he hasn’t done, and what should he do now?

A: In big law firms, you have risk managers. So this is unheard of to me, that after the Leslie White jailhouse scandal [in which an informant proved that he could concoct a believable murder confession from someone he had never met], that you wouldn’t have a practice for assessing the trial deputies on a regular basis. Look at Michael Kraut, a trial deputy. Two years ago, he had a narcotics case and he determined that [disgraced former LAPD Officer Rafael] Perez was not truthful. He dismissed the narcotics case two years ago. He filed a memo. He sent it upstairs. When police officers are found to be less than truthful, the practice is that the head deputy will go to the commander and say, “We’re not going to take any more cases from this police officer.” That’s inadequate. If that officer has been lying, those are perjury cases.

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Q: If you’re elected, you are going to be primarily responsible for resolving the Rampart cases. How will you figure out who’s lying, who’s not?

A: I have a crisis mentality when it comes to trial work and important issues. When a plane goes down, the Kennedy plane, EgyptAir, Alaska Air, it’s a terrible tragedy, but we expect that the Coast Guard and the Navy are going to find the black box, and they always do within 48 hours. I have that attitude about the way that office needs to perform. [On Rampart], we’re going to put a team on that’s going to assure the public that the two questions are resolved. First, nobody should remain incarcerated if they are under the stigma of a prosecution that the police chief has said is tainted. End of story. Second, prosecuting the bad apples. Much faster action is required. Within 90 days--I will commit to this--there’s going to be a decision on a police shooting. First, from the police officer’s standpoint, they shouldn’t be twisting in the wind. Second, from the public’s standpoint, Gil Garcetti has had a habit of waiting two years. Press dies down, the interest dies down. That’s nonsense.

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Q: You’ve talked about having assistant D.A.s present at police roll calls and instructing on points of conduct?

A: Yes. I want to see an ethics overhaul. I want to bring in somebody to do training, like Michael Josephson, whom I’ve known for 15 years at the Josephson Institute of Ethics. It’s not just about me giving you a guideline. It’s about me going through a colloquy with you. And I want to change the review practices on promotion. Because I’d like to be seen as somebody who will reward you for doing something ethically correct, even if it didn’t mean [a conviction] in the case.

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Q: The biggest criticism that we hear from some of your opponents is the grandstanding issue. That you’ll make [former Dist. Atty.] Ira Reiner look shy. That you desperately want public office and you’re an environmental lawyer who gets money from metal platers. How do you respond to those allegations?

A: I don’t know how to respond to that. A lot of that’s probably coming from Gil and Bill Carrick [Garcetti’s campaign spokesman]. I think you need to look into my history. [In] one history that you’re familiar with, because this paper has been very courageous in the last year or two with regard to tough decisions on Belmont, I wasn’t grandstanding.

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Q: What about the other questions about the campaign contributions?

A: These are not organized crime figures. First of all, it’s like $20,000 out of $500,000. These are clients, people I represented. I’m proud of it, and what you really need to look at is that I have done more in environmental protection in the last eight years in influencing these businesses to do the right thing than the current administration has done as prosecutors, plus I’ve been endorsed by the League of Conservation Voters. I wrote Proposition 65 [which requires public warnings to be posted when chemical hazards are present], and I’m proud that people thought I was a good lawyer and they want to contribute.

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Q: Proposition 21 on juvenile offenders--could you tell us what your position is?

A: Yes, I support it. I understand the arguments on both sides. Crime has gone down, but violent crime like gangs has not gone down. It’s gone up. Kids in L.A. Unified, according to surveys, are revealing that they see an increase in gang presence. And the type of crimes are getting worse. I thought, before I even saw Proposition 21 that, to do the job effectively, I wanted more tools. I wanted tools that would deal with gang recruitment and intimidation of kids. I wanted tools that would deal with crimes near schools. I wanted to be able to use wiretaps, because I think that’s the way you fight organized crime. And I think to break these gangs up, it’s necessary. And as far as the worst part the people find objectionable, which I’m not happy about, nobody will ever be happy about, 14-year-olds being automatically triable in adult court. These are really violent cases. You get to a point where the question is, is it only about rehabilitation with those few kids? And you get to another point. The juvenile justice system is overburdened, and it’s going to get worse as the demographics go up. The problem is that those kids that commit the worst crimes in the juvenile court system become the role models. And by the way, they will never be in an adult [prison] population, the law doesn’t allow it. They’ll just have to make different provisions in state facilities. So it’s about really trying to get the worst, most violent, heinous crime offenders off the street and concentrating on the rest of the kids.

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Q: You mentioned fairness. Are there areas where you think the district attorney’s office is too subject to influence, to playing favorites?

A: I have seen it, we’ve all seen it. I can make a difference. What I think would be fundamentally different is I would like to see some kind of an ethics officer who would have independent authority. Here’s how we might work: The D.A.s in the office are horrified because they think I would just interfere in a three-strikes case like [Brian John] McMorrow [in which the grandson of a Garcetti contributor received a 16-month prison term in a case that could have cost him life in prison] or Robert Rosenkrantz [in which the district attorney’s office did not oppose parole for a convicted murderer who used an assault weapon and whose father is a prominent Calabasas attorney] or all these others that are paraded out in front of the public and erode integrity. But if [an ethics officer] has the authority to investigate and can’t be fired, that person will go and check it out. I think that that independence [would] assure the office that [unethical interference] is not happening.

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Q: What do we do about the cases that we’ve seen in Ramparts where we read that so many people have been advised by their lawyer or public defender, you’d better plead guilty or else you’re going to do really big time. Are there better ways that the D.A. can protect people from that undue pressure?

A: Yes, two ways. Third-strike decisions have to be made much sooner because the holding of the third strike over a defendant’s head till the end of the matter is what leads to the extracting of the unfair plea. So one way is to make sure that the decision-making is done early in the process, so it is not a bargaining chip. The second one is, and I saw this many times, over-filing. I come in to your company, the L.A. Times and I say, I’ve caught you in a violation and we’re filing 30,000 counts. You could be innocent as the day is long, but you’ve got a problem now because it’s going to cost $1 million to defend that. And that’s abuse of discretion. Justice begins with the prosecutor and the decisions on filing. One fundamental principle: It is never about all you can do. It’s about all you should do.