D.A. Releases Names in Cases Tied to Probe

In a development that may expand the legal scope of the burgeoning Los Angeles Police Department corruption scandal, the district attorney’s office on Wednesday gave attorney Steven Yagman the names of several thousand people who were convicted in cases in which Rampart Division officers had at least some role.

Yagman plans to post all the names on his law office Web site (https://www.yagmanlaw.net), perhaps as early as today, he said in an interview.

The district attorney’s office turned over the list in response to a court action Yagman filed under the state’s public records law late last year.

Deputy Dist. Atty. R. Daniel Murphy, who heads the office’s Rampart task force, agreed to give Yagman a list of cases involving 14 officers who have been linked to the corruption scandal.

In addition, the district attorney’s office gave Yagman a list of cases involving 13 other officers from other LAPD divisions who also are alleged to have engaged in misconduct. Yagman said that the district attorney turned over a total of 179 pages, with 55 cases on a page. He said that of the 9,845 cases on the list, about 5,000 involved the 14 Rampart officers.

There is no way to know at this point how many of those cases are tainted. The list provides only a case number, the last name of the defendant, the last name of the officer and the date of conviction. No one, including vigorous defense lawyers, believes that all the cases are tainted. In December, Dist. Atty. Gil Garcetti said it would take many months, perhaps years, to fully unravel the Rampart scandal.

The district attorney declined to give Yagman its files on five cases that are part of the Rampart scandal. Yagman is representing people in each of those cases in lawsuits alleging that their federal civil rights were violated.

Posting the thousands of names on a public Web site may yield new clients for Yagman--who specializes in police misconduct cases--but, more important, the move may inform many people for the first time that they have a chance of getting their convictions overturned or even winning civil damages for wrongful incarceration.

On the other hand, the move may not have a huge impact in the short term because most of the individuals are low-income people--including a number in prison--who are unlikely to own computers, said Cathy Dreyfuss, who heads the Los Angeles County Bar Assn.’s Indigent Criminal Defense Appointments Program.

Officials’ handling of the list already has become an issue in the district attorney’s race, with challenger Steve Cooley promising that, if elected, he would open the prosecutors’ files on all Rampart-related cases to defense attorneys and not merely provide a list of names.

“We need to start exercising full disclosure with opposing counsel. [The district attorney] has the information; they’re just not letting it out.”

However, district attorney’s office spokeswoman Sandi Gibbons rejected Cooley’s proposal: “To suggest that all the files be thrown open, without them first being examined to determine if there are any investigations underway, or if disclosure might threaten someone’s life and for other reasons, is not the way we conduct business,” she said.

But Dreyfuss leveled criticism similar to Cooley’s: “There is no way to know from these lists what the officer’s involvement was in the case,” because the list is simply a list of every officer who was subpoenaed to testify in a given case. For example, Dreyfuss said, an officer could be on a list for a particular case simply because he drove the defendant from the place where he was arrested to the police station.

On Wednesday, Gibbons reiterated the office’s position that it is complying fully with its disclosure obligations under California law. The state Public Records Act contains a broad exemption from revealing information about ongoing law enforcement investigations.

In any case, Yagman’s move is likely to generate a host of calls to the Los Angeles County public defender’s office from its former clients on the list, according to Robert Kalunian, the chief assistant public defender. The office represents 80% to 85% of all criminal defendants in Los Angeles County.

The public defender’s office has formally opposed giving Yagman the list on several grounds. The office contends, among other things, that making the names public would violate its clients’ privacy rights. Although all the individuals were involved in cases that are technically a matter of public record, many of them are unknown to the public because their cases received no publicity, said Public Defender Michael Judge.

The office contended in legal papers filed in response to a Public Records Act request from Yagman that “the public defender cannot deal with the flood of phone calls and letters from those on the list.”

The public defender also maintained in court papers that if the expected flood of phone calls materializes, it will delay the office’s investigation into possibly tainted Rampart cases. Yagman has been in a heated battle with the public defender’s office, contending that the office is not doing all it can to help incarcerated individuals discover that recourse may be available to them. Judge has said that simply is not true.

The Rampart scandal has been growing since September. It took a big jump this week. On Tuesday, a Los Angeles Superior Court judge overturned the convictions of 10 people who allegedly were framed by officers from the LAPD’s Rampart Division, bringing to 23 the number of cases that have been thrown out. Judge Larry Fiddler acted in response to motions filed by the district attorney’s office, which is continuing to investigate the Rampart matter.

Garcetti said three dozen other cases are under active review and may be overturned because they were tainted by false testimony and the planting of evidence.

Until now, all the cases that have been voided came in response to motions lodged by the district attorney’s office. However, Kalunian, the chief assistant public defender, said that one of those thrown out this week on a district attorney’s motion came in response to a public defender telling the district attorney he planned to launch a court action to get one of the defendants freed.

Late last year, the district attorney gave the public defender’s office a list of 3,000 cases in which officers involved in the Rampart scandal were subpoenaed to testify. Two of those officers, including Rafael Perez, the policeman at the center of the scandal, have resigned, two were fired, two were relieved of duty and eight have been assigned to their homes.

The district attorney has given more limited lists to Dreyfuss of the Los Angeles County Bar Assn., whose indigent defense program represents defendants in cases in which the public defender is unable to serve as counsel because of a legal conflict, and to the alternate public defender’s office.

After getting the list of names, public defenders and the private lawyers have been checking their own files to see if they think any of those cases ought to be reopened. Kalunian, Dreyfuss and alternate public defender Bruce Hoffman have said it is very difficult to assess the merits of reopening the cases without more information.

Kalunian said he could not say how many cases the office has reviewed so far or how many former clients have been notified. It is not clear how many of the clients already have served their terms or are still in prison. Some were illegal immigrants who were deported after getting out of prison.

Kalunian and Judge said the review process clearly is very cumbersome and consuming considerable resources of the public defender’s office. Judge said he has concluded that the office will need at least three lawyers to run “a triage operation” to review the cases.

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Times staff writers Peter Hong and Matt Lait contributed to this story.