By Linda Deutsch, The Associated Press
LOS ANGELES (AP) - Five years after the Rampart scandal shook the Los Angeles Police Department, the last three officers remaining from the only trial held had their charges dismissed after prosecutors said they could no longer proceed.
Deputy District Attorney Anne Ingalls told Superior Court Judge Kathleen Kennedy-Powell that the prosecution was unable to retry Sgts. Brian Liddy and Edward Ortiz and former Officer Michael Buchanan, whose convictions four years ago were overturned and sent back for a new trial.
Kennedy-Powell then dismissed the charges.
“The case should have never been filed,” said attorney Harland Braun who represents Buchanan. “The tremendous pressure of the Rampart scandal pushed the district attorney to file a case.”
A district attorney’s official, Janet Moore, said after years of lingering in appeals courts, the case was no longer viable.
“We really feel that a dismissal was in the best interest of justice,” said Moore, director of the district attorney’s Bureau of Specialized Prosecutions.
She said there were “witness difficulties” now that did not exist before. Some witnesses have vanished, some are incarcerated, and others “have continued to engage in actions that could affect their credibility.”
In addition, she said, some witnesses have been compensated through resolution of civil suits, another matter jurors would consider in weighing credibility.
“We were not in as sound an evidentiary position as we were four years ago,” Moore said. “We took that reality and balanced it against positive outcomes. We did expose corruption in the LAPD, and they took corrective measures. There is extensive oversight now.”
The dismissal was the last gasp of a scandal that once involved the investigation of 82 incidents involving 50 officers and reversal of more than 100 convictions tainted by police misconduct.
A renegade officer, Rafael Perez, sparked headlines by alleging that officers in an elite anti-gang unit beat, robbed, framed and sometimes shot innocent people in the city’s tough Rampart neighborhood near downtown.
Perez spent months talking to investigators and making allegations of vast police wrongdoing
But in the end, Perez himself emerged as the main culprit and many of his accusations against others were apparently undermined by his own lies. His ultimate lack of credibility made him all but useless as a witness against others.
Liddy, Ortiz and Buchanan were convicted by a jury in 2000 of conspiracy to obstruct justice for framing two gang members, but those convictions were overturned by the trial judge a month later because of jury misinterpretation of instructions.
Superior Court Judge Jacqueline Connor agreed with defense lawyers then that jurors improperly considered whether Liddy and Buchanan suffered great bodily injury, rather that whether they were hit by a truck carrying gang members in 1996, a situation that was likely to produce great bodily injury.
The district attorney’s office appealed to the 2nd District Court of Appeal, but the three-justice panel rejected the prosecution request to reverse Connor’s ruling. The California Supreme Court refused a prosecution request to review that decision.
The trio was accused of falsifying police reports stating Buchanan and Liddy were hit by two gang members driving a truck in an alley as an excuse to arrest them.
The officers were the only members of the now-defunct Rampart station anti-gang unit to be tried on charges based on the allegations of Perez. Five officers including Perez and his partner, Nino Durden, struck plea bargains and one of the codefendants in the 2000 case, Paul Harper, was acquitted.
Moore said that Buchanan, 34, was fired by the police department. Liddy, 43, and Ortiz, 48, have internal disciplinary proceedings pending, she said.