LOS ANGELES POLICE SCANDAL MAY SOIL HUNDREDS OF CASES

LOS ANGELES, Dec. 15 -- A widening investigation into accusations of
corruption, brutality and false testimony by police officers in a gritty,
drug-plagued precinct here has forced the review of hundreds of criminal
cases in which suspects may have been wrongly convicted, and the number
could grow to many more than that, prosecutors and defense lawyers said
today. District Attorney Gil Garcetti said that in his 31 years in the
prosecutor's office, "there has never been a more important case," because
the accusations of false testimony go "to the heart of the criminal justice
system." Mr. Garcetti said his deputies were already offering anecdotal
reports that the scandal in the precinct, the Rampart Division, was hurting
their conviction rates in unrelated cases.

But he said he did not have statistics to buttress that belief.

Word of the investigation surfaced in September, when prosecutors won the
release of a gang member serving a 23-year sentence for assault on the
police after a former rogue officer told investigators that he and a partner
had handcuffed and shot the man, who was unarmed, then framed him by
planting a gun near his paralyzed body three years ago. Since then, nine
other verdicts have been reversed and 13 officers have been dismissed or
relieved of duty.

The district attorney said today that he did not know whether a handful, or
20 or 30, or 100 officers might ultimately be involved, in a department of
some 10,000, but he vowed to "go wherever the investigation leads us." He
said he had seven lawyers working on the case full time, and was prepared to
add another 20 if needed. The public defender's office said it might have to
request additional money or lawyers to handle the cases of prisoners who may
have been wrongly convicted.

Mr. Garcetti said at a brief news conference this morning that hundreds of
other cases were being reviewed as possibly tainted, and he said the inquiry
would take many months. But he scoffed at an estimate by public defenders
that as many as 3,000 cases might have to be reconsidered, a figure first
reported in The Los Angeles Times today.

"We certainly have been looking at hundreds of cases," Mr. Garcetti said.

Robert Kalunian, the county's assistant public defender, said the district
attorney had provided his office with some 3,000 cases in which about 10 of
the suspected officers had played any role over the past 10 years, from
transporting arrested people to jail to offering substantive testimony at
trial. Mr. Kalunian said it was not yet clear in how many cases the officers
had played a substantive part.

"Certainly all 3,000 cases are not going to be reopened," Mr. Kalunian said,
"but I can't tell you how many will be."

So far, no criminal charges have been filed against the suspended officers,
and Mr. Garcetti said today that his first priority remained to free anyone
wrongly imprisoned, then to help the police in finding officers who should
be fired, and finally, developing evidence sufficient to prosecute any
officers guilty of crimes.

In recent years, a number of police agencies around the nation have grappled
with scandals over false testimony by corrupt officers, a practice known in
police lingo as "testilying." But Edwin H. Delattre, the dean of the school
of education at Boston University and a national expert on police ethics,
said that the Los Angeles situation was "the worst case of a poisoned well
in a police department that I've seen in 25 years, and the work that has to
be done will be staggering."

Mr. Delattre helped the New York State Police in an inquiry into
evidence-tampering in the early 1990's that ultimately involved about eight
troopers required about 120,000 hours of investigation of potentially
tainted cases.

Here in the home Hollywood, the case seems the stuff of noir fiction, of
"L.A. Confidential" come to lurid life. The former rogue officer, Rafael A.
Perez, who was convicted of stealing cocaine being held as evidence, told
investigators that he and a former partner, Nino Durden, intentionally shot
a drug gang member, Javier Francisco Ovando, at point-blank range in a 1996
raid, then planted a .22-caliber rifle to make it seem he had attacked them.

Since then, the authorities have been forced to review not only cases
handled by those two officers, but by partners and other officers in a
widening circle in an anti-gang street crime unit known as Crash at the
Rampart station just west of downtown. The Los Angeles Police Department
commissioned a sweeping internal review, scheduled to be released next
month, and local officials have declined for weeks to predict just where the
investigation will lead. It has already forced suspension of an injunction
intended to bar gang members from congregating, because of fears that
statements by officers in support of the measure might have been false.

The Southern California chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union has
called for appointment of a special prosecutor to take over the
investigation, arguing that the district attorney's office, which relies on
police testimony in most of its cases, cannot adequately investigate police
misconduct.

"I don't know if it's ultimately 300 cases or 3,000 but it's going to be a
whole lot," said the group's executive director, Ramona Ripston. "We
absolutely cannot go on like this."

Merrick J. Bobb, a special counsel to the Los Angeles County Board of
Supervisors, who served as a deputy counsel to a commission that recommended
many procedural changes in the police department here in 1991, after the
Rodney King beating, said the Rampart case had already put big burdens on
the city's trust in law enforcement.

"The entire justice system, both the criminal justice system and the civil
justice system, will be put under extraordinary strain now and into the
indefinite future by virtue of the sheer numbers of cases that will have to
be reviewed," Mr. Bobb said, "and the sheer numbers of lawsuits that can be
anticipated.

"I think that one of the most tragic and disheartening things about the
Rampart scandal is that the L.A.P.D. had begun to emerge from the shadows of
Rodney King and the civil disturbances, and the O. J. Simpson case, and was
beginning to resurrect its reputation. This scandal, I'm afraid, necessarily
will set the L.A.P.D. back."