CORCORAN PRISON GUARDS HAVE ADVANTAGE, EXPERTS SAY

COURTS: Testimony from convicts and whistle-blowers in the 1994 case may be
highly suspect.

Sacramento-The officers said they were only following policy. Some of the
whistle-blowers who testified against them might have had questionable
motives. And convict testimony contains an inherent credibility problem.

These three considerations may present huge barriers between federal
prosecutors and criminal convictions in the case against eight Corcoran
State Prison officers indicted last week on charges of staging inmate
fights as "blood sport" in 1994, according to two Sacramento legal experts.

"I can tell you, these are very difficult cases to litigate out," said Don
Heller, former U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of California, which
is prosecuting the case. "The fact is that Corcoran is not a Boy Scout
camp. It's had some very vicious criminals, and these guys have tough jobs."

Joshua Dressler, a professor at McGeorge School of Law, said that "in any
kind of case in which you're dealing with allegations of criminal behavior
by people in authority, it's more than ordinarily difficult to obtain
successful prosecutions."

Especially in prison cases, Dressler said, "where the most obvious
candidates for testimony are going to be prisoners."

The indictment charged the officers with intentionally releasing inmates
from rival prison gangs onto the closely confined exercise yards of the
prison's Security Housing Unit, knowing they would fight. One inmate was
shot and killed when officers used gunfire to stop one of the battles.

Heller said the prosecutors may have trouble proving intent amid the
backdrop of a state prison police that puts rival prisoners together in
some controlled situations.

At issue is the Department of Corrections' "integrated yard policy." First
implemented in the 1980s, it mixes inmates from competing prison gangs to
determine if the prisoners can handle general-population confinement.

The two specific 1994 yard fights cited in the indictment took place under
the auspices of the integrated yard policy.

In trying to prove intent, prosecutors called on a number of former
Corcoran officers to testify in front of a federal grand jury. The
credibility of two of them, however, came under attack Monday from a
defense attorney in the case.

One whistle-blower witness, former Corcoran officer Richard Caruso, was
suspended for shooting prisoners in an incident unrelated to those outlined
in the indictment.

The other whistle-blower, former Corcoran correctional Lt. Steve Rigg, made
$8,000 in movie rights related to the prison investigation.

Prosecutors haven't said whether they plan to rely on inmate testimony. But
it was a prisoner who told the grand jury that he heard officers say, "It's
going to be duck-hunting season," in the moments before inmate Preston Tate
was shot and killed in the April 1994 yard fight, according to a source
familiar with the case. The inmate, Jack Anthony James, who was Tate's
cellmate, is serving a 32-year prison term for rape.