The System Has Become Dysfunctional
By CHARLES L. LINDNER
 
Charles L. Lindner is past president of the Los Angeles Criminal Bar Assn. The criminal-justice system in Los Angeles is broken. No spin doctor can mask the institutional breakdown at the Los Angeles Police Department. The Rampart scandal could not have occurred without the district attorney and the judiciary looking the other way for years.

The reasons for this near-chaos in the local enforcement of the law have been exposed by the Rampart scandal. Police Chief Bernard C. Parks. Dist. Atty. Gil Garcetti and the Los Angeles criminal bench, collectively, have made decisions that inevitably led us to Rampart. 
* The judiciary has turned a blind eye to police perjury. Judges have a constitutional duty to protect defendants' constitutional rights. The judicial appointments of Govs. George Deukmejian and Pete Wilson have filled the bench with former prosecutors. One result is that it has been 10 years since I heard a judge say, "I do not find the officer's testimony credible."

Outside the presence of jurors, the equation has become hauntingly simple. State court judges will accept police fabrications as the "truth" because they do not want "technicalities" interfering with the apprehension and imprisonment of "bad guys." Those "technicalities" include the 4th, 5th and 6th Amendments of the U.S. Constitution. Defense expectations of fairness have fallen so low that the highest compliment a defense lawyer can pay a judge is, "He gave me a fair trial"--and it is not said with great frequency. 
In too many cases, the judge is the de facto prosecutor because the deputy district attorney is either so inexperienced or inept that he or she needs a little help. So the judge steps in and questions the officer testifying, strengthens dubious parts of his or her story and withdraws after bolstering the cop's testimony. With the singular exception of the court's most senior jurist, judges never take over cross-examination to hammer at a cop for what seems a questionable story. 
This abdication of constitutional oversight and the virtual merger of judge and prosecutor have contributed to an environment in which cops assigned to the anti-gang CRASH unit at Rampart believed they could break the law with impunity. Cops can lie on the stand because they fear no judicial sanction. With the exception of Mark Fuhrman, the detective who testified in the O.J. Simpson double-murder trial, no police officer in modern times has been prosecuted for lying under oath, as long as he lied for the prosecution.

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