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.