LA DA's illegal wiretaps revealed ---LA Times

[David Honig <honig@alum.mit.edu>]

Fans of CALEA, take note.



                                                  Sunday, April 26, 1998 

             THE STATE 
             Can the L.A. Criminal-Justice System Work Without Trust?

             By CHARLES L. LINDNER

[excerpt] 
in the wake of the discovery that
deputy district attorneys assigned to its narcotics unit have relied on
secret wiretaps for years to gather evidence against their
clients--and no one, including judges, knew about the practice.
Beyond the obvious legal question of whether the district attorney
knowingly violated the 4th Amendments's prohibition against
unreasonable search and seizure is one that cannot be resolved in
court: Can the county's criminal-justice system carry on in an
atmosphere of mistrust? 

...

LAPD officers have avoided revealing the existence of their
electronic intercepts using a police procedure known as "the handoff
technique." It works like this: Narcotics officers on "Team A" set up
a wiretap to gather information on a suspect. Without identifying the
source of their information, the officers turn over the wiretap's
"intelligence product" to detectives from "Team B," also members of
LAPD's narcotics unit. Using the intelligence product, "Team B"
officers set about trying to gather facts independently that would
provide "probable cause" for a second judge to sign a search warrant
targeting another suspect, without the cops disclosing the existence of
the first wiretap to the jurist. 
It is not hard to imagine the potential harm from this
police-prosecution malfeasance. If an investigation focused on a
pharmacist, for instance, the police would have a taped record of
every prescription for every patient and physician who called the
pharmacy. By law, these wiretaps are preserved for 10 years, so the
potential damage to an innocent citizen having his or her private calls
intercepted is significant. 

What aggravates the misconduct is the likelihood that neither the
police nor the "wiretap judge" followed the legal requirement that the
police file written progress reports every 72 hours, and that the judge
make a decision every 72 hours on whether a tap can continue.
There is strong reason to suspect that neither the judiciary nor the
Legislature has been "minding the store." For example, a judge issuing
a wiretap order must inform any person whose voice was
wiretapped within 90 days and supply the person with an inventory of
what was recorded. Similarly, Atty. Gen. Dan Lungren is required to
provide a detailed report to the Legislature and state Judicial Council
each April regarding the number and duration of all wiretaps
conducted by every law-enforcement agency in the state. As of last
week, neither the Judicial Council nor Chairman John Vasconcellos'
Senate Public Safety Committee could find a copy. 
Finally, no public defender or private criminal lawyer has been given
the legally required inventory since 1985, when the secret wiretaps
began. According to Public Defender Michael P. Judge, the public
record discloses only three reported wiretaps by local law
enforcement during 1997--two by the LAPD and one by the county
Sheriff's Department. It is simply mind-boggling that, for the last 13
years, on hundreds of occasions when the court or opposing counsel
have asked prosecutors whether they have turned over all
defendants' and co-defendants' statements, they have been lied to or
misled. 
The danger from these secret wiretaps is not limited to suspected
criminals. According to statistics published by the Administrative
Office of the United States Courts, which oversees "authorized"
federal wiretaps, each wiretap order of roughly 40 days in length
results in the interception of an average 2,139 conversations involving
84 separate persons. The statistics also note that the average tap
produces incriminating information less than 20% of the time,
resulting in the arrest of two suspects and the conviction of a single
individual. If, as a police narcotics detective testified in the Gaxiola
case, there have been hundreds of secret "handoff" taps and
electronic intercepts, by extrapolation, thousands of Los Angeles
residents have had their private telephone conversations secretly and
illegally monitored by LAPD. 
The public defender has filed an unprecedented class-action habeas
corpus petition with Superior Court Presiding Judge Robert W. Parkin
on behalf of all past, present and future public defender clients. It
seeks to discover whether the prosecution denied thousands of
defendants a fair trial by hiding the true source of its information, i.e.,
secret wiretaps. If secret wiretaps were used and the evidence was
concealed from the defense, then thousands of men and women were
illegally convicted and incarcerated. 
Should this unhappy scenario play out, the criminal justice system
could well be irreparably damaged, its credibility in the public mind
ruined. Yet, even if events keep the convicted behind bars, the loss of
trust between prosecutor and defense lawyer may never be fully
recovered. The problem defense lawyers and criminal judges face
today is that they have never had so many prosecutors lie for so long
about so much, which may have resulted in the unconstitutional
convictions of so many. 

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------------------------------------------------------------
      David Honig                   Orbit Technology
     honig@otc.net                  Intaanetto Jigyoubu

"I actually thought Silicon Valley was where women went to get fixed."
		---LA Mayor Richard Riordan 98.02.19