The Los Angeles Times du lieu suivant : Los Angeles, California • Page 285

THURSDAY, MAY 14, 1992 LOS ANGELES TIMES AFTER THE RIOTS U.S. Sets Up More Low-Interest Loans Recovery: $600 million from federal bank system will go to rebuild homes and businesses damaged in riots. J. ALHKRTDIAZ Los AngtHcs Timra Seven men accused of looting a sporting goods store in Boyle Heights. All were bound over for trial.

Riot Felonies The first geographic breakdown of 2,048 jelony charges stemming from the recent riots shoivs that they were scattered throughout Los Angeles County, with most filed in the central Los Angeles area. The most common felonies have been commercial burglary and possession of stolen property, according to prosecutors. Locations listed are where the district attorney's office filed the charges, and figures do not necessarily indicate the number of arrests in those areas. FELONIES FELONIES OFFICE OFFICE 175 Long Beach CASES: Legal Skills on Display Continued from Al vard. Another case provided a surprise in a courthouse corridor when a scheduled prosecution witness remarked that while she did see two men run into her house to hide after nearby looting, she also saw an officer curse at the suspects and "kick them on the floor." The prosecutor never called her as a witness, but defense attorneys pledged that they will use her if the case comes to trial.

"A lot of these riot cases are really fun cases for a defense lawyer," said Ahearn. "There are legal issues all over the place. Police) didn't have much time for paperwork and legal niceties. "Of course," he added, "if they caught a looter inside the store, there's going to be a problem" for the defense. And there were many cases like that, including one involving an apparent record haul for Los Angeles police in which a few carloads of officers corralled no fewer than 55 suspects cleaning out a supermarket.

"Sealed it off," said Deputy Dist. Atty. John Lynch. The Los Angeles criminal justice system has been scrambling to keep up almost from the moment the first store windows were smashed, and fires were set, at dusk on Wednesday, April 29. A judicial emergency was declared the next morning and weekend sessions scheduled for the first court appearances arraignments in which defendants are presented with formal charges.

Many misdemeanor suspects pleaded guilty at that time, getting 10 days in jail for curfew violations and 30 days for petty theft. But more is at stake in felony cases, and they invariably proceed to the next stage, the preliminary hearings, at which judges decide whether there is enough evidence to go to trial. There was just a trickle of "prelims" in some Municipal Courts Wednesday, including those in Van Nuys and Inglewood where the flood of hearings is not expected until today, continuing through next week. But the action was already frantic, at times, in Long Beach and downtown Los Angeles. In Division 37 of the main Criminal Courts Building, Deputy Dist.

Atty. Laura Baird spent much of the morning looking for the police officer who caught four men and a woman outside a swap meet at Broadway and 47th Street in a car loaded with shoes, purses, necklaces, pants and a cash register. "Yourhonor, I lost my officer," she reported when the case was called. In the adjoining Division 36, another case involving a home burglary unrelated to the riots-was dismissed because the turmoil in the courts had pushed its preliminary hearing past the legal deadlines. Two police officers scurried out at the direction of prosecutor James Falco, who said they should "get him," meaning rearrest Bank system, said his agency approved the $600 million injection of loan funds for Los Angeles on its own after reviewing the post-riot situation.

Because the board does not depend on congressional appropriations, Evans said, it can act very swiftly, and lending institutions can approve loans without a lot of government red tape. "The beauty of the retail (lending network is that it already exists," Evans said. "I intend to follow through on this to see that the rubber hits the road." The President said the additional loan funds are "one way we, can underscore the fact that we are serious about helping Los Angeles recover. but it's not just Los Angeles, it's all American cities." His afternoon visit to a rundown neighborhood in East Baltimore followed a visit Monday to a police station in Philadelphia and his trip to Los Angeles at the end of last week. At an East Baltimore medical center, he met with a group" of young, black pregnant women who are paid $10 to attend a weekly lesson on prenatal care.

Meanwhile, a group of mayors testified before the Senate Banking Committee and met with House Democratic leaders in an effort to mobilize support for their proposal for a $35-billion urban aid program. "We need not the pittance that the President spoke of," said New York Mayor David Dinkins. "That is woefully inadequate." "We see the tragic occurrence in Los Angeles as an opportunity," said Mayor Joseph Riley of Charleston, S.C. "We must try to find good from bad events." House Majority Leader Richard A. Gephardt emerging from a two-hour session with the mayors, said he and other House leaders will confer with them again in 10 days.

"We're not going to agree to a package that won't mean anything," he told reporters. Altogether, Administration and congressional leaders have proposed aid programs for cities estimated at $6 billion. They include $500 million for law enforcement, $1 billion for housing, a enterprise-zone tax plan, a school choice program, welfare reform and a youth jobs program. In addition, Congress and the Administration have agreed to extend unemployment benefits. Democrats and Republicans have agreed to move expeditiously to get the programs approved.

At a meeting of Administration officials Wednesday, which included chief of staff Samuel Skinner and budget director Richard Dar-man, Housing Secretary Jack Kemp said lawmakers should not be constrained by the nation's $400-billion deficit. "The time to move is right now, and we shouldn't let the budget per se stand in the way," Kemp said. "We've got to decide whether we're for people or for budgets." By WILLIAM J. EATON and JAMES GERSTENZANG TIMES STAFF WRITF.KS WASHINGTON-President Bush announced Wednesday that the government will provide $600 million in low-interest loans for South Los Angeles and other areas devastated in the violent aftermath of the Rodney King verdicts. The new loan funds, to be made available through the Federal Home Loan Bank Board system, are in addition to $600 million in emergency' funds already designated for the stricken city and a host of other urban aid programs being considered by Congress and the President.

The House was poised to vote on the earlier allocation today as part of an $822 -million appropriation package to be shared by Los Angeles and flood -damaged Chicago. Bush made the announcement during a trip to a rundown neighborhood in Baltimore the third inner city foray he has made in a week for a firsthand look at urban distress. He pronounced the new loan money which could be made available at interest rates of between 4.4 and 7.9 as "good news for the people who lost homes and jobs, as well as owners who lost businesses" in Los Angeles. But a panel of big-city Democratic mayors denounced the package as "woefully inadequate" and urged Congress to do more. The $600 million in community rebuilding funds will be loaned for the purchase or rehabilitation of homes, and will be available to people willing to undertake commercial enterprises in the poorest areas of the city.

Individuals with incomes less than 115 of the area's median will qualify for the help, which is in addition to disaster loans from the Small Business Administration and Federal Emergency Management Agency. Owners of apartment buildings will qualify if their units will be rented to households with incomes below 1 15 of the median. The loans also can be obtained for rebuilding stores or offices in the South Los Angeles area or other neighborhoods where the residents have incomes below 80 of the city's median income. Private banks will make the loans with low-cost advances from the 12 district banks of the Federal Home Loan Bank system, an independent agency that can loan money at below-market rates. Forty-three of the eligible private savings and loans and three of the private commercial banks are in Los Angeles County.

Statewide, another 126 savings and loans and 21 commercial banks may participate in the program, officials said. The loans are not guaranteed by the government, officials said, so lenders must be prudent in selection of- borrowers to avoid undue risk. Daniel F. Evans chairman of the Housing Finance Board, which oversees the Federal Home Loan Pasadena 58 Pomona 6 San Fernando 28 Santa Monica 48 Torrance 75 Van Nuys 48 West Covina 4 Whittier 3 TOTAL 2,048 Bellflower 3 Beverly Hills 16 Centrall.A, 1,172 Compton 215 Downey 1 El Monte 5 Florence-Firestone 35 Huntington Park 35 Inglewood 1 18 SOURCE: Los Angeles County district attorney's office ent patrol cars from those arrested at other locations. The judge seemed sympathetic to the extraordinary demands that were placed on police he didn't expect an officer to remember the face of every person he or she arrested during those crisis days.

He ordered all seven held for trial. It was much the same elsewhere. In Inglewood Municipal Court, several batches of riot defendants were held over on charges of burglary and receiving stolen property after police officers testified that they saw large groups of "black guys" looting various stores in Hawthorne. When asked by Public Defender Marguerite D. Whichard to describe specifics about the men, the officers were unable to provide details other than their race.

"That seems to be the pattern in all of these cases," Whichard said. In Van Nuys, police told of noticing men in gang attire in a van near a North Hollywood mall. It was 4 p.m., before curfew on May 1, so they pulled over the van for having a bald tire and found electronic equipment and clothing, some with price tags attached. Robin DeWitt Arthur and Leon Charles Armand Lockwood, both 28, were ordered to stand trial for receiving stolen property. They and other defendants who lost Wednesday's round in court the vast majority, by all accounts now must consider the plea bargains offered by the district attorney's office: one year in county jail in connection with less serious lootings, 16 months in state prison in others.

Ken N. Green, who oversees branch offices of the county public defender's office, complained that the terms were too severe for offenses that, in milder times, might draw misdemeanor petty theft charges. "It's all posturing," Green said. "It's a political year for their boss Dist. Atty.

Ira Reiner." With that, he and others looked forward to the steps ahead the plea bargains and trials for the thousands of alleged looters from the riots of '92. Times staff writers Stephanie Chavez and Julio Moran contributed to this story. the defendant before he leaves the courthouse. A court on the ninth floor, Division 58, had the type of multiple-defendant case that accentuated many of the complications of riot prosecutions. They were the same seven defendants who had been in the first batch brought to court for arraignments 1 1 days earlier, young Boyle Heights men charged with burglary or receiving stolen propertymostly athletic shoes from a Sports Plaza store.

Police reportedly arrested one pushing a cart loaded with loot, three others running away and the last three in or near a home where more merchandise was found. "They may just be the seven slowest people in the neighborhood," a public defender quipped at their first court appearance. Now they were back, lined up behind their lawyers in the exact order they were listed in the written criminal complaint an arrangement that draws an objection from one of the defense attorneys. "There's going to be a significant issue relative to I.D.," she told Municipal Judge Larry Paul Fid.ler. "We believe that police officers almost exclusively I.D.

defendants in the order they're in the complaint." In other words, she didn't think the police could remember, without help, who they saw doing what. The judge ordered two defendants to change places. Then a second attorney objected to her client's position. Then, another game of musical chairs. Despite the moves, the first two witnesses a security guard and a police sergeant easily picked out the man who allegedly had the shopping cart.

It was another matter, however, with the other defendants. The witnesses could recall only that they were "male Hispanics." "I couldn't possibly see their faces, it was too dark," said the security guard. The sergeant needed to use booking photos to identify the others. But his testimony showed that his officers took precautions to keep track of the arrestees, numbering them in the order they were seized and placing them in differ COURTS: L.A. Riots Raise Sensitive Fair-Trial Issues for Justice System According to Peter Arenella, an expert in criminal law who teaches at UCLA Law School, it will be even more difficult to secure convictions in a federal civil rights trial than in a state case alleging use of excessive force because the federal government must prove that the officers intended to inflict punishment on King.

"There needs to be some public education and understanding before the trial takes place assuming there is going to be a federal indictment that the burden of proof is even more onerous than what the state had to show," Arenella said. Said Jeffe of the Claremont Graduate School: "What happens if they come down and it's acquittal? If they don't convict yet again? To me there are very grave risks involved. There are political risks. There are social risks. I'm just happy that I don't have to make these decisions." If there is a second trial, either at the state or federal level, experts agree that selecting a jury and a site also will be more difficult than it was the first time around.

"It's not going to be simple," said Thomas Munster-man, director of the Center for Jury Studies at the National Center for State Courts. "You'd have to leave the planet, almost." As yet, it is unclear whether a Powell retrial would be moved out of Los Angeles County. Although an appeals court ordered that the first trial be held in another county, that order may not apply to a retrial. And because federal trials in Los Angeles draw jurors from a seven-county area, changes of venue are rare. If there is a second trial, wherever it is held, jurors are likely to harbor fears that their decision could touch off another round of urban unrest or make them subject to personal threats.

Those factors would make powerful arguments for defense lawyers, who are likely to maintain that their clients cannot get a fair trial anywhere in the United States. "We're not just talking now about a lot of press attention or rumors that there might be violence," said Stuntz. "That's something that the criminal justice system deals with from time to time. What we have here is 50 people dead in the riots. We have the same people back in the system again.

It seems to me that if a jury did not feel comfortable convicting on the merits, there is a substantial risk that they might do it anyway." great deal of consideration" to the theory that to do so might "reopen painful wounds" in the city. But although the first jury deadlocked 8 to 4 in favor of acquitting Powell on one count, Reiner said the evidence in the videotaped beating case was compelling enough to warrant a second prosecution. No one, he said, worried aloud that a second acquittal might bring a second round of rioting. "Not specifically," he said. "I don't know that anybody used that expression." Many lawyers and scholars, however, say that authorities cannot help but realize that, with every decision they make, there is the possibility for public outcry and, perhaps, renewed violence.

I 'his is going to be a prosecution under super A scrutiny," said Laurie Levenson, who teaches criminal law at Loyola Law School. "Now everybody on the streets believes that they have a personal stake in what happens in this case. "There are thousands of cases that go through our criminal justice system every year," Levenson continued. "Mistakes are made. Nobody knows, perhaps nobody cares.

But this is one where every aspect is going to be under a microscope. The prosecutors know it and the courts know it and they will act accordingly." That the riots have raised the stakes considerably became evident in the immediate aftermath of the verdict, with Los Angeles still smoldering and the streets not yet cleared of the shattered glass that looters had left behind. In a televised nationwide address two days after the rioting began, President Bush announced that he had directed the U.S. Justice Department to step up its criminal civil rights inquiry into the King case. It was an extraordinary presidential announcement, said Stuntz of the University of Virginia Law School, and one that would not have occurred had it not been for the riots.

"This would have been a relatively low-level issue but for the riots," Stuntz said. "The riots made bringing a federal prosecution a very high-level issue, a political imperative." With Bush taking such a strong position on the case, Stuntz and others say the government must now guard against raising public hopes for a guilty verdict that may never come. Continued from Al experts say. Los Angeles Dist. Atty.

Ira Reiner, who announced Wednesday that he will ask a judge to order another trial for Powell, is facing a tough election in less than three weeks and is in much the same situation. If there is a second trial, the legal landscape will be fraught with land mines. Potential jurors, knowing of threats against those on the Ventura County panel that heard the first case, might be afraid to serve. Or, realizing that another acquittal could mean another round of rioting, they might be afraid to acquit. One question looms especially With news of the riots touching virtually every corner of the United States, where might a new trial be held? os Angeles and every institution government, the judiciary is going to be walking on eggs for a good long time," said Sherry Bebitch Jeffe, a political analyst at the Claremont Graduate School's Center for Politics and Policy.

"The Earth has shifted." Said William Stuntz, who teaches criminal law at the University of Virginia Law School: "I'd worry a lot if I were in the Justice Department. They are really committed now. They've got to go forward and they've got to win, or there are going to be political consequences and maybe consequences on the street." Elsewhere, the riots are already affecting what goes on in the courts particularly with respect to the racial makeup of juries. In Florida, a. judge moved the manslaughter trial of a Miami policeman from Orlando to Tallahassee, which has an ethnic mix more like Miami's.

The case, which touched off riots in 1989, involves the death of a black motorcyclist. "This court cannot ignore the national tragedy of the urban riots that followed the Rodney King verdict," Dade County Circuit Judge Thomas Spencer said in his ruling last week. "That so many of our fellow Americans feel shut out from our judicial system demands our attention." In a judge cited the riots in dismissing an all-Anglo jury in a lawsuit filed by a Latino farm worker. In Washington state, a judge postponed the trial of a former police officer out of fear that jurors, with the King case in mind, might treat him unfairly. And in Los Angeles, a judge sent a civil suit filed by three former transit police officers all of them Latino to San Bernardino County.

The former officers claimed that the Southern California Rapid Transit District and its former police chief had discriminated against them in promotions. In his ruling in that case, Superior Court Judge Richard C. Hubbell noted that the King verdict "set off a firestorm of protest and violence that has risen to unimaginable levels." He found that the RTD and its former chief, who is Anglo, could not get a fair trial in Los Angeles "amidst this background of turmoil and social upheaval." Meanwhile, California lawmakers are proposing legislation requiring demographics to be considered in trials, such as the King case, that have been moved to another county. New Jersey legislators have proposed a similar law in the wake of the King verdicts. These political and judicial decisions may signal a turning point in a system that some lawyers and legal scholars say has paid too little attention to the ethnic makeup of juries in the past.

In the case of the four Los Angeles Police officers who were accused in the King beating, for instance, the trial was moved to largely white Ventura County even though Alameda County, with an ethnic makeup similar to that of Los Angeles, was available. When prosecutors objected, Superior Court Judge Stanley M. Weisberg said his decision was based on convenienceVentura County is close to Los Angeles. Now, said Cynthia McClain Hill, a Los Angeles attorney who was a television commentator on the King case, "justice is beginning to confront political reality. What we are seeing is an increasing awareness that while justice may be blind, it can't be colorblind.

You need ethnic interaction on juries in order to produce a just result, as much as you need ethnic interaction in society." Such factors will undoubtedly come into play should Judge Weisberg order a second trial for Powell, or should the federal government launch a civil rights prosecution in the King case. Federal prosecutors declined to discuss their plans. But Reiner, in an interview Wednesday, hinted that he considered the riots in his decision to seek a second trial. The district attorney said that as he and his deputies met for three hours on Tuesday to discuss the pros and cons of pressing forward with the case, they gave "a.