CommentsCORRUPTION WATCH-Twenty-five years after the 1992 LA Insurrection, we are deluged by retrospectives and analyses. Many of them are excellent. All ignore one of the bedrock causes – a corrupt judicial system.
As some of the documentaries mention in passing, many Blacks believed that finally with the trial of the four police officers, there would be some modicum of justice. After decades of being harassed, beaten and railroaded into prison by a predatory police department, many believed that the Rodney King case would hold the occupying army to an accounting.
The judicial system played a far greater role in causing the uprising than by merely moving the trial to a bedroom community of police officers. For decades judges in the criminal courts had been lynchpins in the abuse, unjust jailing, and murders of Blacks by “the system.” After the disgraceful judicial elections in 1986 where the public had thrown three justices off the Supreme Court for not killing enough people, trial court judges knew their careers were tied to a high conviction rate. While one appellate decision had tried to stop these abusive judges by limiting the use of lying jailhouse informants to railroad people into prison, the bulk of those judges were of like mind: “if they’re not guilty of this, they’re guilty of something.”
While the “white” community still lives in denial of the corrupt nature of the judicial system, the Black community was (and still is) not so naive. That knowledge was a major factor in the explosion after the Rodney King verdicts. Even with videotaped evidence, the courts made certain that the police officers were set free. The Black community knew that calling the courts “halls of justice” was a mockery and a fraud.
Back then, as now, society lived in denial. While the LAPD was an occupying force, no one would admit that the ring leaders of the predatory system were the judges who knew their careers were buttered on the side of brutalizing minorities. Judges did far more than look the other way at police perjury or the concealing of exculpatory evidence. Some judges engaged in witness intimidation and active collusion with assistant DAs in order to convict people without regard as to whether or not they were guilty.
Many judges like Judge Jacqueline Connor had served as Assistant District Attorneys and were not only aware of the perjury and falsification of evidence -- they expected it, they encouraged it, and they engaged in it. When Judge Connor was upset that a witness in a case pending before her had rebuffed the DA’s demand that he commit perjury in order to support a falsified police report, Judge Connor lodged a bogus complaint against the witness with the State Bar. The witness happened to be a lawyer. Her State Bar complaint was structured to sound as if it had been made by the defendant, but she insisted that the State bar keep her identity a keep secret.
After her bogus complaint was revealed as judicial obstruction of justice, the Commission on Judicial Performance found that it was fine for a judge to intimidate a witness in a case pending in her courtroom. That was after the 1992 Insurrection, but before the Ramparts Scandal, where the criminal court judges, including Judge Connor, again played a key role.
The Christopher Commission Report covered-up the role that judges played in the years of civil rights abuses; everyone blamed only the LAPD. While there is no doubt the officers did many horrible things (like attempting to murder Javier Ovando and when he was only paralyzed, prosecuting him for attempting to kill the police officers) the judges also played a pivotal role in the misconduct. They had the power to stop these gross injustices against Blacks and Latinos and others who displeased the police. Not only could the judges have held police officers who committed perjury responsible, they could have held the prosecutors who used perjured testimony liable for their misconduct. Instead, some judges showed prosecutors how to intimidate witnesses.
Mentioning the existence of corrupt judges has always been taboo. As related in a prior CityWatch article, some federal judges have recently begun a crusade against prosecutorial misconduct, but they also tippy-toe around the role played by California state court judges. Judge Kozinski indirectly blames the state courts by saying that they suffer from an “epidemic of misconduct” because judges “turn a blind eye” to misconduct.
On both the criminal and civil sides, judges and justices do far more than “turn a blind eye.” They actively encourage and engage in hideous misconduct, turning the state court system into a capricious scourge on the Constitution in which no one can predict when an abusive judge will alter evidence, lie outright in his or her opinions to railroad innocent people, or intimidate attorneys into abandoning their clients.
Federal Judge Jay S. Bybee, in writing his concurring opinion in Curiel v Miller, (2016) 830 F.3d 864, suggested that the California Supreme Court needs a new composition, beginning with a new Chief Justice. Leopards do not change their spots and criminally abusive judges and justices of the California judiciary are not going to reform themselves.
Will the corrupt judiciary result in another insurrection in South Los Angeles? Probably not. Much of the Black community has dispersed to the Inland Empire and north to the Newhall area, if not completely out of state. The area is now heavily Latino. To the extent it has “illegals,” the community knows the necessity of keeping a very low profile. Garcetti’s gentrification should soon further decimate the community, but that does not mean that judicial abuse will stop.
Just because certain demographic changes indicate that LA won’t have the same reaction in the same place where it occurred in 1967 and 1992 does not mean society itself is safe from a corrupt judiciary. Wherever they live, minorities and the poor will be disproportionately victimized by abusive judges. Others are foolishly naive if they think that a lighter shade of skin makes them safe from the same judicial injustices.
(Richard Lee Abrams is a Los Angeles attorney and a CityWatch contributor. He can be reached at: [email protected]. Abrams views are his own and do not necessarily reflect the views of CityWatch.) Edited for CityWatch by Linda Abrams.
25 Years After Rodney King, CA Judicial Misconduct Still Not Fixed
