Judge Rejects Prosecutor's Plea Deal With Former Top Cop of Nation's Largest Sheriff's Department

A federal grand jury has again indicted former Los Angeles County Sheriff Lee Baca on charges he encouraged deputies and ranking officers to employ remarkably brazen tactics against officials investigating reports that his jail guards routinely beat inmates and that official corruption pervades the department he had led for 15 years.

The investigation was supposed to be kept secret. When deputies found a mobile phone inside one of the jail's cells, though, sheriff's officials traced it to the FBI and discovered the agency had smuggled it to a prisoner who was serving as a secret informant.

The investigation became very public.

It also became the target of a a core group of sheriff's officers who, with the encouragement of Baca, used genuinely breathtaking tactics to sabotage federal investigators. A dozen sheriff's officers who joined that effort have been convicted of obstruction-related charges and sentenced to prison.

By February, more than five years after the initial federal investigation into violence and corruption was launched, Baca had seemingly managed to escape serious punishment for his obstruction efforts. He avoided trial and a potential 5-year prison sentence by persuading prosecutors to agree to a plea bargain.

Under the agreement, Baca pleaded guilty to lying to investigators when he told them he had no contact with the rogue underlings and had no knowledge of their tactics.

Baca's plea acknowledges that, in fact, he was aware of the group responsible for obstructing the investigation and had even praised their gall. Among the group's tactics: systematically identifying potential turncoat guards for intimidation sessions to assure their silence; sending several aggressive officers to confront an FBI investigator at her home and threatening to jail her; and falsifying jail records to hide an inmate from federal investigators, constantly moving him and assigning deputies to guard him 24 hours a day.

The tactics, though, were doomed: They were so risky that only an officer of uncommon arrogance or tremendous stupidity — traits common to criminals who get caught — would agree to carry them out.

Baca's plea bargain admitting to his part in the sabotage would also prove to be flawed, fatally so, as far as U.S. District Judge Percy Anderson was concerned. Asked by Baca and prosecutors in February to approve the agreement, required to make its terms legally binding, Anderson would have none of it.

He rejected the plea bargain during a court session Monday, ruling that it unreasonably limited Baca's maximum sentence to six months in prison. That limit is far too lenient considering the nature of the crime, he said.

Six months, the judge said, would not "address the gross abuse of the public’s trust … including the need to restore the public’s trust in law enforcement and the criminal justice system.”

The sheriff had not just lied but had jeopardized the exposure of a jail culture in which deputies covered up for one another and routinely beat inmates severely enough to send them to hospitals, Anderson said. That needed to be considered in sentencing, too, he added.

The judge rejected arguments from the defense attorney that Baca should be spared any jail time because he has recently been diagnosed with the early stages of Alzheimer's disease. The judge wasn't persuaded.

Anderson stuck to his decision to kill the plea bargain, stripping Baca of any guarantee that he would be sentenced to any less time than the 5-year maximum.

That left the former sheriff with three lousy choices: he could stick with his guilty plea and face Anderson for sentencing; he could try to negotiate another plea bargain that included a sentence limit more acceptable to the judge; or he could withdraw his guilty plea and risk his freedom with a trial.

Baca decided his chances were better with a jury than with the judge, and on Monday he withdrew the guilty plea he had entered under the suddenly worthless February agreement. Prosecutors responded to Baca's decision by filing Friday's indictment, which replaces the original and includes two additional charges.

With Baca's decision and the additional charges, his maximum potential prison sentence increased from five to 20 years.

The nation's one-time Sheriff of the Year, who served from 1998 until his scandal-induced retirement in 2014, “was well aware of allegations of rampant abuse of inmates at Men’s Central Jail and Twin Towers Correction Facility,” according to Friday's indictment.

Baca’s attorney, Michael Zweiback, said Friday he expected the new charges.

“We expected the U.S. Attorney’s Office would punish us for wanting to seek a trial,” Zweiback told the Los Angeles Daily News. The attorney told reporters earlier in the week that although Baca's Alzheimer’s disease is in its early stages, his illness could progress quickly. He also suggested his client's condition may have influenced past decisions, including his February agreement to a guilty plea

“He is suffering from a very progressive neurological disease,” Zweiback said. “We don’t know what timeline that’s going to take. He’s really in a fight for his life at this point.”

Paul Tanaka, who was the second in command of the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department, was sentenced last month to 60 months in federal prison for his conviction on obstruction of justice charges.

On Thursday, a federal judicial panel rejected the appeals of seven former Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department officials convicted of attempting to block the federal investigation.

The former lieutenants, sergeants and deputies received sentences ranging from 18 to 41 months in jail.

City News Service contributed to this report.