Jury deadlocks in former L.A. County sheriff’s obstruction trial
LOS ANGELES — A mistrial was declared Thursday in the corruption case against former Los Angeles County Sheriff Lee Baca after a jury failed to reach a verdict on charges that he tried to obstruct an FBI investigation into allegations that deputies abused jail inmates.
U.S. District Judge Percy Anderson dismissed jurors in the afternoon after they had deliberated for more than three days. The mistrial offers a temporary reprieve for Baca, who ran the nation’s largest sheriff’s department for more than 15 years.
The former sheriff had faced conspiracy and obstruction of justice charges that could have sent the 74year-old — who is in the early stages of Alzheimer’s disease — to prison for several years.
Prosecutors from the U.S. attorney’s office must now decide whether to retry Baca.
Baca is also accused of making false statements to federal investigators about his involvement in the alleged plan to interfere with the jail investigation. That allegation, however, will be argued at a separate trial.
During the trial, prosecutors alleged that Baca resented the FBI’s efforts to investigate his jails and believed sheriff ’s officials should, as he said in a TV news interview, “police ourselves.”
The U.S. attorney’s office has secured convictions in the obstruction case against nine former sheriff’s officials, including Baca’s second-in-command. Several other deputies have been convicted of civil rights violations in connection with the abuse allegations.
In closing arguments earlier this week, Assistant U.S. Attorney Brandon Fox said Baca turned a blind eye and merely “gave lip service” to repeated warnings about violence and corruption in his jails. But when he learned in the summer of 2011 that federal authorities had launched a secret inquiry by bribing a deputy in an undercover sting to smuggle a cellphone into Men’s Central Jail, Baca was enraged, Fox contended.
Baca’s mindset, Fox said, was to “forget about the abused inmates, forget about the dirty deputies. Mr. Baca wanted to ensure that no outside law enforcement agency was going to police his jails.” It was Baca who was at the center of the conspiracy carried out by his subordinates to hide an inmate working with the FBI, manipulate potential witnesses and intimidate a federal agent by threatening her with arrest, the prosecutor argued.
Baca’s attorneys maintained that although he was upset with federal officials for keeping him in the dark about their operation, his motivation was not to impede the federal investigation. Undersheriff Paul Tanaka was the one who directed the rank-and-file deputies to take steps to foil the FBI probe, a defense lawyer told the jury. Baca did not know what was going on, the defense argued.