Detective's false testimony leads to dismissal of L.A. murder case
A judge grants the district attorney's request to release Saul Eady, who was suspected in a 2005 shooting. But police recordings contradict the cop who placed Eady and another man at the scene.
False testimony by a Los Angeles police officer led a judge on Monday to throw out a case against a man accused of attempted murder -- the second time in recent months that an LAPD officer's testimony has torpedoed a prosecution.
Saul Eady, who has spent three years in custody, was released Monday after Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge William Sterling granted a request from the district attorney's office to dismiss the case. The abrupt ending came after Eady's lawyer confronted the prosecution's key witness, Det. David Friedrich, with Los Angeles Police Department radio recordings that contradicted Friedrich's account of a stakeout.
Michael Yglecias, the head deputy district attorney involved in the decision to seek the dismissal, said he did not believe Friedrich had intentionally lied on the stand. He attributed the contradictions to "faulty recollections" and the officer's poor documentation of the incident -- documentation that omitted crucial details.
Police testimony: In some editions of Tuesday's California section, a headline on an article about the dismissal of a criminal case because of false testimony by a Los Angeles police officer described the charge against the defendant as murder. The defendant, Saul Eady, had been charged with attempted murder.
Greg Apt, Eady's attorney, was far more critical, accusing Friedrich in court of lying on the stand.
"I expect that there will be shades of the truth told in a trial," Apt said in an interview. "But we rely on certain foundational things -- that someone is not going to tell a straight-out lie. This is very frustrating and disturbing."
In May 2005, the LAPD's Special Investigation Section, an elite group of plainclothes detectives, received a tip that several men were plotting to use a van to carry out a string of crimes. Eady and another man, Justin Montgomery, were said to be members of the group. Friedrich staked out the van on August Street in Baldwin Hills in a surveillance vehicle while other members of the unit waited in cars nearby.
On May 9, three men drove the van into an alley to confront a suspected gang rival and opened fire. They missed their target, raced back to the Baldwin Hills neighborhood and went into an apartment building. Police locked down the street and searched the building but found none of the suspects. Eady and Montgomery were arrested days later.
