Police Brutality

A federal appeals court in San Francisco on Friday upheld the right of the Los Angeles City Council to shield police officers from punitive damages awarded in excessive-force cases. In a 3-0 ruling, the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals held that the council is entitled to indemnify officers for punitive damages if the council has reviewed the case under guidelines set out in the California Government Code.

After finding that two men were victims of police brutality, a jury awarded them $6,000. Then the judge ordered them to pay $241,000 for the officers' attorney fees. "As far as I'm concerned, it's a travesty," said Thomas Beck, attorney for plaintiffs Jose Bernal and Shawn Choate. "It was bad enough that they had to get beat up and hurt," Beck told the Los Angeles Daily Journal. "How do I explain to my clients what happened?" The case was filed in 1991 and came to trial last month.

Reacting to reports of torture and killing by guards, Gov. Pete Wilson on Friday launched a criminal investigation into allegations of brutality and cover-up at troubled Corcoran State Prison. The governor asked Atty. Gen. Dan Lungren to oversee a wide-ranging probe of the prison. "We received the governor's letter, and the attorney general's office will be conducting a criminal investigation into allegations of illegal activity at Corcoran," said Steve Telliano, Lungren's press secretary.

A Pennsylvania judge declared a mistrial Friday in the case of two white police officers charged in the October 1995 suffocation death of black motorist Jonny Gammage, who died after a routine night traffic stop near Pittsburgh turned violent. Allegheny County Judge David Cashman, citing combative, improper testimony from Allegheny County Coroner Cyril Wecht, halted a trial that has been conducted amid allegations of police brutality and racism.

A former Canadian Football League player has sued the California Highway Patrol for assault, alleging two officers injured his knee when they pushed him down a freeway embankment after a traffic stop. Alex Stewart, 32, who played with the British Columbia Lions, contends that on Oct. 22, 1995, Officers Erick Heinlein and Chris Finnega pushed him down the grade off the Orange Freeway without provocation. Stewart said his left knee, which had recently undergone surgery, was re-injured.

Hundreds of students gathered at a major intersection in the capital, Yangon, to protest police brutality. The gathering near Yangon University was peaceful. No uniformed security personnel were at the scene, although university officials were on hand to keep order. The students said their protest was not political. The demonstration, led by students from the Yangon Institute of Technology, protested an incident in which police arrested students involved in a dispute with a restaurant owner.

Los Angeles police commissioners formally received a written report Tuesday documenting the LAPD's internal investigation of former Det. Mark Fuhrman, whose lies in the O.J. Simpson murder trial caused a national sensation and led to his recent no contest plea to perjury charges. Although the report has not been released, sources previously have said investigators concluded that Fuhrman manufactured and exaggerated claims of brutality during taped interviews with an aspiring screenwriter.

The U.S. Commission on Civil Rights left Los Angeles on Friday with two wildly divergent views of the Sheriff's Department, as community activists attacked what they characterized as law enforcement's "head in the sand" attitude toward deputy racism and brutality.

The nation's most massive jail system has a new and potentially troublesome class of inmate, serving longer sentences than anyone else: the deputies of the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department. There was a time when the agency's rookies spent only their first 18 months guarding the county jails. No more. Today, new deputies are being stuck on custody duty for five, six, even seven years because of a growing backlog in patrol jobs.

A Los Angeles Galaxy soccer fan who said that Pasadena police officers knocked him out, dragged him from the Rose Bowl bleachers and uttered a racial slur said Thursday that he will file a lawsuit against the department. Victor Aguilar, 23, his family, his attorneys and Latino activists gathered outside the Rose Bowl on Thursday and called for an investigation into his arrest for disturbing the peace at a professional soccer game last Sunday.