One of Los Angeles District Attorney George Gascon’s hand-picked prosecutors obtained the rare feat of losing a high-profile police abuse case at a preliminary hearing before a trial even started.
The case was against two sheriff’s deputies who chased a fleeing suspect in their car and hit the man with an open door. A Superior Court judge dismissed the case Thursday for lack of evidence.
Gascon ran for office in 2019 on a platform of holding police accountable and filing use of force cases. He transferred nine attorneys from the Public Defender’s Office to initiate this goal, prosecutors told the Washington Examiner. Those attorneys are part of a Civil Service Commission claim that they lack the experience to be prosecutors.
One of those recruits is John Perroni, who prosecuted deputies Woodrow Kim and Jonathan Miramontes on charges of filing a false report while Kim was additionally charged with assault because his door hit Hector Martinez. The 2018 case resulted in two additional deputies getting shot in the face and the neck. The shooters were in a car with Martinez and were shot dead by the injured deputies.
“This happens pretty much almost never,” a prosecutor said of losing a preliminary hearing, noting that “99.9% of the time, we win a prelim. I can’t even think about the last time this happened.”
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Defense attorney Josh Ritter said his client Kim was the driver and chased Martinez, who jumped out of a car and was running. Kim rolled to a stop with the car door open to follow Martinez, but instead, the door knocked him over. Martinez was not injured, Ritter said.
A witness took a grainy video of the event from a far distance, which was the basis for the charges. Deputies wrote on their report that they were involved in a traffic collision, but Gascon believed it was an intentional assault and blasted them in a statement at the time of the filing.
“Peace officers must do their job lawfully and truthfully,” District Attorney George Gascon said in a statement obtained by CBSLA. “There is no place in law enforcement for officers who use illegal force then lie to cover up their crime or the crime of another officer.”
But now, the District Attorney’s Office wasn’t sure whether the case would be refiled to take another run at a prosecution.
“We have confidence in our prosecutor’s ability to appropriately represent the District Attorney’s Office and are currently assessing whether to refile the case,” Gascon’s office said in a statement.
The preliminary hearing lasted just three hours and involved testimony by other sheriff officials who investigated the incident. The deputies have been on leave without pay from their jobs for a year.
“To get a case kicked at prelim is pretty unheard of — prelims are by and large a rubber stamp,” Ritter said. “I would love to take credit that it was entirely lawyering on my part, but this was a very poor case, and Judge Coen is a very smart and strong judge.”
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Perroni is assigned to the DA’s Justice System Integrity Division, a plum assignment involving high-profile cases usually handled by veteran prosecutors. Perroni testified this week in a Civil Service hearing about his qualifications to be a prosecutor. He said he was offered a job after donating to Gascon and sponsoring a campaign event that Gascon attended.
