Opinion ID: 4211658
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: Post-Trial Jailhouse-Informant Scandal

Text: Six years after Sanders’s trial, a scandal erupted in Los Angeles surrounding the use of jailhouse informants in criminal prosecutions. In October 1988, Leslie White demonstrated to the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department how he and other informants had obtained information “about defendants they had never met” to fabricate claims that they 12 Stewart pleaded guilty to four counts of first-degree murder in February 1983. She was sentenced to four concurrent terms of life with the possibility of parole. A jury found Freeman guilty of four counts of first-degree murder with special circumstances in December 1983. Freeman’s first penalty-phase trial ended in a hung jury; in March 1985, the second jury returned a verdict of life without the possibility of parole. 18 SANDERS V. CULLEN heard confessions while in jail. Gonzalez v. Wong, 667 F.3d 965, 1004 (9th Cir. 2011) (W. Fletcher, J., concurring in part). White explained that he was one of several prisoners who gave bogus testimony about such confessions in order to get better deals in their own cases, and for other privileges. Id. at 1005 (9th Cir. 2011). A grand jury was empaneled to look into the improper use of informant testimony by the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Office. Id. The grand jury issued a 150-page report painting “a harrowing picture of the role of jailhouse informants in the Los Angeles County criminal justice system during this period” and noted the “appalling number of instances of perjury or other falsifications to law enforcement” by informants. Id. at 1005–06. The report found that informants were given numerous benefits for their fabricated confessions, such as being transferred to jails perceived to be more desirable. Id. at 1007. The District Attorney’s Office reviewed all cases from the previous ten years in which: (1) a jailhouse informant testified as a witness for the State “at a preliminary hearing or trial to admissions or confessions made by a defendant to the informant while the informant and the defendant were in custody together;” or (2) Leslie White testified as a witness for the State on any subject matter. Leslie White did not testify at Sanders’s trial, but he was romantically linked to one of the eyewitnesses who did, Tami Rogoway.
Rogoway Roughly one month before jury selection started for Sanders’s trial, Deputy District Attorney Giss testified at a discovery hearing about a connection between Tami SANDERS V. CULLEN 19 Rogoway and Leslie White. Giss testified that White forwarded a letter that had been written by a prospective defense witness and prison inmate, Richard Quine. The letter was addressed to Quine’s girlfriend, Gina Gutierrez. Gutierrez was Rogoway’s friend and it was through these mutual acquaintances that Rogoway met White. In his letter, Quine offered himself as a fake informant against codefendant Freeman. In relevant part, the letter stated: I need you [Gina] to tell Tami that I can help her out on putting Freeman away . . . . Ask her if she is going to court on him still, and if so, all she has to do is tell me about his case, then call the D.A. and tell him she knows someone that Freeman told he did what he is in jail for . . . . Giss testified that White told him about Quine’s offer to give false testimony about five months before the discovery hearing, and that the prosecution planned to produce a tape recording of its follow up interview with White because the interview might be relevant to defense efforts to impeach Tami Rogoway. Defense counsel Abramson expressed concern that White might have tampered with witnesses. Giss responded, under oath, “Leslie White was never used as an agent of the police,” and the prosecution “never made a deal with him, never offered anything, never asked for anything.” The state trial court ruled that defense counsel could only question Tami Rogoway about Richard Quine, Leslie White, and the letter offering false testimony against Freeman if Quine was first called to testify. Neither Quine nor White were called. On May 15, 1982, roughly two weeks after 20 SANDERS V. CULLEN Sanders’s trial started, White signed an affidavit stating that: (1) he had no knowledge adverse to the defense in the Bob’s Big Boy case; (2) he received no statements about the case from Sanders or Freeman; (3) everything he knew about the case he learned from his ex-girlfriend Tami Rogoway; (4) he had not been asked by the prosecution to solicit information from Sanders or Freeman; and (5) he was not “an informant in any capacity.” Police notes from a contemporaneous interview with White indicate he told the police that both Sanders and Freeman approached him in prison and asked him to testify that Rogoway said she did not know who shot her on the night of the robbery. White’s May 15, 1982 affidavit made no mention of Sanders and Freeman approaching White in prison. On March 13, 1989, White testified as a defense expert on the use of jailhouse informants in an unrelated state court case, People v. Marshall.13 In that testimony, White claimed that in 1981 a Deputy District Attorney who was not involved with the Bob’s Big Boy case arranged for White to be transferred from Chino State Prison to Long Beach City Jail, where White was released on regular weekend furloughs. Furlough orders—signed by a judge not involved in the Bob’s Big Boy case—corroborate that White was released from jail repeatedly for long weekends between October and December 1981. In the Marshall case, White testified that he gave information to the prosecution in the Bob’s Big Boy case during the period he was receiving furloughs. He characterized his involvement as “basically behind the scenes 13 The case’s docket number in the Superior Court of the State of California for the County of Los Angeles is A954922. SANDERS V. CULLEN 21 in the sense [that Giss] was asking me to do certain things on the street and in jail I was doing - - I would collect the results.” White also testified in the Marshall case that he was romantically involved with one of the eyewitnesses in the Bob’s Big Boy prosecution, that Deputy District Attorney Giss knew that White was “having sexual relations” with Rogoway, and that over the course of his three month relationship with Rogoway, he told her false information from other jailhouse informants that was detrimental to Sanders and Freeman, but he did not know what Rogoway did with the information. On August 8, 1989, White again testified about his relationship with Rogoway, this time before the grand jury investigating the jailhouse-informant scandal. He stated that his relationship with Rogoway started before his furloughs from the Long Beach City Jail, that he met Rogoway through Gutierrez and Quine, and that he corresponded with Rogoway while he was at Chino State Prison. White claimed that after he was transferred to Long Beach City Jail, he was allowed to have contact visits with Rogoway. He also testified that Giss was aware of the situation, and that Giss told him “to keep [his] mouth shut about the relationship.” According to White, Giss asked him to find out anything he could related to Quine or other defense witnesses, and asked White for any letters Quine sent to Gutierrez.