A federal grand jury has again indicted former Los Angeles County Sheriff Lee Baca on charges he encouraged deputies and ranking officers to employ remarkably brazen tactics against officials investigating reports that his jail guards routinely beat inmates and that official corruption pervades the department he had led for 15 years.

The investigation was supposed to be kept secret. When deputies found a mobile phone inside one of the jail's cells, though, sheriff's officials traced it to the FBI and discovered the agency had smuggled it to a prisoner who was serving as a secret informant. The investigation became very public.

It also became the target of a a core group of sheriff's officers who, with the encouragement of Baca, used genuinely breathtaking tactics to sabotage federal investigators. A dozen sheriff's officers who joined that effort have been convicted of obstruction-related charges and sentenced to prison. By February, more than five years after the initial federal investigation into violence and corruption was launched, Baca had seemingly managed to escape serious punishment for his obstruction efforts. He avoided trial and a potential 5-year prison sentence by persuading prosecutors to agree to a plea bargain.



Under the agreement, Baca pleaded guilty to lying to investigators when he told them he had no contact with the rogue underlings and had no knowledge of their tactics. Baca's plea acknowledges that, in fact, he was aware of the group responsible for obstructing the investigation and had even praised their gall. Among the group's tactics: systematically identifying potential turncoat guards for intimidation sessions to assure their silence; sending several aggressive officers to confront an FBI investigator at her home and threatening to jail her; and falsifying jail records to hide an inmate from federal investigators, constantly moving him and assigning deputies to guard him 24 hours a day.

The tactics, though, were doomed: They were so risky that only an officer of uncommon arrogance or tremendous stupidity — traits common to criminals who get caught — would agree to carry them out.



Baca's plea bargain admitting to his part in the sabotage would also prove to be flawed, fatally so, as far as U.S. District Judge Percy Anderson was concerned. Asked by Baca and prosecutors in February to approve the agreement, required to make its terms legally binding, Anderson would have none of it.

He rejected the plea bargain during a court session Monday, ruling that it unreasonably limited Baca's maximum sentence to six months in prison. That limit is far too lenient considering the nature of the crime, he said. Six months, the judge said, would not "address the gross abuse of the public's trust … including the need to restore the public's trust in law enforcement and the criminal justice system."

