Testimony will resume Thursday in the corruption trial of former L.A. County Sheriff Lee Baca, who is accused of orchestrating a scheme to thwart an FBI investigation into inmate mistreatment in the jails he ran and of lying to the bureau.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Brandon Fox said he expects to rest his case Thursday after he calls two more witnesses to the stand. The defense case will follow before the jury hears closing arguments.
Baca is being tried in downtown Los Angeles on charges of obstruction of justice, conspiracy to obstruct justice and making false statements to the FBI. The retired lawman was tried in December on the first two counts, and prosecutors had planned a second trial on the lying count. But a mistrial was declared after jurors deadlocked 11-1 in favor of acquitting the former sheriff, and U.S. District Judge Percy Anderson combined all three counts in the retrial, which began Feb. 22 with jury selection.
The charges partly stem from a 2011 incident in which two sheriff’s investigators confronted an FBI agent in the driveway leading into her apartment and falsely told her they were in the process of obtaining a warrant for her arrest. Baca denies having advance knowledge of the illegal attempt to intimidate the agent.
Nine former sheriff’s officials, including Baca’s top deputy, Paul Tanaka, have been convicted in the case.
If convicted of all charges, Baca faces more than 20 years in federal prison, according to prosecutors.
The court was dark Wednesday. On Tuesday, on the retrial’s 10th day, defense attorney Nathan Hochman attempted to cast doubt on a timeline of email exchanges, meetings and phone calls to Baca that prosecutors contend took place at significant times during an illegal scheme that the retired lawman allegedly set in motion and closely monitored to obstruct justice.
Hochman suggested to the Los Angeles federal jury that records of supposed communications between his client and various subordinates could not be trusted to prove his client guilty of conspiring in August 2011 to thwart a federal probe of the sheriff-run county jail system.
Prosecutors contend that a flurry of communications at crucial times in the case show Baca’s close involvement with a handful of sheriff’s officials who were subsequently convicted of obstruction of justice in the scheme.
During his cross-examination of Leah Marx, the lead FBI agent in the case, Hochman suggested that key events were missing from the timeline and that telephone records could not definitively prove whether any conversations actually took place — or between whom.
But the frequency of messages to and from Baca and the way the calls corresponded to important events in the case prove that all roads “go back to one person,” Marx said of the 74-year-old defendant.
—City News Service