LOS ANGELES _ A mistrial was declared Thursday in the corruption case against former Los Angeles County Sheriff Lee Baca after a jury failed to reach a verdict on charges that he tried to obstruct an FBI investigation into allegations that deputies abused jail inmates.
U.S. District Judge Percy Anderson dismissed jurors in the afternoon after they had deliberated for more than three days. The mistrial offers a temporary reprieve for Baca, who ran the nation's largest sheriff's department for more than 15 years.
The former sheriff had faced conspiracy and obstruction of justice charges that could have sent the 74-year-old _ who is in the early stages of Alzheimer's disease _ to prison for several years.
Prosecutors from the U.S. attorney's office must now decide whether to retry Baca.
Baca is also accused of making false statements to federal investigators about his involvement in the alleged plan to interfere with the jail investigation. That allegation, however, will be argued at a separate trial.
During the trial, prosecutors alleged that Baca resented the FBI's efforts to investigate his jails and believed sheriff's officials should, as he said in a TV news interview, "police ourselves." The U.S. attorney's office has secured convictions in the obstruction case against nine former sheriff's officials, including Baca's second-in-command. Several other deputies have been convicted of civil rights violations in connection with the abuse allegations.
In closing arguments earlier this week, Assistant U.S. Attorney Brandon Fox said Baca turned a blind eye and merely "gave lip service" to repeated warnings about violence and corruption in his jails. But when he learned in the summer of 2011 that federal authorities had launched a secret inquiry by bribing a deputy in an undercover sting to smuggle a cellphone into Men's Central Jail, Baca was enraged, Fox contended.
Baca's mindset, Fox said, was to "forget about the abused inmates, forget about the dirty deputies. Mr. Baca wanted to ensure that no outside law enforcement agency was going to police his jails." It was Baca who was at the center of the conspiracy carried out by his subordinates to hide an inmate working with the FBI, manipulate potential witnesses and intimidate a federal agent by threatening her with arrest, the prosecutor argued.
Baca's attorneys maintained that although he was upset with federal officials for keeping him in the dark about their operation, his motivation was not to impede the federal investigation. Undersheriff Paul Tanaka was the one who directed the rank-and-file deputies to take steps to foil the FBI probe, a defense lawyer told the jury. Baca did not know what was going on, the defense argued.
Until he resigned in 2014 as the jail abuse scandal enveloped his department, Baca served as the county's highest elected police official. He won re-election easily several times and built a reputation as a quirky but pioneering leader who spoke of the need to educate jail inmates and pursue community-based policing over traditional law-and-order strategies.
At his two-week trial, Baca, the four-term sheriff who during his time in office was frequently invited to speak across the nation and internationally, sat quietly listening to prosecutors and defense attorneys wrangle over a six-week period out of his five-decade Sheriff's Department career.
He greeted a handful of supporters who came and went throughout the trial, some with lapel pins in the shape of a sheriff's badge. On some days it was just his wife, Carol, by the aging lawman's side.
He chose not to testify in his defense, unlike Tanaka, who took the stand in his own obstruction trial earlier this year and sought to lay the blame squarely at Baca's feet. Jurors deliberated for less than two hours before convicting Tanaka, who has since been sentenced to five years in prison for his role in the obstruction plot.
Earlier this year, federal prosecutors struck a deal with Baca, in which the retired sheriff pleaded guilty to a single charge of making false statements to federal investigators. In exchange, he was to receive a sentence of no more than six months in prison. Anderson rejected the deal, calling it too lenient, and Baca and his attorneys chose instead to withdraw his plea and put his fate in the hands of 12 fellow citizens.
Although prosecutors told the six-man, six-woman jury at the outset of the trial that Baca was the "heartbeat," the "leader" and the "driving force" of the conspiracy, few of the government's witnesses testified to direct interactions with Baca during the time of the alleged interference with federal authorities.
A former L.A. Times reporter testified that Baca said in an interview that he directed two sergeants to go to the home of FBI agent Leah Tanner, then known as Leah Marx. The sergeants confronted her and falsely informed her they were obtaining a warrant for her arrest.
Prosecutors alleged the move was an attempt to intimidate her and get the FBI to back off. A former U.S. attorney, now a federal judge, recalled phone calls and meetings with Baca in which the then-sheriff seemed to be in the know about developments in the case.
Jurors also heard a recorded conversation between an FBI supervisor and Sgt. Maricela Long, who has also been convicted in the obstruction case, in which the supervisor asked whether Baca was aware his subordinates had threatened Tanner with arrest.
"The sheriff knows this, sir," Long said on the recording.
Two other deputies who have been convicted of playing a part in the conspiracy told jurors that while they had little to no contact with Baca, it was made clear to them the orders came all the way from the top. One said he watched a nervous supervisor walk into Baca's office to notify him that deputies had mistakenly allowed FBI agents to meet with the inmate who was working as a federal informant.
The prosecution presented jurors with phone records, emails and meetings scheduled on calendars to show that Baca was in contact with Tanaka as the machinations played out.
But Baca's lead attorney, Nathan Hochman, countered that his client could have been discussing any number of issues he dealt with as the head of the department's sprawling operation.
In more than 100 emails presented by prosecutors as evidence of the obstruction plot, Baca was directly involved in only two, Hochman said. And while Tanaka was exchanging dozens of calls with the subordinates charged in the case, Baca was on only one.
"The sheriff never knew about this, the sheriff was out of the loop," Hochman said.
He asked jurors to instead look at the rest of Baca's lengthy career to decide whether he would be the type of leader to evade federal scrutiny. He pointed to steps Baca took to better conditions in the jails, and put on the stand Baca's high-powered friends _ including two former district attorneys _ who called him "law-abiding" with an "excellent" and "very solid" reputation.
Prosecutors, Hochman argued, were "throwing some spaghetti against the wall to see if anything sticks against Sheriff Baca."
In deliberations this week, jurors requested to review a surveillance video of the sergeants approaching Tanner and submitted a note to the judge asking whether it was legal for the sheriff's officials to do that, possibly indicating they were giving weight to the incident in their decision-making. They also asked to have testimony by the former Times reporter and a former assistant sheriff read back.
