LOS ANGELES _ At a Little Tokyo bar, drinks fueled a heated discussion among a group of lawyers and a Los Angeles police investigator.
Then talk turned to police corruption.
Veteran LAPD Detective Brian McCartin told his three companions about his experience encountering black gang members. He referred to them using the N-word.
"What, you've never used that word in the privacy of your own living room?" he asked when the slur was met with shock, according to court documents.
Among the group was Deputy District Attorney Robert Rabbani, who was prosecuting Cleamon Johnson, a black gang leader known as "Big Evil" and charged with five murders. McCartin was his lead investigator.
The May 2014 conversation, which surfaced in court earlier this year, has become a thorny legal issue in the pending death penalty case against Johnson and offers a glimpse inside a police department that tried over the last two decades to weed out the systemic, casual racism that was once an inherent part of its culture.
Johnson's attorneys argue that Rabbani should be disqualified from the case because he failed to hand over evidence of a law enforcement officer's racial bias, despite their repeated requests for exculpatory evidence. By law, prosecutors are required to turn over "Brady" evidence _ named for a landmark Supreme Court decision _ which includes information that could undermine the credibility of government witnesses.
They also argue McCartin's words suggest that racism permeated his entire investigation.
"The willful and deliberate cover-up of the incident in which McCartin's racist beliefs were expressed brings into question ... what other forms of racism or inappropriate conduct have been suppressed and what each agency feared in exposing this particular incident," defense attorney Stephen Dunkle wrote in his motion for an evidence hearing.
Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Curtis Rappe denied the motion in March, ruling that Rabbani had acted in good faith by reporting the exchange to his office's discovery compliance unit.
A prosecutor with the unit at the time concluded that McCartin had been referring specifically to gang members and that his use of the slur "taken in proper context, does not provide circumstantial evidence that he is biased against African Americans," according to court documents.
An appellate court panel of three judges ultimately sided with Rappe, although one dissented. The matter now rests with the state Supreme Court, which will determine whether the defense is entitled to a hearing that looks more closely at how prosecutors handled the incident.
McCartin left the department in June 2015, taking a $485,000 payout as a member of the agency's deferred retirement program, as well as an annual pension. Records show he now resides in Arizona. He could not be reached for this story.
The Los Angeles County district attorney's office said in a statement to The Times that it does not condone McCartin's language and that its legal analysis was conducted only to determine if the detective's comment was so racially biased that it had to be disclosed to the defense.
Johnson's defense attorney, who declined to comment to The Times, said in court documents that the appellate ruling could lead to "recusal of other members of the district attorney's office or the office as a whole, as well as other possible sanctions."
An LAPD spokeswoman said the agency conducted an investigation into McCartin's comments, but declined to comment further.
