Former Los Angeles County Sheriff Lee Baca, who has been embroiled in a scandal involving reports of prisoner abuse and an alleged conspiracy to cover it up, has agreed to plead guilty to making false statements, the Department of Justice announced Wednesday.
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As part of the plea deal, prosecutors agreed not to seek a sentence of more than six months for the 73-year-old. He faces sentencing May 16.
The FBI launched an investigation into civil rights abuses and corruption inside the Los Angeles County jails in 2010.
Sheriff’s deputies are also accused of confronting an Federal Bureau of Investigation agent at her home and attempting to intimidate her.
During the hearing, the judge asked Baca if he was pleading guilty “because you are, in fact, guilty”. “I will always love the men and women of the Sheriff’s Department”. U.S. Attorney Eileen Decker, left. “He does not deserve prison time”.
Baca appeared in court Wednesday morning for an arraignment on the charge. He had been sheriff since December 1998.
“I don’t see myself as the future”, he said. There must be zero tolerance for this type of failed leadership. But when the sheriff’s deputies learned about the operation, the informant “was essentially made to disappear within the jail system”, Decker said.
“There is a new sheriff”, she said. He said both he and prosecutors were bound by the deal. Baca said he was leaving on “his own terms” but added he’d been battered by the criticism of his department. The conviction, however, confirms that he played a role in trying to thwart the FBI’s civil rights probe.
The Los Angeles Times reported the former sheriff was to enter his plea in a downtown courtroom on Wednesday. Jail officials later discovered the phone, linked it to the Federal Bureau of Investigation and determined that the inmate was an informant. Brown was booked and re-booked under a series of false names, and was eventually told he had been abandoned by the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
The grand jury indictment of Tanaka offered a portrait of a department adrift, with senior officials who were responsible for investigating abuses working instead to undermine internal safeguards and ignoring repeated warnings of widespread problems in the nation’s largest jail system.
Former Los Angeles Sheriff Lee Baca has pleaded guilty to lying to federal investigators during a probe into beatings by deputies at the jails he ran. Baca hired his own criminal defense attorney should he be called to the stand in Tanaka’s trial, which is scheduled for March 22.
“We had planned to call Sheriff Baca as a witness and that continues to be our plan”, according to the attorneys. Baca’s guilty plea is important. He consistently dodged questions about any connection to the corruption even as other former underlings pleaded guilty or were convicted.
“One of the measures of an organizational culture is how it handles its allegations of misconduct”, said David Bowdich, assistant director in charge of the FBI’s Los Angeles office. If a federal judge accepts the plea agreement this afternoon, Baca would become the 18th person to be convicted.
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“With this admission of guilt, the environment that created this type of corruption is out of the department and we begin a new day of restoring confidence and trust”, he said. MORE FBI informant Anthony Brown sues Los Angeles CountyIn September 2015, Baca wasn’t granted immunity in an upcoming corruption trial of his former LASD Undersheriff Paul Tanaka.
