Former LA cop pleads in shooting

LOS ANGELES, Dec. 17 (UPI) -- The former Los Angeles police officer whose revelations of perjury and corruption triggered the Rampart scandal, pleaded guilty Monday in federal court to federal civil rights and firearms violations.

Rafael Perez, 34, said he fabricated a story about a shooting that left an unarmed man paralyzed and then sent to prison for 23 years based on false testimony.

The 1996 shooting of Javier Francisco Ovando was among the serious crimes revealed by the Rampart investigation.

Perez, who will serve 2 years in prison and 3 years of supervised probation, reached a deal with federal prosecutors to plead guilty to one count of conspiracy to violate Ovando's civil rights and one count of possessing a firearm with an obliterated serial number. He will be sentenced March 18.

"Through his guilty plea, Perez has been held accountable for abusing and mistreating members of the very public he was sworn to protect and serve," Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights Ralph Boyd said in a statement.

Perez could have faced 15 years if convicted on the charges of conspiring to deprive Ovando of his civil rights and possessing a gun.

Perez was released in July after serving three years in custody for stealing cocaine from a police evidence room. His relatively light sentence for the drug theft was spent nearly entirely in Los Angeles County jail, where he regaled city and county investigators for months with details of a long-running pattern of brutality, perjury and evidence-planting committed by himself, his partner Nino Durden, and other officers assigned to the city's rough Rampart Division.

The scandal resulted in approximately 100 criminal cases being thrown out due to the likelihood that the evidence was tainted.

"One bad cop can cause the rest of us in law enforcement untold problems," U.S. Attorney John Gordon told reporters after the hearing. "We have jurors who come in here and start losing confidence in us and the police we rely on to investigate our cases."

The fallout also resulted in the disbanding of the LAPD's CRASH anti-gang unit and a court consent decree between the city and the Justice Department aimed at implementing numerous reforms within the department.

Ovando's case followed the pattern Perez described. On Oct. 12, 1996, Ovando, a 19-year-old reputed gang member, walked into an empty apartment that Perez and Durden were using as an observation point and was immediately shot four times.

The U.S. Attorney's office said the two officers "conspired to cover up the fact they had shot an unarmed man by placing a sawed-off .22 caliber assault rifle next to Ovando and then claiming that an armed Ovando had burst into the apartment."

The serial number of the rifle, which had been seized by Perez from a gang member, had been filed off.

Perez and Durden's story led to assault and weapons charges being filed against Ovando, who was convicted and sentenced to 23 years in prison. The conviction was later overturned and Ovando received a $15 million settlement from the city last year.

Durden had pleaded guilty in April to violating the civil rights of Ovando and two others. He will be sentenced in federal court on Jan. 28.

One of Perez's other notorious partners, David Mack, is serving 14 years in prison for robbing a Los Angeles bank in 1997 and making off with $772,000.