Javier Ovando, Officer Rafael Perez, Officer Nino Durden

Shortly after Javier Ovando won his first settlement, in 2000, against the City of LA and the LAPD, for $15 million, he sued the County of LA and public defender Tamar Toister for malpractice. It was announced this week that he has finally settled, for $750,000.

Ovando was shot, paralyzed, and then framed by police officers later disgraced in the Rampart scandal in October of 1996. In his trial a year later, he was charged with felony assault on a police officer, assault with a deadly weapon with the intent of committing great bodily injury, and exhibiting a firearm in the presence of an officer and sentenced to 23 years in prison. He would have likely served all 23 years, had Officer Rafael Perez — one of the officers whose false testimony had put Ovando in prison — not been caught stealing a million dollars of cocaine from an evidence locker in the LAPD property room. Perez’s arrest implied a serious and lengthy sentence that he bartered his way down by offering to testify about a number of cases officers in the CRASH unit had “put on” people, one of which was Ovando’s. (These allegations of widespread police misconduct effectively broke open the Rampart scandal, in which more than 70 police officers were implicated in everything from unprovoked shootings to drug-dealing, perjury to bank robbery. The scandal is one of the most widespread cases of documented police misconduct in US history.)

Ovando’s conviction was overturned two-and-a-half years into his sentence, in 1999. Not long after, he sued the County of LA and his prior public defender Tamar Toister for malpractice, alleging that she represented him incompetently during his trial. He claimed that Toister did not call two witnesses who could have confirmed that he was unarmed the day he was shot. In Toister’s defense, County lawyers said that she had used “reasonable litigation strategy” and that if she had called the witnesses Ovando wanted, damaging evidence about his gang affiliation would have surfaced.

When the case originally went to trial, a jury found in favor of Ovando and awarded him $6.5 million. But this decision was overturned — one of the jurors failed to disclose in the selection process that she was an actress who had starred in “Gang Warz,” a movie about the Rampart scandal, and the judge felt it unfair that all blame had been placed on Toister, and not on Perez and Durden. Ovando’s lawyers appealed this to the State Supreme Court and lost. They were set to start trial again on July 22nd, but will no longer have to since the case was formally dismissed, after the settlement agreement was reached, on the 3rd of last month.

Epilogues:

Rafael Perez was sentenced in 1998 to five years in prison for stealing cocaine from the LAPD. He served three years, and was released on parole in 2001. According to PBS, federal prosecutors have cut a deal with Perez’s former partner, Nino Durden, whose testimony may now be used to bring further charges against Perez.

Nino Durden was sentenced in 2002 to five years in prison, and served less than three.

Tamar Toister is still a public defender. She wrote her account of what went wrong at the trial, in 2000, here.

Javier Ovando has other cases in the works. He was arrested last year for apparently making criminal threats to the new couple that bought his Topanga Canyon mansion. And in that same week, he lead police officers in his Hummer on a high-speed chase from Glendale to South San Gabriel. The case is still open.