Minority Prosecutors Face Tough Questions

When criminal defendants enter the courtroom and see Mario Coto-Lopez, they sometimes ask: “Are you defending me?”

“No, I’m actually the one accusing you,” replies Coto-Lopez, a Los Angeles County deputy district attorney with the office’s Strategies Against Gang Environments program.

In a county criminal justice system where the majority of inmates are people of color, Latino and African American prosecutors often face tough questions. “Why do you put your own people in jail?” “Are you a sellout?” “Why aren’t you a defense lawyer?”

In response, black and Latino deputy district attorneys are increasingly joining or forming professional organizations they hope will eradicate suspicions in their communities that as prosecutors they are just another arm of a criminal justice system that fails people of color.

Los Angeles County jails house about 19,500 inmates--nearly 80% of them black or Latino. But victims are minorities too, said Michael Yglecias, head deputy of the district attorney’s Pomona office.

“Am I going to represent the person who got raped? Or the rapist?” Yglecias said.

In March, Yglecias and about 50 fellow deputy district attorneys formed the Latino Prosecutors Assn.

The group’s main goal is to offer support to members while making the Latino community more comfortable with the legal system and the role of prosecutors in it. The group is fighting years of bad perceptions, said Laura Gomez, a professor of law and sociology at UCLA.

“It’s very clear from popular polls, and some academic studies, that there is a real gap in confidence in the criminal justice system,” Gomez said.

Real or not, the perception of bias against a community hurts the system, said Justice Sandra Day O’Connor during a 1993 address she made to a U.S. 9th Circuit Court task force investigating prejudice in federal courts.

“When people perceive ... bias in a legal system, whether they suffer from it or not, they lose respect for the system as well as for the law,” O’Connor said.

The lawyers in the Latino Prosecutors Assn. say they will seek to change such perceptions by discussing legal procedures with Latinos, including what to expect if subpoenaed.

Often, his role as a prosecutor gives defendants and their families “this amazing misconception that we don’t understand,” said Coto-Lopez, 42, a board member of the Latino Prosecutors Assn. “But we do.”

Coto-Lopez moved with his family from Costa Rica to the Pico-Union area of Los Angeles when he was 10. He grew up with five other family members in a one-bedroom apartment a few houses down from original members of a notorious street gang, he said.

“I saw the rise of drive-bys, of helicopters flying around. I’m not from an upper middle-class background. Most of us aren’t,” Coto-Lopez said.

African American prosecutors also tend to be misunderstood, said county Deputy Dist. Atty. Gregory Jennings, regional director of the National Black Prosecutors Assn.

Jennings went home to the Bay Area to see his family during the O.J. Simpson murder trial, in which African American attorney Christopher Darden was prosecuting the high-profile defendant.

During an outdoor barbecue, a family friend confronted him on the patio with, “People like you shouldn’t be involved. You’re on the wrong side. When are you going to come back to the community and help us?”

Flabbergasted, Jennings had to defend his career, he says.

“I explained how in my position I’m the one who decides if a case is even filed, whether there is bias, whether the defendant has been affected by his race. It’s really important to have attorneys of color making these decisions.”

Jennings still walks into many courthouses where few except defendants are minorities, he said.

“Most judges are white, and the majority of prosecutors are white,” Jennings said.

Sometimes he feels like a prosecutor and a community activist at the same time, he said, especially when he works on behalf of the victims but still wants to make sure the defendants get fair treatment. In one such situation, he recalled, he was prosecuting an 18-year-old man in a gang-related shooting.

“He was facing a lot of time. He called me a name that implied I wasn’t black,” Jennings said.

In spite of the insult, Jennings said he made sure the defendant’s family understood what was taking place in court by explaining the proceedings.

“As a person of color, I had a little insight. This is one of the hardest things of being a prosecutor. Even though I’m involved in my community, I’m part of the system.”

Jennings said he has little hope that stereotypes will change soon, in part because there are few black prosecutors in Los Angeles County. He has worked in courtrooms in Bellflower, Compton and Torrance, and he said the one constant is that “people still don’t expect to see a prosecutor of color. I don’t think it will ever happen that they won’t be surprised.”

Some questions about career choice come from peers, said Cristene Albanese, a Los Angeles County deputy district attorney who grew up in East Los Angeles and went to Loyola Law School.

“When I was going to Loyola I was joining groups there like [Mexican American activists] National Council of La Raza, and there was always this negativity toward prosecutors,” she said.

Albanese sometimes returns to the university to speak about her career, encouraging law students to help their communities by making them safer, she said.

“I’m not putting that gang member away because he is Mexican or Puerto Rican, but because he needs to go away,” the Latino Prosecutors Assn. board member tells students.

The association also seeks to increase diversity in the district attorney’s office, Yglecias said. Raised in Boyle Heights, he is one of the highest-ranking Latinos in the department and the Latino prosecutors group’s first president.

Yglecias went to Dist. Atty. Steve Cooley with the idea of the association to make sure the group was accepted rather than risk it being seen as a group of disgruntled employees. There are more than 110 Latino deputy district attorneys in the office out of more than 1,000 lawyers, said D.A.’s office spokeswoman Sandi Gibbons. There are about 80 black prosecutors in the office, Gibbons said.

The professional groups can have a role in increasing those numbers, said Deputy Dist. Atty. Stanley Williams, who is black.

“We give a face to the many people in our community who perceive that law enforcement organizations are not fair,” Williams said.

“I tell them it’s a system for all of us, and that it’s generally a fair system. Some even seem somewhat proud, awestruck that a person of color is in the system. They’re certainly respectful of what I have to say.”