Once students have finally grabbed their snacks, Rosenthal starts up the movie. Over the past few months, they've analyzed books ranging from To Kill a Mockingbird to A Time to Kill and such films as 12 Angry Men and The Verdict, not to mention what Rosenthal considers one of the most accurate media portrayals of the justice system, My Cousin Vinny. Today they watch Witness for the Prosecution, a 1957 film based on an Agatha Christie story.
Once the final scene ends, the class begins picking apart the melodramatic production. The central conceit, involving secret marriages and conniving spouses, just doesn't make any sense. Courtrooms aren't anything like the one in the film, with all the emotional outbursts on the stand and bloody confrontations on the floor. And the film's hero? The bighearted, brandy-pickled attorney Sir Wilfred Robarts, the attorney who takes on a suicide mission of a case simply because he doesn't like to fail? Lawyers aren't really like that.
Police union president Nick Rogers says officers are afraid to do their jobs.
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Except that when he was working in the district attorney's office in L.A., Rosenthal himself took on just such a case. After all, as he often puts it, "I hate to lose."
Growing up in Sherman Oaks, he'd recognized that he was destined for the courtroom when, in fourth grade, he found himself able to deliver sparkling extemporaneous oral reports. "It was at that point I realized that public speaking was my forte, especially persuasive public speaking," he remembers. So after studying law at the University of California, Berkeley, he took a senior law-clerk job with the Los Angeles County district attorney. It was a job that meshed perfectly with how he was wired. "I was pathologically self-righteous," he says. "I always follow the rules. I do the right thing, and you know what? If you are not going to do the right thing, I need to be part of holding you accountable for not doing it."
When he started that job, in 1986, there seemed to be a lot of people around L.A. not doing the right thing. Rosenthal tackled his first homicide case one year out of law school. Soon after, he was assigned to the office's major-fraud division, prosecuting doctors and lawyers for multimillion-dollar insurance scams. "I was having a ball. I loved it," he recalls. "I was able to hone my craft. And in court, you're like an actor who gets a regular salary, with an audience who can't get up and leave."
Then, while part of the district attorney's special investigations division, Rosenthal stumbled into his biggest courtroom drama of all. In 1999, he was prosecuting L.A. cop Rafael Perez for stealing cocaine from an evidence locker. To get off, Perez offered to snitch on bigger crimes — like the fact that his partner shot a gang member and covered it up. And that, he hinted, was just the beginning.
The beginning, it turned out, of the Rampart scandal, one of the most widespread cases of police misconduct in the country's history. The investigation that grew out of Perez's allegations would eventually implicate seventy anti-gang officers from the Los Angeles Police Department's Rampart Division in west L.A., in everything from dirty shootings to planting evidence, from drug dealing to bank robbery, with dirty cops even showing up on the payroll of Death Row Records. Only in L.A.: Echoes of the scandal wound up on TV in The Shield, in the movie Cellular and in the video game Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas.
As the liaison between the cops and the DA's Rampart Task Force, Rosenthal got unprecedented access to the police internal affairs division, where he saw a side of police culture he'd never experienced as a prosecutor. "It wasn't until I went inside that I started to see how politics really affected police culture, all the way down to line officers," he says. "I saw how internal affairs could be used to harass and intimidate officers, and could be used to ignore bad conduct and cover it up. Nothing got out. That was the thing about the LAPD: They never wanted anything bad to get out to the public."
And that police culture seemed to stymie the prosecutors. The investigation eventually sputtered out, with most of the officers acquitted of wrongdoing as rumors swirled over political feuds and police coverups. But in the meantime, questions about police conduct led the courts to toss out 106 criminal convictions, with the city paying a record $125 million in civil lawsuits and the feds coming in to take over the LAPD at a cost of a hundred million more. "I saw a system where jurors and judges and prosecutors couldn't trust the police," says Rosenthal. "The entire system breaks down. If you don't have that, you have anarchy."
He also saw that it was time for him and his wife, herself a prosecutor, to get out of town. "I was not going to be able to live it down for a decade," he says. "Wherever I went, I would be the guy who started Rampart."
That's why, in 2001, he jumped at the opportunity to become the first police auditor in Portland, Oregon. While the job represented a major cut in pay, it was also an opportunity to confront police misconduct in a new way. "I used to think that through the sheer force of my will, I could change things and get things done," Rosenthal remembers. "But what I think I learned through Rampart was that if you are dealing with an entrenched bureaucracy, the frontal assault may not be the way to go. You have got to work with them to establish the long-term change."
