Los Angeles Justice not served in whistle-blower case
By Steve Wilson, for the Arizona Republic Jan. 09, 2001

Bob Mullally was back at work at a Scottsdale hardware store Monday, helping customers find nails, paint and plumbing fixtures. Last Friday, the avuncular 57-year-old, a Scottsdale resident, was found guilty of criminal contempt by a federal judge. He awaits a sentence of up to six months in prison. More at Bad Cop

This is Mullally's reward for following his conscience and exposing adomestic abuse coverup by the Los Angeles Police Department. It's a rotten end to an ugly story of police concealing crimes within their ranks.

Mullally was convicted of violating a court order when he handed 79 police personnel files to a Los Angeles TV reporter in 1997. The records were obtained in a wrongful death case against an LA policeofficer, who killed his estranged wife. The lawsuit asked for all police files with domestic abuse complaints.

Mullally, who spent most of his career as a personnel executive, was hired by the plaintiff's attorney to review the files. His report listed 61 assaults, including 28 with a deadly weapon, six rapes and one sodomy.

Most of the files contained a note by police investigators saying a crime had been committed, but not a single case was prosecuted. After Mullally's report was given to Los Angeles city attorneys, the City Council voted to settle the death case out of court for $1.5 million, which kept the records from becoming public in a trial.

Believing the files wouldn't otherwise come to light, he gave them to the television station. Its news reports led to a storm of outrage and a city-ordered investigation that confirmed his findings.

James Weinstein, an Arizona State University law professor and a lawyer for Mullally, conceded that court orders normally cannot be disobeyed. But he contended that this case presented an extraordinary circumstance that deserved an exception.

Disclosing the files was clearly in the public interest, he said, because they held prima facie evidence of the police breaking the law. Had the court known what was in the files, a magistrate would not have issued the protective order, he asserted.

Weinstein said the greater act of contempt had been committed by the LA city attorney's office. Its lawyers had seen the files and had to know they contained criminal evidence. Yet they asked the court for the protective order to keep them secret.

To that extent, he argued, city attorneys had used the federal court as an unwitting accomplice in the coverup. Judge William Keller, however, chose to follow the letter of the law and cut Mullally no slack. Letting him get away with defying the court order would "inflict a serious wound on the judicial system," Keller said.

I've got news for the judge. The deepest wound in this case, by far, is its grossly perverse outcome. The dozens of Los Angeles policemen who battered their spouses, whose crimes were affirmed by internal affairs officers, were never brought to justice.

The gavel slammed down just once, falling on the soft-spoken man who dared blow the whistle.

The following was reported in the Deseret News, out of Utah.

Wife Sues over Husband's Unlawful Eviction

A lawsuit filed by the estranged wife of a Salt Lake County sheriff's detective contends that she was unlawfully forced to leave the home she bought five years ago because her husband abused his authority and filed a false protective order.

According to the suit filed in Salt Lake's U.S. District Court, detective Kenneth Frank and officers Nathan Scott Thompson and Brett Perez violated Debbie Frank's constitutional rights by evicting her from her home, "under the color of law."

Kenneth Frank convinced the two officers that the protective order he held required his wife to vacate the home. Debbie Frank is suing her husband, Salt Lake County, the city of South Jordan, and Thompson and Perez. Besides civil rights violations by all five defendants, the suit charges intentional infliction of emotional distress by all parties, abuse of process and malicious prosecution by Kenneth Frank, and negligence by Salt Lake County,The Salt Lake Deseret News reports.

She is seeking punitive damages to be determined at the trial.

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