{"id":299204,"date":"2017-03-15T23:45:03","date_gmt":"2017-03-15T22:45:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/newswire\/fmr-la-county-sheriff-guilty-of-corruption-faces-20yrs-in-federal-prison\/"},"modified":"2017-03-15T23:45:03","modified_gmt":"2017-03-15T22:45:03","slug":"fmr-la-county-sheriff-guilty-of-corruption-faces-20yrs-in-federal-prison","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/newswire\/fmr-la-county-sheriff-guilty-of-corruption-faces-20yrs-in-federal-prison\/","title":{"rendered":"Fmr LA County sheriff guilty of corruption, faces 20yrs in federal prison"},"content":{"rendered":"
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A federal jury has found former Los Angeles County sheriff Lee Baca guilty of corruption charges. He previously avoided conviction when a mistrial was declared. Now the prominent law enforcement leader could be behind bars for two decades.<\/p>\n

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After two full days of jury deliberations, a unanimous verdict was handed down against Baca on Wednesday, finding him guilty of assisting in the obstruction of a 2011 FBI investigation into LA County jail guards brutally beating inmates, taking bribes and lying to federal agents about it.<\/p>\n

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Read more<\/p>\n


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Baca, 74, himself was also determined to have been lying about his role in the obstruction, which prosecutors said was ordered from the top in the nation\u2019s largest sheriff\u2019s department.<\/p>\n

During the trial, Assistant US Attorney Lizabeth Rhodes said, \u201cwhen defendant Baca learned the FBI and a federal grand jury was investigating, he obstructed and when he learned the FBI has turned its focus on him, he lied,\u201d<\/em> KABC reported<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Defense attorney Nathan Hochman told jurors there was \u201cno evidence Sheriff Baca gave orders to obstruct the FBI,\u201d<\/em> according to KABC.<\/p>\n

This was Baca\u2019s second trial on corruption charges. The first was declared a mistrial<\/a> in December when one juror out of 12 refused to vote for acquittal.<\/p>\n

Upon learning that the FBI had an informant inmate in the LA County jail system, guards secretly moved the informant and lied to FBI agents about his whereabouts. In September 2011, a female FBI agent working the probe was threatened with arrest at her own home by two sergeants from the LA Sheriff\u2019s Department. Former Los Angeles Times reporter, Robert Faturechi, told jurors in the first trial that Baca had told him in an interview that he \u201cdirected\u201d<\/em> the sergeants to initiate the encounter.<\/p>\n

Baca was sheriff from 1998 to 2014, when he retired as news of the jail guard scandal broke. He is the eighth department official to be convicted in the FBI\u2019s probe, according<\/a> to KCBS.<\/p>\n

Baca is also reportedly to be in the early stages of Alzheimer’s disease.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

Via RT<\/a>. This piece was reprinted by RINF Alternative News<\/a> with permission or license.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Published time: 15 Mar, 2017 22:32 A federal jury has found former Los Angeles County sheriff Lee Baca guilty of corruption charges. He previously avoided conviction when a mistrial was declared. Now the prominent law enforcement leader could be behind bars for two decades. After two full days of jury deliberations, a unanimous verdict was […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":299205,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[519],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-299204","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-newswire"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/299204","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=299204"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/299204\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/299205"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=299204"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=299204"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=299204"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}