San Diego : Penn’s Attorney Seeks Hearing on Academy Session

The attorney for accused police slayer Sagon Penn has requested further hearings before Penn’s retrial to establish the authenticity of the transcript of a Police Academy counseling session with Police Agent Donovan Jacobs.

In a motion filed late Monday, defense attorney Milton J. Silverman argued that he should be allowed to question all police officials who may have information about how the 8-year-old document came to light during jury deliberations in Penn’s first trial on charges of killing one officer and wounding another and a civilian.

The district attorney’s office is seeking to have any mention of the counseling session barred from Penn’s retrial, which is scheduled to begin Jan. 20 in San Diego County Superior Court.

During the 1978 session, academy sergeants upbraided Jacobs, then a police trainee, for hostile behavior and expressing a willingness to use racial slurs in the course of police work.

Prosecutors contend that the information is “stale” and irrelevant, and that Silverman has been unable to demonstrate the authenticity of the transcript. Silverman--who contends Jacobs provoked the March 31, 1985, shootings in Encanto--says the counseling session is prime evidence of Jacobs’ inclination to racist behavior.

Silverman also is seeking before the retrial to obtain testimony about a shirt purportedly belonging to Jacobs that may bear a paramilitary insignia. He wants to question police and prosecution officials, too, regarding the whereabouts of Penn’s wallet, which remained a mystery during the first trial. Just how Penn did, or did not, turn his wallet over to police may have triggered the confrontation.

Penn was found innocent in June of charges that he murdered Police Agent Thomas Riggs and attempted to murder Jacobs. He will be retried on charges on which the first jury deadlocked in favor of acquittal: voluntary manslaughter in Riggs’ death, attempted murder in the shooting of civilian ride-along Sara Pina-Ruiz, and attempted voluntary manslaughter and assault with a deadly weapon in the wounding of Jacobs.