Jailbreak Inquiry : No Case Is Established on Lawyer

There is insufficient evidence to link San Diego attorney Alex Landon to a 1972 prison escape in which a guard was killed, an independent inquiry into the 16-year-old incident has concluded.

But the inquiry, conducted by former U.S. Atty. Terry Knoepp and released Monday, also says that the pattern of telephone calls between the escapee and the attorney at the time of the incident raises “disturbing questions,” a conclusion that echoes concerns from Landon’s detractors.

What role, if any, Landon played in the October, 1972, escape of Ronald Beaty from the Chino state prison has taken on significant political and legal importance since the San Diego attorney was hired as executive director of Community Defenders Inc., the city’s largest nonprofit organization of private attorneys devoted solely to defending indigent criminals.

Contract on the Line?

Community Defenders is in line to receive a $36-million, three-year contract from San Diego County to represent poor people in the courts. But persistent questions about Landon’s role in the escape--questions pushed openly by Assemblyman Larry Stirling (R-San Diego)--have dogged the organization while it is waiting for final approval on the contract.

Landon denies any involvement in the incident.

The charges against Landon stem from an Oct. 6, 1972, escape from Chino by Beaty, who was whisked from a vehicle being used to transport him to a San Bernardino court hearing. Friends of Beaty forced the car off the road, shooting one of the guards to death and wounding another.

Two months later, Beaty was apprehended in the Bay Area and he turned state’s witness to help prosecute members of Venceremos, a prison rights group, who helped in the escape. Beaty’s testimony helped convict four people in the escape plot.

Beaty also told authorities that Landon, then a San Diego attorney with a private practice geared toward helping inmates, helped smuggle 24 hacksaw blades to him at Chino. Beaty also said Landon smuggled out escape plans he had drawn up in the summer of 1972.

Testimony Reversed

However, Beaty later reversed himself and said that Landon had nothing to do with the escape and that he carried the escape plans out of prison in two envelopes as an unwitting participant.

State Bar officials investigated the allegations and found insufficient evidence against Landon. No criminal charges were ever filed against the San Diego lawyer, but the state Department of Corrections has banned him from the state prison system.

The incident appeared to be dead until Community Defenders, with Landon as its executive director, won the county contract. Since then, Stirling has openly questioned Landon’s involvement in the escape, and interest in the incident has revived.

Last month, the chairman of the state Legislature’s Joint Committee on Prison Construction and Operations called for a criminal investigation into charges that Landon sneaked hacksaw blades into Beaty by taping them to the back of a legal brief. At his urging, the San Bernardino County district attorney’s office has agreed to look into the allegations.

Meanwhile, Community Defenders hired Knoepp in February to answer questions from the San Diego County Board of Supervisors.

“Despite additional leads developed during the investigation that tend to corroborate the existence of escape plans and jewelers blades, the new evidence does not point to Alex Landon as the agent of delivery of those items,” the inquiry concludes, adding that Beaty’s statements on the matter cannot be considered credible.

Knoepp wrote in his report that his investigation reconstructed a telephone log showing many telephone calls between Beaty, two of his co-conspirators and Landon between July and December in 1972. Twenty-two of the calls occurred between Sept. 3 and Oct. 6, the night of the escape, and many were made after midnight; several other calls were received by Landon after the escape.

Landon told Knoepp and his investigators that he was sharing a home at the time with Geraldine Davies, whose phone number was the same as that listed for Prisoner’s Rights and Re-Entry Project, a group that helped former convicts find work and adjust to a world outside of prison.

Landon told the investigators he didn’t recall the exact nature of the calls, but that the conspirators in the escape would make general conversation and express interest in the project.

“The pattern of telephone traffic between phones accessible to Mr. Landon and members of the escape team, particularly during September and early October, 1972, does raise disturbing questions,” Knoepp concluded. “The investigators were not able to learn from third parties to what extent, if any, the telephone traffic played in the escape and its aftermath. However, the evidence would be insufficient to support prosecution of Mr. Landon in connection with the escape.”

Reached in Sacramento, Stirling said the mention of “disturbing questions” with regard to Landon is the most relevant finding of the independent inquiry.

“There is no one smoking gun--or smoking hacksaw blade--that does it all,” Stirling said about the questions surrounding Landon and the 16-year-old incident. “The weight of evidence is that there is some significant involvement by Mr. Landon and his friends in this thing. Only the participants know, so there is a substantial body of evidence that creates some disturbing questions.”

Even if there eventually are no findings of criminal wrongdoing, Stirling said, the questions about Landon’s involvement in the escape may be enough to convince the County Board of Supervisors not to award the contract to Community Defenders.

Landon said Monday that the report supports what he has been saying all along--that he had no part in the escape.

“My position has been that I have done nothing wrong,” said Landon. “It’s difficult to prove that something that didn’t happen, didn’t happen. But there’s nothing in the report to indicate that I was involved, and I was not involved, and so obviously I feel that’s a correct conclusion.”

E. Miles Harvey, chairman of Community Defenders, agreed that the report vindicates Landon and called on Stirling to stop engaging in “McCarthyism” by continuing to ask a “series of questions that are designed to have innuendoes in them, innuendoes of guilt.”