Challenge to Using Informers Dealt Blow : Courts: Judge rejects new trial for man charged with murder on basis of jailhouse informants’ false claims. She says there was ample other evidence to lead to conviction.

In a serious blow to lawyers challenging the use of jailhouse informants, a judge Tuesday refused to grant a new trial to a Compton man who was charged with murder only after informants claimed that he confessed.

Despite evidence that the informants lied, Superior Court Judge Judith C. Chirlin said Kevin Dykes’ conviction for second-degree murder was fairly obtained.

Chirlin, who presided at Dykes’ trial, said there was ample other evidence for jurors to convict Dykes, including Dykes’ own testimony that he served as a lookout for the killers.

Her assessment clashed with that of both the defense attorney and the original trial prosecutor, who said they believed that the informant testimony was critical.

But a new prosecutor assigned to the case agreed with Chirlin that the informant testimony was not important.

The judge’s ruling stunned Dykes’ defense lawyer, Steven Hauser, who said: “The informants took up 40% of the trial . . . I don’t see how the court can say 40% of the case was perjured, but it didn’t matter to the jury because they had the other 60%.”

The trial prosecutor, Deputy Dist. Atty. Elliot Alhadeff, expressed his opinion in an October, 1988, memo to his superiors.

“The entire case against Dykes in the murder,” he said, “. . . rested on his confession to the informants.”

The memo was written in response to a request from top officials in the Los Angeles County district attorney’s office, who were then attempting to identify every case involving informant testimony in the last decade.

The officials vowed to investigate the cases in the wake of a demonstration by veteran informant Leslie Vernon White, who showed his jailers that he could convincingly fake the murder confession of an inmate whom he had never met.

Using a jail phone, White posed as a policeman to gather inside information about the murder from law enforcement agencies, then arranged a phony record to show that he had briefly shared a cell with the inmate whose confession he claimed to have heard.

Dykes, who is serving a sentence of 24 years to life for the 1986 stabbing death of his friend, Otis Perry, and two attempted murders, was not present at the hearing, which was the first in a series of expected bids by defense lawyers to reopen cases because of questionable informant testimony.

Los Angeles defense lawyer Gigi Gordon, who has coordinated defense efforts against use of jailhouse informants, predicted that the denial of the petition for a writ of habeas corpus would have a chilling effect.

“Few people (defense lawyers) came forward in the first place,” she said. “Now people will be much more discouraged.”

Dykes was arrested for possessing rock cocaine in 1986, days after he told Compton police that he had seen a friend stabbed to death and witnessed two other stabbings that were not fatal.

Because he could not immediately post $250 for a bail bond, he was jailed. Because he had provided information on the murder case, he was placed in a section of the Hall of Justice jail reserved for informants.

Two veteran informants, Willie Battle and Jesse Williams, told police that Dykes confessed to them in jail.

Only then was Dykes charged.

Battle testified that Dykes told him that he was a drug dealer who helped his “henchmen” stab his friend to death.

Williams testified similarly, saying Dykes admitted ordering his “bodyguards” to kill his friend, then helped with the stabbing.

After Battle and Williams came forward, Dykes was moved to the Men’s Central Jail and placed in a section used for prisoners who need protection.

There he met veteran informant White. White told police and later testified that Dykes confessed to him too.

The trial turned into a battle of informants as the defense called informants of its own, who testified that Battle, Williams and White were liars.

“It was a matter of the jury deciding whom they believed,” Chirlin said.

She said the “jury obviously rejected a substantial portion of the testimony of the informants.”

Dykes’ attorney, Hauser, wanted Chirlin to hear testimony Tuesday from White in his bid to reopen the case.

White had said in a sworn statement after the trial that Williams and Battle had admitted framing Dykes. White had indicated in the statement, but had not actually admitted, that he had framed Dykes too.

However, Chirlin decided that she did not want to hear from White.

She noted that White had testified twice recently as an expert witness for the defense in other trials and had answered “no” when asked specifically whether he had lied at the Dykes trial. If he said now that he had perjured himself, how would she know he was telling the truth, she asked.

“I don’t think anybody would know . . . if and when Leslie White was telling the truth,” the judge said.

She added, “The only thing we would accomplish would be holding another little media event for him.”

White, who was not present in court, later called The Times to say that he was disappointed that he was not allowed to testify and had planned to admit that he committed perjury in the Dykes case.

He said he had conned Dykes into providing him with copies of police reports recounting the statements of Battle and Williams.

“I took the information verbatim from the reports and called up Compton PD and fed it to them,” he said. “They jumped on it because in their minds, there was no way that I could have gotten the information from Battle or Jesse Williams because they were in the other jail.”

In fact, White said, “Dykes never made any admissions to me whatsoever.”

In rejecting White’s testimony, Chirlin said a recantation by White would have had no “material effect” on the verdict.

She based her assessment, in part, on the form the verdict took.

She noted that jurors specifically found a “special-use allegation”--a charge that Dykes himself used a knife--to be untrue.

If they had believed the informants, they presumably would have found it to be true and thus found Dykes guilty of first-degree murder, the judge said..

The new prosecutor, Deputy Dist. Atty. Frank E. Sundstedt, argued that Dykes was properly convicted of second-degree murder as “an aider and abettor.”

He recounted for Chirlin circumstantial evidence that he said indicated that Dykes had an ancillary role in the two non-fatal stabbings and Dykes’ own testimony that he had a gun and could have intervened to stop the murder of his friend, who was stabbed 81 times.

Dykes testified that he did not intervene because he was too afraid of the killers. But Dykes admitted also that he told the killers he would act as their lookout, helped them dump his friend’s body, treated one of the killer’s cuts and suggested that they clean up a bloody driveway.

Sundstedt said that under these circumstances, Dykes was lucky that he was not convicted of first-degree murder.

On another issue, Sundstedt conceded that the district attorney’s office had unwittingly, but nonetheless illegally, withheld information about the informants’ pasts from the defense attorney.

But he argued that the information was not critical to Dykes’ receiving a fair trial.

Chirlin agreed.