Amount of Settlement, Gates’ Role Questioned

SANTA ANA — As Orange County officials scrambled Tuesday to explain a secret multimillion-dollar deal to pay the family of a sheriff’s deputy slain by a fellow officer, legal experts criticized the proposed settlement as unusually high and questioned Sheriff Brad Gates’ involvement.

Despite earlier assertions by the family’s attorney that the case was being settled for $10 million, county officials said Tuesday that survivors of Deputy Darryn Leroy Robins may receive nearly $5 million under a proposed settlement.

Thomas Beckett, the county’s risk manager, said about $1.1 million would be paid in a lump sum to Robins’ wife, Rosemary, his 3-year-old daughter and his mother. In addition, the county would purchase an annuity for another $800,000 to fund payments that could total nearly $4 million over their lifetimes, Beckett said.

In all, the settlement offer as now structured would cost the county about $2 million, he said.

Beckett declined to discuss how the county arrived at the settlement or the liability in the case.

The offer, Beckett said, is still tentative and needs the approval of a U.S. Bankruptcy Court judge and a three-member county claims committee, consisting of Chief Executive Officer Jan Mittermeier, acting County Counsel Laurence Watson and Auditor-Controller Steve E. Lewis.

Thomas Girardi, the family’s Los Angeles attorney, said earlier this week that the parties had agreed to a $10-million settlement. He filed papers in Bankruptcy Court listing that amount. Girardi did not respond Tuesday to requests for comment on the settlement amount.

County sources say Gates had pushed hard to compensate the Robins family without a bruising court battle.

The sheriff declined to talk about the settlement Tuesday. His spokesman, Lt. Ron Wilkerson, said Gates was withholding comment on the proposed deal.

“We’re attempting to find out where the information came from regarding the settlement and reconcile it with what we believe to be the facts,” Wilkerson said. “We will evaluate the situation after that.”

The settlement involved the Christmas Day shooting two years ago of Robins by his partner, Brian P. Scanlan, during a training drill outside a Lake Forest movie theater. Scanlan was improperly training with a loaded weapon when he shot Robins in the face.

The shooting sparked allegations of gross misconduct and racism because Scanlan is white and Robins was an African-American. The Orange County Grand Jury and federal prosecutors, however, found no criminal wrongdoing.

On Tuesday, some members of the legal community questioned the amount of county’s proposed settlement.

Brian Shenker, a director with the National Verdict Research Service in Horsham, Penn., which tracks jury awards, said the median settlement for a wrongful-death lawsuit against a police department is $700,000.

E. Thomas Barham, a Los Alamitos civil rights lawyer who has filed several lawsuits against police departments, said the county appears to be taking the “highly unusual” step of settling the case without the filing of a lawsuit by Robins’ family. The family filed a claim for damages against the county seeking $15 million but never took the case to court.

“It looks like there’s something wrong here and somebody needs to apply the smell test,” Barham said. “The county is saying this case is worth X number of millions without even taking a deposition.”

Stephen Yagman, a Venice lawyer whose practice is largely devoted to cases against police officers, said the proposed settlement appears to be “a special case in which the county government decided to give a gift to a family of one of its own. It sounds like a gift of public funds. The amount is outrageously higher than any settlement that’s ever been given by someone that has been harmed by the police.”

Wylie A. Aitken, one of Orange County’s top personal injury attorneys, said he was surprised by the settlement amount because the publicly known facts of the case don’t seem to support a multimillion-dollar claim against the county.

Aitken and other questioned why county officials did not direct the family to pursue a workers’ compensation claim. That procedure, which is routinely followed in such cases, would have given the victim’s family a maximum of $115,000 in 1993, said Manny Nunez, a Santa Ana attorney who handles workers’ compensation cases.

Aitken said the fact that Robins was killed “during the course and scope of his duties” would make the family’s claim a worker’s compensation issue. “The question is why is the county paying that much,” Aitken said.

Scanlan, who says he accidentally fired the shot that killed his 38-year-old partner, on Tuesday said he approved of the proposed deal and was not surprised by reports that Gates supported it.

“When [the shooting] first happened, Gates said that it was like losing a son,” Scanlan said in a telephone interview from Rio Rico, Ariz, where he now works as a private investigator. “I know that his primary concern was to take care of Rosemary. He didn’t want her to go through any more undue pain.”

Scanlan said that “still not a day goes by that I don’t think about Darryn and the shooting.

“It will always be with me, something that I’ll have to live with,” said Scanlan, who has since been granted a service-connected disability retirement in which he receives about $2,100 a month. “I hope that everybody’s satisfied with the settlement. I believe it’s fair for Rosemary, and I hope that there is finally some closure.”

According to law enforcement accounts of the incident, Robins and Scanlan were engaged in an unscheduled training exercise behind the theater, with Robins playing the part of a suspect in a car stop and Scanlan the arresting officer, when the shooting occurred.

Scanlan, a 32-year-old field training deputy, told investigators that he shot Robins accidentally after Robins startled him by pulling a hidden handgun from behind the visor of his patrol car.

Robins, authorities said, apparently was mimicking a technique used by gang members against police.

The Orange County district attorney’s office concluded after an investigation that Scanlan had been “grossly negligent” for using a loaded pistol in a training exercise, and suggested he be charged with involuntary manslaughter. But in an unusual twist, prosecutors left the final decision to the grand jury, which declined to indict Scanlan.

At the urging of the victim’s family and community leaders, Justice Department officials looked into the case but said they could find no violations of federal law.

In August 1994, Robins’ widow filed a claim with the county seeking $15 million on behalf of herself and her 3-year-old daughter, Melissa. She alleged that the Sheriff’s Department and county officials knew that deputies were holding training sessions with loaded weapons in violation of department policy.

After the shooting, Sheriff Gates expressed concern for Rosemary Robins, and visited her at her home in Los Angeles several times.

According to a county official close to the settlement talks, Gates “wanted to get the case settled before a claim was even filed.” The official added that at one point, the sheriff tried to get the county to buy Rosemary Robins a house as part of an eventual settlement.

The family’s attorney and county officials confirmed Monday that the proposed settlement has been in the works for months. The deal was handled through the Judicial Arbitration & Mediation Services Inc., a private service that for a fee helps settle civil disputes and avoid long and costly court battles.

Times staff writers H.G. Reza, Mark Platte and Ken Ellingwood contributed to this report.