West Coast Firm to Undertake Probe : Assignment for Congress Is New Challenge for Lawyer

Throughout a career baptized in the smoke and fire of the 1965 Watts rebellion, Los Angeles attorney Johnnie L. Cochran Jr. says there is one lesson he learned the hard way: The official version is not always the correct one.

It is with that lesson in mind, Cochran said, that he and his firm have agreed to accept an assignment that might be considered unusual for a man whose reputation was built on aggressively disputing “the official version,” largely in civil lawsuits accusing police officers of abusing, assaulting or killing citizens they arrested.

For the next eight or nine months, Cochran’s law firm will serve as special counsel to the Committee on Standards of Official Conduct of the U.S. House of Representatives, more commonly known as the House Ethics Committee.

The panel recently voted to conduct investigations of three House members--Fernand J. St Germain (D-R.I.), James Weaver (D-Ore.) and Bill Boner (D-Tenn.)--who have been accused of using their offices to enrich themselves.

To a large extent, it is Cochran’s six-lawyer firm that, in helping to conduct the investigations and in making formal recommendations to the committee, will shape the official view of the congressmen’s conduct.

“I want to be as thorough and open as I can,” Cochran, 48, said this week in an interview, “so when someone comes in and says, ‘Why did you do this?’ I want to be able to explain it.”

Giving the assignment to a law firm far-removed from the nation’s capital was an unusual move, said Rep. Julian C. Dixon, the southwest Los Angeles Democrat who chairs the ethics panel.

“I was desirous of going outside the traditional loop” of Washington lawyers, Dixon said.

Dixon and Cochran have a history. In fact, as a young Los Angeles deputy city attorney, Cochran practiced law in a courtroom where Dixon served as as a county marshal.

During the 1984 Democratic National Convention in San Francisco, Dixon, as chair of the party’s Rules Committee, was called on to help settle a potentially divisive rules dispute between Sen. Gary Hart (D-Colo.) and the Rev. Jesse Jackson. Cochran was among the lawyers Dixon called on for advice.

Some who know him say that Cochran’s style in the courtroom closely resembles his style in clothes: Smooth, understated elegance with an occasionally unexpected flash of color.

Born in Shreveport, La., Cochran and his family came to Los Angeles in 1949, after stops in San Francisco and San Diego. His father managed a life insurance company; his mother sold real estate. Cochran’s parents still live in the same home on W. 28th Street near Arlington Avenue, where Cochran grew up. Cochran is married and has three children.

Cochran, a Los Angeles High School graduate, earned a bachelor’s degree at UCLA, where, he met a former fraternity brother who had become a Los Angeles police officer. Tom Bradley became a close friend. In 1981, the mayor appointed Cochran to the Los Angeles Airport Commission, a panel which Cochran now heads.

Explosion in 1965

After finishing law school, Cochran worked as a deputy city attorney. In the summer of 1965, only a few months after he had opened his own practice, Watts exploded.

“You’ve never seen anything like it from a lawyer’s standpoint,” he recalled in a 1981 interview. “We were in court until 9 p.m. every night. We’d be seeing clients until 11 p.m. or midnight.”

In 1966, Cochran became involved as an outside attorney in a case that was to help chart the course of his career.

Leonard Deadwyler was shot and killed by a Los Angeles police officer who had stopped Deadwyler’s car while he was rushing his pregnant wife to a hospital. Accounts of the events that precipitated the shooting varied, but Cochran believed that the officer had grossly overreacted. A coroner’s inquest disagreed.

The Ron Settles Case

Cochran and the lawyers who work with him have had their share of victories and defeats. Although no criminal charges resulted, the City of Signal Hill in 1983 agreed to pay $760,000 to settle a wrongful death suit that Cochran filed on behalf of relatives of college football star Ron Settles. Police contended that Settles hanged himself in the city jail after he was arrested for speeding. But a coroner’s jury ruled that he had died at the hands of another. No one has ever been charged.

Last month, attorneys Michael R. Mitchell and Kenneth R. Roberson, who are associated with Cochran’s firm, won a $2.3-million verdict against three Long Beach policemen who, the lawyers claimed, persuaded witnesses to lie about a cook’s involvement in a 1971 murder. The cook, Juan Venegas, was released from prison in 1974 after the California Supreme Court ruled that evidence presented at his trial had not been sufficient to convict him.

“I really do have a lot of faith in our governmental institutions,” Cochran said. “Look at the Venegas case. It took a long time, but that’s justice at work--as long as they don’t throw out the verdict.”

As an assistant Los Angeles County district attorney from 1978 through 1980, Cochran supervised the Special Investigations Division, the unit responsible for looking into shootings by police officers. Cochran was picked by former Dist. Atty. John Van de Kamp, largely on the strength of his reputation as a lawyer concerned with the problems of police abuse.

He drew criticism from police officials. Cochran said he believes the complaints were undeserved.

A Matter of Confidence

“I think that it is very important that the people have confidence in our institutions. I don’t think that enough had been done in looking at these allegations before that time.

“If you look at the overall statistics, we didn’t file many cases at all. But I think the ones where we did, we had an effect. I can point with pride to some lesser degree of shootings.

“I don’t think you become anti-police if you say, ‘The police are human beings and they make mistakes.’ I think what happens is by questioning, you make the system better.”