May 10, 1992

U.S. apologizes to Puerto Rico in cop brutality case

By Jim McGee

While the federal review of possible civil rights violations in the Rodney King case proceeds in Los Angeles, television viewers in
Puerto Rico have learned new details in the last week about a 14-year-old police brutality investigation by the Justice Department and
the FBI that went badly awry.

Most remarkably, they have heard a formal apology for the Justice Department's role following the 1978 case. Drew S. Days III, who
headed Justice's Civil Rights Division from 1977 to 1980, apologized for what he now believes was an FBI cover-up.

The episode, which still haunts politics in Puerto Rico, began July 25, 1978, when two members of an independence group and a
police undercover officer commandeered a taxi outside the city of Ponce and ordered its driver to take them to Cerro Maravilla,
about 40 miles away southwest of San Juan, where they planned to sabotage a television transmission tower as a political protest.
Instead, they were met by five police officers, and the two activists were killed by gunfire.

An initial police ruling that the officers fired in self-defense was challenged by the taxi driver, who told San Juan reporters that the two men had surrendered after some initial gunfire. He said that the two were beaten and that minutes later he heard a second volley of
shots.

Days acknowledged in testimony before a hearing of the commonwealth Senate Judiciary Committee, conducted during a closed
session in late March but televised this month on tape, that the San Juan FBI office had dismissed reports of the driver's account as
"nebulous" and had refused to interview him.

"The local FBI office employed one stratagem after another to avoid doing a full investigation," Days testified after being shown copies of FBI teletypes. "The FBI is part of the Justice Department and, to that extent, what you've shown me does point to a cover-up in that part of the Justice Department."

Five years after the shooting, the Puerto Rican Senate conducted its own investigation, using testimony of witnesses who were
granted immunity, and uncovered evidence that the two men were murdered while kneeling. The Justice Department lawyers then
returned to San Juan in 1984 and convicted 10 police officers of perjury and obstruction of justice.

Asked why his Justice Department lawyers did not take the same investigative steps years earlier, Days said, "If we didn't do what we
should have done in terms of immunity, then I am very sorry that we didn't, because to put Puerto Rico through 14 years of this
agony is something that the Civil Rights Division ought to try to avoid."

Now, the commonwealth Senate Judiciary Committee is examining why the Justice Department's original review failed. The Senate
wants to find out why the case went so wrong, to make the American public aware of it, and to make sure that it does not happen
again.

But the inquiry has been stymied by the Justice Department's refusal, during eight years of a continuing court battle in Washington, to
turn over its internal documents on the Cerro Maravilla case. One reason for the reluctance, chief Puerto Rican counsel Edgardo Perez
Viera says, is the possibility that the FBI was in on the undercover operation all along.

The FBI's 1984 internal investigation of its own work in the case found no evidence of a deliberate cover-up, saying the agents in the
case wanted to avoid derailing "the cooperative anti-terrorism effort" with Puerto Rican police. But the review criticized "unsound"
judgments by the agents and lax supervision by headquarters.

In a 1990 letter, FBI Director William S. Sessions conceded, "In hindsight, the eyewitness should have been interviewed and a civil
rights investigation initiated" by the FBI immediately. In his televised testimony, Days said he should have pushed harder to overcome
"unprecedented" FBI resistance to a civil rights investigation. Days testified that he and his aides knew something was amiss and
initiated two grand jury inquiries. Without the benefit of meaningful FBI work, however, the inquiries proved fruitless.