LOS ANGELES—Faced with spending the best of his remaining years in prison as he declines from Alzheimer’s, former Los Angeles County Sheriff Lee Baca withdrew his guilty plea to lying about efforts to thwart an FBI investigation into abuses at the jails he ran and vowed to “set the record straight” at trial.
The decision followed a collapse in negotiations to reach a new sentencing deal Monday after a judge rejected a previous agreement as too lenient because it called for no more than six months behind bars in the corruption case.
Defense lawyers said they offered to have Baca serve no more than a year, but they believed the judge wanted a sentence of several years and they needed certainty given the 74-year-old’s prognosis and his desire to emerge from incarceration without having lost too much mental capacity.
“We have a very, very small window of time that we believe Mr. Baca’s life will be normal,” attorney Michael Zweiback told reporters. “There’s a good likelihood that he'll be suffering very dramatically from the disease at issue. So if there was a possibility that he was going to go beyond his good years in prison, then he should go out and fight.”
Judge Percy Anderson set a trial date for Sept. 20 in U.S. District Court, although that’s likely to be postponed after prosecutors seek an indictment that could allege more serious offenses.
