Brody's Notes... Deal Rejected In Palm Springs Gay Sex Sting Operation

Warm Sands neighborhood in Palm Springs, California

Photo By Michael Snyder, The Desert Sun

By Brody Levesque (Bethesda, Maryland) JAN 22 | Defence attorneys for 15 of the 19 defendants in the Palm Springs, California Gay Sex Sting rejected a plea bargain offer by the Riverside County District Attorney Thursday. Four other defendants in the 2009 incident in the Warm Sands neighborhood of the city either had their charges dismissed or have opted to mount a defence in separate hearings.

Riverside County Deputy District Attorney Earl Lee Robert said that his office had proposed a plea agreement that would have dropped the lifetime sex offender registration requirement if the defendants pleaded guilty. He noted that if they were convicted as charged, then they would be required to register as sex offenders, with annual renewals, for the rest of their lives on a national database available only to law enforcement officials.

Countering that plea bargain, defence attorney's for the men want the charges against them dismissed due to their contention that the Palm Springs Police Department targets gay men and has an institutional bias against them.

“The problem I have with this is that it's always, ‘Why don't the gay men roll over and apologize? Why don't they take a deal or something like good gay guys are supposed to?' Well, no. We've had enough of that,” defense attorney Joseph Rhea said. “These men were entrapped.”

Roger Tansey, a Riverside County Public Defender, who represents six of the defendants, added that the documented homophobic slurs by police Sergeant.Bryan Anderson as well as former Palm Springs police Chief David Dominguez, who has since resigned in the ensuing scandal once the remarks were made public during the court hearings, is proof of their contentions.

"Sgt. Anderson was actually the commander in charge of the sting. So, we now have the chief of police making obscene comments and the very senior official who was in charge of the overall sting calling out gay slurs — it kind of sounds like discrimination to me.” said Tansey

In the court documents filed by the defence attorneys, they maintain that the charges against all of the men are invalid because the police appeared “to be engaging in homophobia rather than focusing on actual crime.”

The Warm Sands operation, which took place in June of 2009, involved an undercover male officer acting as a decoy to attract male suspects intent on engaging in public sex acts. Nineteen men were arrested and charged with misdemeanor lewd public conduct.

Deputy District Attorney Earl Lee Roberts labelled the defence's decision “ironic.”

“They've been screaming about (being listed as sex offenders) all along, and now we've offered to settle this for less than sexual registration and they want to keep going. I think that's kind of ironic,” Roberts said, adding that he is confident about winning convictions against all of the defendants.

“The Palm Springs Police Department did nothing wrong. Nothing at all. They did an operation to address a problem that was legitimately there, that legitimately needed to be addressed,” he said. “We are right on the law I'm counting on us winning.”

Attorney Tansey, disagrees claiming that it was the police uncover officers who instigated any encounters in the sting.

“A typical scenario,” Tansey said, “would be a couple of cops, who were dressed in tank tops, would walk around grabbing their crotches and staring at the defendants’ crotches saying, ‘Show me what you got. Show me what you got.’ In no case did they come upon any man already having sex.” Tansey added that “in many cases the defendants were reluctant to participate and wanted to go back to a room or someplace more private and were coaxed to stay and allegedly expose themselves by the officers.”

After testimony Friday on the slurs and alleged police statements and misconduct, the Judge ordered a recess with the hearing set to resume Monday afternoon.