A Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department homicide detective quietly approached a Superior Court judge late last month with an unusual request: He wanted the judge to bar the county’s coroner from releasing the autopsy report on a man killed by sheriff’s deputies.
In normal times, a judge would have had no reason to get involved. The office of the medical examiner-coroner had always kept reports secret whenever investigators from the Sheriff’s Department or any other police agency asked.
But these are not normal times in L.A. County, where Sheriff Alex Villanueva is locked in an increasingly hostile power struggle with county officials who accuse him of undoing critical reforms, shunning transparency and rebuffing efforts to hold him accountable. The friction has spilled over in recent months to the office of the medical examiner-coroner, where senior staffers have made it clear that the old rules no longer apply when it comes to killings by sheriff’s deputies.
The judge signed off on the gag order, setting in motion a legal tussle that has further isolated the sheriff from other county leaders and deepened the feud with the coroner.
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