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In an unusual ruling late last week - - in a case borne out of an era of misuse of informants by the Los Angeles Police Department and the district attorney's office - the 2nd District Court of Appeal ordered a Los Angeles trial judge to vacate a 20-yar-old murder conviction and order a new trial, or explain to the appeals court why it shouldn't order a new trial itself.

Signaling that reversal is on their minds, a three-judge panel Friday issued an alternative writ of mandate which gives Superior Court Judge Patricia Collins less than 90 days to make up her mind. Stacy v. Superior Court of Los Angeles, B143115 (Cal. App. 2nd Dist. March 29, 2002.)

The case has special significance because it joins the informant scandals of the 1980s with a post-Rampart era in which tension over release of so-called Brady material that is exculpatory to defendants continues to heighten in the criminal bar.

Collins' decision to order a new trial or show cause why she should not, depends on whether she believes Los Angeles prosecutors suppressed material evidence in 1983 that would have led to a better result for the defendant, Anthony Stacy.

If Collins does not order a new trial, prosecutors will have to appear before the appeals court to explain what they knew and when they knew it, in a case involving double identity and deception.

The delayed appeal stemmed from the Los Angeles jailhouse informant scandals of the 1980s, which led to the re-opening of hundreds of criminal convictions as a result of prosecutors' misuse of informant testimony.

In a separate unpublished opinion on Friday, the 2nd District Court of Appeal affirmed Collins' 1999 ruling that Los Angeles deputy district attorneys failed to disclose evidence about the credibility of a witness that Stacy could have used to disprove he pulled the trigger in a triple murder committed during a robbery in 1982. People v. Stacy, B132661 (Cal. App. 2nd Dist. March 29, 2002).

The failure of prosecutors to disclose exculpatory evidence such as a witness's criminal record or history of lying violates Brady v. Maryland - which also has been the grounds for more than 60 re-opened cases arising out of the Rampart scandal. Observers said that District Attorney Steve Cooley's actions in further pursuing the Stacy case - and in conducting his office's investigations into the Rampart scandal - reflect on his office's commitment to complying with Brady.

Stacy was charged in 1982 with conspiracy to commit murder and robbery with the special circumstance that there were multiple killings. He was convicted in 1983 on all counts with the help of a confession by a jailhouse snitch with a long rap sheet and a history of dealing his way out of trouble in Kentucky and Los Angeles.

In 1999, at a Los Angeles Superior Court hearing on a petition for a writ of habeas corpus, Collins ruled that Brady violations occurred and set aside special circumstance allegations against Stacy but allowed his conviction to stand.

As a result, Stacy's sentence of life without possibility of parole was changed to an indeterminate life sentence at Salinas Valley State Prison.

The jailhouse snitch at the heart of the Stacy case was recidivist felon Michael Hayes, whose real name is Charles Jones. According to court documents, Hayes had received consideration from law enforcers on numerous occasions for testifying against other defendants before he testified against Stacy.

Stacy was convicted during an era that later erupted into scandal in Los Angeles.

From the late 1970s through the 1980s, informants in Los Angeles received consideration in the form of money and reduced jail sentences for serving up confessions - often phony ones - that enabled prosecutors to put hundreds of defendants behind bars.

Abuse of Los Angeles jailhouse informant testimony made national news when a prisoner named Leslie White went on CBS' "60 Minute" in 1988 and showed how easy it was for him to fake confessions that led to criminal convictions. White's modus operandi was to call the coroner's office or other agencies and claim to be a copy requesting details about homicides and other crimes.

The Los Angeles County grand jury conducted an investigation from 1989 to 1990, in which it concluded, "The Los Angeles County District Attorney's Office failed to fulfill the ethical responsibilities required of a public prosecutor by its deliberate, informed declination to take action necessary to curtail the misuse of jailhouse informant testimony."

The grand jury further admonished the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department for facilitating bogus confessions by placing informants on a cell block designed to encourage interaction with inmates with pending charges.

As a result of the scandal, prosecutors curtailed widespread use of paid informants in Los Angeles. However, they also had to re-open between 150 and 200 cases, Stacy's among them.

The Stacy case brings together the jailhouse informant scandal with a more recent thorn in the side of defense counsel: violation by the district attorney's office of the 1963 U.S. Supreme Court decision in Brady.

"Stacy could have happened yesterday. The DA's office is going after criminals, and the mentality is that they will use whatever means possible, even if that means turning a blind eye to false testimony from convicted criminals," one veteran defender said.

More than 60 cases re-opened as a result of the Rampart scandal involve allegations that prosecutors failed to disclose information regarding witness credibility in their zeal to convict defendants brought to custody by the disbanded CRASH unit of the Los Angeles Police Department.

After 15 months as district attorney, Cooley has yet to announce his plans for ensuring Brady compliance, to the chagrin of defenders who rail against the practices of prosecutors past and present.

Sandi Gibbons, a spokeswoman for the district attorney's office, did not comment on the appellate court's Friday ruling. However, prosecutors have refused to concede the case against Stacy though some have given testimony supporting his grounds for appeal.

The second key witness against Stacy was an accomplice named James Dean, who according to court transcripts lied to prosecutors and failed a polygraph test after disclaiming responsibility for the offenses.

Hayes was last seen in a minimum security Kentucky jail but could be at large, according to the attorney handling Stacy's appeal. Dean's whereabouts are unknown.

Stacy was found guilty of murder on June 21, 1983, with the special circumstances that he committed multiple killings during the course of a robbery. He was sentenced to life without the possibility of parole. His first appeal to the 2nd District Court of Appeal was denied in 1985.

From that time, Stacy languished, as did hundreds of other defendants, until the Leslie White sandal broke in 1988. In 1990, the presiding judge of the Los Angeles Superior Court issued a standing order appointing counsel to defendants who had been convicted through the use of informant testimony.

Stacy's petition for a writ of habeas corpus made its way to Superior Court in 1996 and led to an evidentiary hearing in 1999 and a ruling by Collins that prosecutors suppressed evidence of Hayes' prior felony convictions before allowing him to testify against Stacy.

Hayes surfaced as a jailhouse witness against Stacy less than three weeks before his trial began in 1983. Hayes had been in custody on two separate charges of murder and occupied a jail cell next to Stacy. He said Stacy confessed to killing three people during a robbery at a safe house for drug dealers in 1981. One of the victims had been pregnant.

Los Angeles Police Detective Woodrow Parks took Hayes' statement. Parks was the same detective who had arrested Hayes on murder charges. Not long after Hayes accused Stay of the killings - and testified against defendants in two other cases - one murder charge against him was dismissed. The other was lowered to involuntary manslaughter.

At Stacy's trial in 1983, Hayes testified that he received no consideration for fingering Stacy as the shooter in the triple murder. Detective Parks corroborated that testimony.

Paroled in 1986, Hayes could not be located by Stacy's appellate lawyer, Robert Berke. Berke, who was appointed by the court in 1993, said he eventually hired a private investigator to locate Hayes.

In 1996, the investigator found Hayes in the Marion Adjustment Center, a minimum-security prison in Marion, Ky., where he was confined under his real name, Charles Jones.

Berke flew to Kentucky to interview Hayes. According to Berke, Hayes started the interview by denying that he used an alias and that he had played any role in convicting Stacy. Berke said that, when he caught Hayes in his lies, Hayes terminated the interview.

That was not all Hayes had lied about, according to Berke.

Before testifying against Stacy, Hayes had been a paid informant in Kentucky under the name of Charles Jones for several years, according to Berke. From 1974 through 1978, he had received cash and lowered sentences in exchange for witness testimony until Kentucky law enforcers cut him off because they considered him unreliable.

FBI rap sheets obtained by Berke and included in the court record showed more than 30 arrests and five prior felony convictions that Berke saw as a pattern of Jones' testifying against other inmates to get out of jail.

On appeal, Berke claimed Los Angeles prosecutors failed to disclose to Stacy's trial attorney, Santa Monica defender Mark Overland, both Hayes' criminal history and his history of being a snitch.

Instead, prosecutors handed Overland a rap sheet from the Bureau of Criminal Identification that contained only an entry for a charge against Hayes in Kentucky in 1974.

At Stacy's writ hearing in 1999, Overland testified that, if he had received an FBI rap sheet with the 30 arrests and five convictions, he would have sent an investigator to Kentucky to look into Hayes' background. And, had he known of Hayes' history as a paid informant, he could have used it to discredit him at trial.

"I would have had a field day with him," Overland said.

In recent appellate briefs, the district attorney's office continued to maintain it was unaware of Hayes' past. And, according to the district attorney, standard practice for inquiring into a witness' background does not require obtaining an FBI rap sheet.

Hayes' prison file in Kentucky also showed just one prior conviction, for grand theft auto, Berke said, leading him to claim that law enforcers in Los Angeles may have sanitized Hayes' record when they released him in 1986.

That assertion was bolstered in Berke's mind following his interview with Hayes in Kentucky. As Berke was leaving the Marion Adjustment Center, a corrections officer who had witnessed the interview told Berke that Hayes had used the telephone earlier that day to call Detective Parks in Los Angeles.

"He must have called Parks to talk about his parole or to remind him they had something going on," said Berke, who raised the issue of the relationship between Parks and Hayes at Stacy's writ hearing in 1999 and then again on appeal. "Parks was his juice man."

Parks did not return calls for comment.

The district attorney's office has maintained that Hayes' Kentucky record failed to reflect his Los Angeles criminal activity because of an injury Hayes suffered to one of his fingers during his arrest. As a result, Los Angeles Police could not forward his fingerprints to reporting agencies.

Berke said the excuse was preposterous, that one injured finger would not prevent copes from fingerprinting a suspect. In any event, Berke said, Jones' fingerprints were on file at the jail, which would have allowed corrections officials to file a complete report when they released him.

Parks did other favors for Jones, as well, according to Berke. Retired Deputy District Attorney Marsh Goldstein testified at Stacy's writ hearing that, when Hayes was re-arrested for attempted robbery, in 1985, Parks appeared in court in an effort to get Hayes' bail reduced. He also urged a shorter sentence for Hayes.

In both the Superior Court petition for writ of habeas corpus and the recent appeal to the 2nd District, Berke has alleged failure on the part of Deputy District Attorney Lonnie Felker and former Deputy District Attorney Fred Horn - now an Orange County Superior Court judge - to discover Hayes' complete record and disclose it to Stacy's trial attorney.

Berke also has questioned jailhouse interviews between Parks and Hayes, witnessed by Horn and Felker.

Parks refused to answer questions until he was subpoenaed to testify at Stacy's writ hearing in 1999. He claimed that he took no notes during the jailhouse interviews and that he never saw FBI rap sheets on Hayes.

Berke said that Horn also interviewed Hayes in the presence of Parks and that neither the investigator nor the prosecutor took any notes on the interview.

Felker testified that he conducted a taped interview of Hayes, with his consent. And, though he saw a rap sheet from the Bureau of Criminal Identification and Investigation, he waited until Stacy's trial to question Hayes about his past.

Felker's handwritten notes from the interview with Hayes read, "Michael Hayes - he is in for murder - deal," with a star next to "deal."

Felker testified later that he jotted down "deal" as a reminder that he offered no deal to Hayes.

In her ruling on Stacy's habeas petition, Collins' asked the prosecutor's efforts to question Hayes at trial "produced too little too late."

More than a decade after his testimony led to Stacy's conviction, Deputy District Attorney Imogene Katayama interviewed Hayes in Kentucky. On Nov. 26, 1996, Hayes told Katayama that he had received consideration from Detective Parks in exchange for his testimony against Stacy, according to Berke.

Parks later told Katayama that Hayes was the only inmate he would ever go to bat for and that Hayes looked up to him like a father figure.

Hayes also told Katayama that the jailhouse confession he attributed to Stacy was based in part on information he received from a third source, whom he would not identify, Berke said.

Katayama later obtained FBI rap sheets on Hayes and information from the Jefferson County Police Department that documented felony charges of murder, robbery, burglary, grand larceny and receiving stolen property dating back to 1974 in Kentucky.

In 1998, after Katayama reportedly expressed concerns to her supervisor, Deputy District Attorney George Palmer, head of the appellate division, about the viability of the case against Stacy, she was taken off the case and re-assigned to Contract City Division.

Neither Katayama nor Palmer would comment for this story.

Katayama later testified at Stacy's writ hearing that she had obtained the FBI rap sheets and out-of-state data on Hayes the same way she always has during her 15-year career: she asked for them.

Deputy District Attorney Peter Berman also testified at Stacy's writ hearing that he had been assigned to Stacy'' case at one time and that, if a prosecutor was not satisfied with a defendant's rap sheet, they could simply request more information.

Curt Livesay, chief deputy district attorney and former directors of the office's Bureau of Central Operations, similarly testified that, if a deputy doubted the completeness of an informant's rap sheet, he could ask the investigating officer to get an FBI rap sheet or seek out-of-state information from other law enforcement officers.

Two appeals court justices commended the Los Angeles prosecutors for their testimony at Stacy's 1999 writ hearing when they heard the most recent appeal, on Feb. 21.

In its Friday order, the appeals court set a deadline of June 13 for Collins to show why Stacy does not deserve a new trial because of Brady violations by the prosecutors.

Collins also simply could order a new trial.

Defense attorneys familiar with the case expressed disgust that prosecutors have fought the Stacy case all the way to the Court of Appeal, rather than concede that his conviction appears tainted.

But a new trial might have cost as much as the prolonged appeals, observers said, despite the seemingly small chance the Court of Appeal can be persuaded to let the conviction stand.

"The Court of Appeal is giving the lower court a chance to change its mind," Robert Gerstein, a veteran appellate lawyer, said. "They saw saying this after the case had been briefed and argued, which means they are telling [Collins] they don't want to have to reverse her."

Although the possibility of a re-trial after 20 years is unusual, Gerstein said it happens.

"Not very often," he said, "but it has happened in the past - although I can't name any specific cases off hand."

"The fact that the district attorney's office is fighting this one so hard doesn't bode well for the current spirit of Brady compliance," one defense expert said.

Los Angeles defense lawyer Gigi Gordon said she had been a member of a countywide committee charged with coming up with a Brady policy until she quit recently.

"I was the research attorney for the committee, and I got tired of researching cases and handing them to prosecutors who had this blank look on their faces, "Gordon said. "It's obvious that, if we're going to ensure Brady compliance, it will be through the efforts of a handful of lawyers who are willing and who can afford to pursue years worth of appeals."

Reached for comment in Boise, Idaho, Judge Stephen Trott of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeal, who is an outspoken critic of the misuse of jailhouse informant testimony, said it is a systemic problem that must stop.

A deputy district attorney in Los Angeles from 1965 to 1981, Trott recalled being sandbagged by a phony confession in the 1970s, after which he began lecturing on the subject.

"Cops always go to bad guys for information," he said recently. "They don't go to the Sisters for the Poor."

Trott said he knows nothing about what has transpired in Los Angeles since he left 20 years ago. And, he says, he has never heard of Anthony Stacy.

"Back when I was in Los Angeles, [informant testimony] wasn't a big problem," he said. "If something was wrong with a case we dismissed it. The district attorney was behind us all the way.

"That's the way we ran the office."

Los Angeles Public Defender Michael Judge said that the Public Integrity Assurance Section of his office is continuing to review cases that warrant the release of defendants because of Brady violations. He remains hopeful that District Attorney Steve Cooley will implement a policy that rewards prosecutors for disclosing Brady material.

"There has to be a hostile environment in the district attorney's office for these types of violations to occur," Judge said recently. "If prosecutors become pariahs for stepping forward, then the incentive to comply with the law disappears."