LOS ANGELES — After less than a day of deliberations, a jury Monday acquitted two Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputies who were charged with filing a false report involving a 2018 arrest in East Los Angeles.
Deputies Woodrow Kim and Jonathan Miramontes were charged in August 2021 with one count each of filing a false report. The charges were dismissed in August 2022 by a judge who found “insufficient evidence” against the pair, but a state appeals court reinstated the case in February 2024.
Kim was accused of opening the driver’s side door of a patrol vehicle and knocking a man to the ground following a vehicle pursuit that ended in Ruben Salazar Park on Sept. 19, 2018, according to a statement issued by the District Attorney’s Office the day the case was filed.
The appellate court justices wrote in their 2022 decision that surveillance video depicted the patrol car’s door hitting the man with sufficient force to propel him forward and then to the ground. The justices concluded in their ruling that Kim’s statement in a report that the man was “‘still standing’ after the impact was false,” and that Miramontes’ report “includes at least two affirmative statements of fact that a reasonable trier of fact could have found false.”
Kim and Miramontes were responding to an assault with a deadly weapon call involving occupants in a black BMW who had allegedly threatened a motorist with a gun, according to the District Attorney’s Office.
During the trial in downtown Los Angeles, Deputy District Attorney Lana Barnett told jurors in her closing argument that the two wrote reports in which “they chose to lie about what happened.”
“No one witness told you that hitting a guy with a car is a trivial detail. … It’s frankly offensive to call it a trivial detail,” the prosecutor told the jury.
Defense attorneys had urged jurors to acquit both deputies.
Kim’s attorney, Richard Pinckard, told the jury that one of the easiest things to do is call someone a liar, but one of the toughest things is to actually prove it.
“She (the prosecutor) has to prove what Deputy Kim wrote did not happen,” Pinckard said. “This has to be an intentional, deliberate lie in order to be guilty in this case.”
Miramontes’ attorney, Tom Yu, told the jury, “What is there to hide? … There’s nothing to hide, no cover up at all.”
Yu urged jurors to “use your common sense” and said the verdict that justice requires is an acquittal.
In her rebuttal argument, the prosecutor countered, “When the truth is on your side, you don’t have to lie as the defendants did.”
She asked the panel to “hold each defendant accountable,” saying that “the evidence has established that they are guilty.”
According to the sheriff’s department, Kim and Miramontes were both relieved of duty pending the outcome of an internal investigation.