Judge tosses charge against Oakland police officer accused of bribery
Judge Scott Patton threw out a charge of attempted bribery of a witness against Phong Tran.
OAKLAND — An Alameda County judge on Friday tossed one of the five charges against an Oakland police officer accused of bribing witnesses and later lying about it on the stand.
Judge Scott Patton threw out a charge of attempted bribery of a witness against Phong Tran, whose case has represented an early test of Alameda County District Attorney Pamela Price’s new Public Accountability Unit and its work to investigate wrongdoings by law enforcement officers and public officials.
In striking down the charge, Patton suggested Tran’s statements more closely resembled regular police work, rather than anything nefarious.
“That kind of colloquy between a homicide detective and a witness is just not attempted bribery of a witness,” Patton said in a hearing Friday.
Still, Patton denied a motion by Tran’s attorney to also dismiss the remaining four counts against the officer, including multiple counts of perjury and bribery of a witness.
Prosecutors allege Tran paid an unhoused mother thousands of dollars to testify that she saw the killer who shot Charles Butler Jr., 23, during a 2011 argument over a North Oakland parking spot. The alleged payments include $5,000 given to the woman barely a half-hour after she finished testifying at the 2016 murder trial, according to testimony at a prior hearing.
The charge dismissed on Friday centered around another woman’s statements in that same case. Prosecutors claimed Tran offering to help free the woman’s son — who had been jailed on unrelated robbery charges — in exchange for her cooperation in identifying a suspect in Butler’s death. The woman, Theresa Anderson Downs, claimed Tran told her: “We could help you with that, if you help me with this. Because we can overlook a robbery, but we cannot overlook a murder.”
“It made me feel really angry, because I’m a mother, and my son was already in jail,” Anderson Downs testified at a June hearing. “I told him that’s another mother’s son — that I cannot send another mother’s son to jail over something I did not see.”
After Friday’s hearing, Tran’s attorney, Andrew Ganz, maintained in a statement that “the District Attorney has all-but conceded that the standard required for a jury to convict in this case cannot be met,” adding that “the case should, and really must, be dismissed in its entirety.”
The Alameda County District Attorney’s Office did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Tran is a veteran homicide detective who has handled numerous cases for OPD, some of which are now under review. He remains on leave from OPD and was “temporarily suspended” as an officer by a state commission overseeing standards and training.