LAW REPORTER IS SUBPOENAED FOR MURDER TRIAL; DEFENSE ASKS JUDGE FOR NOTES.

Byline: Bhavna Mistry Staff Writer

Defense attorneys in the murder trial of three Lancaster skinheads want the tape recordings and notes of a Southern Poverty Law Center employee who interviewed one of the defendants in jail.

Lisa O'Kane, who interviewed Randy Rojas, 23, for the center's quarterly newsletter, must appear in a Los Angeles courtroom Oct. 26 for a hearing to determine whether her tapes and notes should be handed over to lawyers in the case.

``We are resisting this as would any news organization,'' said Mark Potok, editor of the Intelligence Report, which writes about political extremism and bias crimes in the United States and which has not yet published a story on the interview. ``If we lose, we will turn over the notes.''

A nonprofit organization located in Montgomery, Ala., the Southern Poverty Law Center was founded in 1971 by two lawyers who took pro bono cases under the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

Officials at the Intelligence Report, which sends issues without cost to law enforcement agencies, schools, the news media, human relations groups and other organizations, are seeking protection under the California shield law for journalists in the dispute over the notes.

``We went in without any pretext,'' Potok said. ``When our reporter's notes are subpoenaed like this, it makes it very difficult to interview anyone.''

Potok said that O'Kane's interview dealt less with the 1995 slaying of Milton Walker Jr., a homeless African-American man in a field behind a Lancaster McDonald's, than on Rojas' background and family.

``We were working on a story about the attraction of hate groups to low-, working- and middle-class white kids,'' Potok said. ``It dealt mostly about their lives and experiences.''

Rojas was one of many incarcerated youths O'Kane interviewed, officials said. The article is expected to be published as a cover story on the Nov. 20 edition.

Rojas is on trial along with Jessica Colwell, 20, and Ritch Bryant, 23, who are accused of beating Walker to death with a two-by-four and a metal pipe two days after Thanksgiving 1995.

A special-circumstance allegation in the case says that Walker was killed because of his race.

Testimony started last week in the courtroom of Judge Lance Ito, who has issued a gag order barring the prosecutor and defense attorney from talking about the case.

Rojas and Bryant already have been sentenced to prison for hate crimes, which came two months before and less than a month after the slaying of Walker.

Rojas was sentenced to two years in prison after he admitted beating David Wilkerson, 19, outside a Lancaster 7-Eleven in September 1995.

Authorities said Rojas and a 20-year-old accomplice walked up to the victim and asked if he was ``down on the white race,'' investigators said. When the man said that he was Latino, they beat him.

Rojas was arrested last year in connection with the Walker killing at a halfway house where he was sent after completing his sentence in the 7-Eleven beating.

Bryant has been serving an eight-year prison sentence for a December 1995 attack on an African-American teen-ager, who was beaten and stabbed with a screwdriver at Antelope Valley High School.