Plea Fails to Win C. Arnholt Smith Release

Gov. George Deukmejian has rejected a plea to commute the one-year jail term for elderly ex-financier C. Arnholt Smith.

In a three-paragraph letter to Smith’s lawyer, Deukmejian’s Legal Affairs Secretary Vance Raye said the governor saw no reason “to substitute his judgment . . . for that of the judge and jury which heard the case in the first instance.”

Smith’s lawyer, Peter Benzian of San Diego, who had pleaded that the former San Diego business leader was in poor health and had been convicted of victimless crimes, said Wednesday he was “largely disappointed.”

“Beyond that, I guess I don’t have a reaction,” added Benzian, who still had not received Raye’s letter Wednesday.

The 86-year-old Smith began serving the sentence for felony grand theft and misdemeanor income tax evasion in November after a series of appeals that resulted in a reduction of his sentence, from three years to one, and the elimination of a $680,000 reparations order. He was initially convicted in May, 1979.

San Diego County District Attorney Edwin Miller, who took issue with the claim that Smith’s were victimless crimes, wrote to the governor opposing Smith’s early release.

Disputing the claim that Smith’s health is failing and characterizing his appeals as a long struggle to avoid justice, Miller wrote, “It would be a disgrace and a manifest injustice to commute that sentence by a single day.”

In his letter denying the request for commutation, Raye wrote that Deukmejian uses his powers of executive clemency only in “extremely unusual and compelling circumstances.”

“Such circumstances are generally confined to cases in which an individual is determined by law enforcement authorities to be innocent, or cases of extreme hardship arising after conviction.

“Mr. Smith’s application does not establish his undisputed innocence, nor does it establish hardship of the magnitude required to warrant the Governor’s intervention,” the letter continued.

Smith, a longtime friend of former President Richard Nixon, was a powerful figure in state political circles before his legal troubles arose.