Mayor’s Lawyer Wants Miller Taken Off Case

Renewing his efforts to prevent San Diego Dist. Atty. Edwin Miller from prosecuting Mayor Roger Hedgecock’s felony trial, Hedgecock’s attorney on Tuesday argued that Miller’s office should be removed from the case because the district attorney himself may testify and because Miller has been a “strident and persistent foe” of the mayor.

The motion filed Tuesday by Oscar Goodman is similar to others that courts have previously rejected. Last month, the 4th District Court of Appeal rejected Hedgecock’s attempt to have Miller’s office removed from the case, and another petition concerning the same issue is before the state Supreme Court.

If Miller’s office were removed, the state attorney general’s office would prosecute the felony perjury and conspiracy case against Hedgecock. The charges facing the mayor stem from allegedly illegal campaign and personal financial aid that he received from J. David (Jerry) Dominelli and Nancy Hoover, former principals in the bankrupt La Jolla investment firm of J. David & Co.

In asking for a Superior Court hearing next month, Goodman offered several new reasons for removing Miller’s office from the case, as well as the previous ones.

Miller’s testimony at Hedgecock’s retrial--the mayor’s first case ended in February in a mistrial with the jury deadlocked 11-1 in favor of conviction--would pose “an obvious conflict of interest,” Goodman argued. The removal of Miller’s office, Goodman added in his 20-page motion, “is dictated by all ethical considerations addressing such situation.”

The district attorney’s office notified Goodman earlier this month that Miller might testify at the retrial, scheduled to start in late August, about a March, 1982, meeting at which Miller reportedly advised Hedgecock to amend his financial disclosure forms to disclose his interest in a condominium development partnership.

Prosecutors conceivably could use such testimony to attempt to explain why Hedgecock did not accept a $24,000 loan from real estate developer Harvey Schuster in the spring of 1982--a key piece of evidence in the first trial.

Hedgecock, who sought the loan because of financial difficulties connected with the failure of the condominium partnership, testified that he never picked up the $24,000 check because Schuster made it out to a property management firm run by Hedgecock’s wife. At the time, Schuster was a bidder on a multimillion-dollar county project before then-county Supervisor Hedgecock. But Hedgecock testified that he had told Schuster that, if he accepted the loan, he would be forced to disqualify himself from voting on the project.

Prosecutors, however, argued that Hedgecock had no intention of not voting on the major project, realizing that to do so would create the risk of being publicly embarrassed by having his personal financial difficulties exposed. In accordance with that theory, Miller’s testimony could be used by prosecutors in an attempt to persuade a jury that Hedgecock never consummated the loan with Schuster because he realized that the district attorney’s office was scrutinizing his financial disclosure forms.

Goodman’s motion also repeats Hedgecock’s allegation that Miller is a longtime political enemy of Hedgecock who is using the case to carry out a political vendetta.

Goodman’s motion notes that in 1983 and 1984, Miller “met with Hedgecock enemies and detractors,” presumably in an attempt to uncover damaging information about the mayor. The defense attorney’s list of alleged Hedgecock enemies includes officials of the Copley Press, publishers of the San Diego Union and Tribune; Police Chief Bill Kolender; business leaders, including Gordon Luce, chairman and chief executive officer of Great American Savings Bank, and Robert O. Peterson, the husband of Maureen F. O’Connor, Hedgecock’s 1983 opponent.

For those reasons and others, Goodman argued that the district attorney’s office should be removed from the case to ensure that the prosecution “is carried out in an unbiased and impartial way.”