High Court Enters Hedgecock Case : Order Signed by Chief Justice Bird to Delay Monday Hearing on Mistrial

In a dramatic 11th-hour reprieve that bolstered Mayor Roger Hedgecock’s hopes for a new trial, the state Supreme Court on Friday postponed a scheduled Monday Superior Court hearing on whether the mayor’s felony conviction should be reversed because of jury-tampering allegations.

Meeting in a special session only hours after the 4th District Court of Appeal rejected the mayor’s request for a delay, the Supreme Court ordered Judge William L. Todd Jr. to postpone Monday’s hearing until the high court decides whether to review Hedgecock’s motion to remove Todd from the case.

The order, signed by Chief Justice Rose Bird at about 5:30 p.m., in essence puts Hedgecock’s case in a holding pattern in order to give the Supreme Court’s justices additional time to consider the merits of Hedgecock’s request that a judge other than Todd rule on his motion for a new trial. However, the high court’s stay of next Monday’s hearing cannot be interpreted as either a favorable or negative harbinger of the court’s ultimate decision.

“I think the court just felt that there were some questions here that it wanted more time to consider,” said Hedgecock attorney Charles Sevilla. “As far as what’s going to happen next, I haven’t the foggiest notion.”

In a related development, the two bailiffs who supervised Hedgecock’s jury during its deliberations both issued sworn statements Friday in which they strongly denied any improprieties. In addition, bailiff Holly Murlin claimed that a male juror who has lodged the jury-tampering charges “made sexually suggestive remarks” to her throughout the deliberations.

Friday’s high court ruling not only prolonged the uncertainty over Hedgecock’s political and legal fate, but in some ways actually added to it by raising more questions than it answered--and creating an open-ended timetable for when the answers will come.

“This opens up . . . an infinite number of legal permutations,” Sevilla agreed.

Noting that the justices “don’t like to let stays linger,” Sevilla said that he expects the court to “decide relatively quickly” whether to hear the case, but that the decision is unlikely to occur before next Wednesday’s normal court session.

If the justices decide not to review Hedgecock’s challenge to Todd, the stay would be lifted and “we’d be right back where we are now,” with a new hearing date at which Todd would rule on the mayor’s new-trial request, Sevilla explained.

However, if the court decides there is merit to Hedgecock’s request for a new judge, a final ruling “could be months away,” Sevilla said. In that event, the options before the high court would include hearing oral arguments itself on Hedgecock’s motion for Todd’s disqualification, sending the matter back for reconsideration by the 4th District panel or even ordering another San Diego County Superior Court judge to decide whether Todd should remain on the case.

Despite the fact that Friday’s developments represented only a temporary procedural victory for Hedgecock, the mayor’s attorneys joyously overlooked the stay’s lack of permanence and hailed the ruling as the first bright sign in their long, and to date, unsuccessful effort to remove Todd.

“It was murky when I got the news that the Court of Appeal denied our petition,” said Oscar Goodman, Hedgecock’s lead attorney. “But now there’s a ray of sunshine and the clouds are breaking through.”

Hedgecock himself, Sevilla said, was “surprised and very pleased” by the high court’s ruling. Dist. Atty. Edwin Miller and his spokesman did not return telephone calls.

Friday’s two contradictory court rulings were only the latest twists in the roller coaster path that Hedgecock’s case has followed in the 3 1/2 weeks since the mayor’s 13-count felony conviction on conspiracy and perjury charges stemming from alleged illegal contributions to his 1983 mayoral campaign.

Two days after his Oct. 9 conviction, Hedgecock, conceding that he could “no longer offer leadership,” announced plans to resign. However, two days before Hedgecock’s planned departure from City Hall, one juror and the attorney for another signed sworn statements alleging that a court bailiff had tampered with Hedgecock’s jury during its deliberations--a disclosure that prompted the mayor to decide to remain in office pending resolution of his new-trial motion.

Since then, the mayor’s attorneys have waged a vigorous legal battle in a bid to remove Todd from the case, arguing that there is “the appearance . . . of possible impropriety” because the accused bailiff, Al Burroughs Jr., works under Todd’s supervision. Last Monday, Todd refused to disqualify himself, setting the stage for Friday’s legal showdown.

Describing Todd as “both the employer . . . and friend” of Burroughs, Sevilla argued in his 109-page appeal to the 4th District panel that allowing Todd to preside over the new-trial hearing would be comparable “to having (Los Angeles Dodger manager) Tommy Lasorda umpire all the Dodger-Padre games next year.” In addition, the defense contended that because Todd had been in frequent contact with the bailiff during the jury’s 6 1/2-day deliberations, Todd should be a witness, not the judge, at the hearing.

In its two-paragraph ruling late Friday afternoon, the appeals court rejected both the defense’s requests for a delay of Monday’s hearing and for Todd’s replacement.

“The petition is denied . . . because the motion to recuse the trial judge . . . was based solely on the ground the trial judge was to be called as a witness by the defense,” the court wrote.

Prepared for the worst, Sevilla immediately filed a 29-page appeal with the state Supreme Court, with the appeal being sent to San Francisco via a Telecopier. Although the justices convened a special session to review the appeal, Sevilla conceded that he viewed the prospects of a favorable ruling as “very slim,” then waited with about a dozen reporters at his downtown office for word from San Francisco.

When the call came, Sevilla’s broad smile as he emerged from his private office told the story before his words could confirm yet another improbable twist in the case.

“I’m pleased to inform you all that . . . the Supreme Court stayed all proceedings in the mayor’s case,” Sevilla said. “So there will be no hearing on Monday morning.”

If Hedgecock had lost his motion for a new trial on Monday, he was scheduled to be sentenced by Todd on Wednesday. However, because the mayor, who faces a maximum sentence of eight years’ imprisonment, cannot be sentenced until his request for a new trial is decided, the Supreme Court’s action also postpones any possible sentencing hearing.

Earlier Friday, bailiffs Burroughs and Murlin prepared sworn affidavits in which they denied the jury-tampering allegations included in sworn statements signed by jurors Stanley J. Bohensky and Kathy Saxton-Calderwood.

According to the two jurors, Burroughs, in violation of court rules, talked with jurors on numerous occasions about the case and the progress in their deliberations. However, sworn statements from the 10 other jurors disputed those charges and have been cited by Dist. Atty. Miller as proof that “there was nothing even remotely approaching jury tampering.”

In his six-page statement, Burroughs described most of Bohensky’s and Saxton-Calderwood’s allegations as “absolutely untrue.” For example, Bohensky contended that Burroughs had urged the jury to “reach a speedy verdict” because of the costliness of the Mission Valley hotel in which the jurors were sequestered during deliberations.

Responded Burroughs: “At no time did I tell Mr. Bohensky that the jury should reach a speedy verdict because the sequestration was costing the taxpayers a lot of money . . . I do not believe I have been involved (in) any criminal conduct or wrongdoing.”

Similarly, Murlin said that she “neither observed nor participated in any wrongdoing whatsoever during the sequestration of the Roger Hedgecock jury,” and used the identical phraseology included in Burroughs’s affidavit--”absolutely untrue” to characterize most of the tampering allegations.

In addition, Murlin alleged in her statement that Bohensky “made sexually suggestive remarks to me which I ignored . . . on a number of occasions” during the jury’s deliberations.

Early one morning, Murlin said, she “was awakened by (Bohensky’s) loud knocking on the door to my room.” Murlin added that she summoned Burroughs to escort Bohensky back to his own room.

Corroborating Murlin’s description of that purported event, Burroughs said in his statement that he told Bohensky “in no uncertain terms . . . that he should not be bothering Miss Murlin.”

“Mr. Bohensky turned and glared at me and he then went inside his room,” Burroughs’ statement said.

John Learnard, Bohensky’s attorney, could not be reached for comment on the bailiffs’ allegations. But Goodman described the bailiffs’ charge as “ridiculous,” adding “when we have the hearing, you can be assured we’ll be able to dissuade that notion very, very easily.”