District Attorney Deserves Thumping

Regarding Dist. Atty. Ed Miller’s letter (July 27) objecting to your editorial of July 13, our esteemed D.A. sounds positively petulant. “Sanctimonious tub-thumping,” indeed!

Come off it, Ed. The handling of the Sagon Penn case by your office was not your brightest hour.

Focusing on the “now-much-ballyhooed transcript” (as hyperbolically described) relating to Agent Donovan Jacobs--what a lame excuse. You say that the 12-day “delay” in turning the report over to the judge was caused by (among other things) that fact that five days were weekends. My heart bleeds for your deputies. We pay the senior deputies something like $65,000 a year, as I recall. I presume they have a key to the office on weekends. I even heard prosecutor Mike Carpenter say on the radio, “I don’t work weekends like Milt Silverman.” Perhaps he should!

Any thinking person who was reading the press coverage of that trial is aware that the jury was already out, deliberating, during those crucial 12 days. Are we supposed to believe that during those days of “evaluating the relevance” of the transcript, you weren’t all hoping to heaven that the jury would come in with verdicts? Don’t stretch the public’s credulity.

As for the “document that lopes in under strange circumstances” (your words), one could reasonably wonder when your office will look into why it took nine months to “lope in.”

As for your “getting weary of the mushy-headed debate about the propriety” of the juror investigation, that is an absurdly pejorative term to apply to, among others, a dedicated judge who diligently attempted to avoid reversible error throughout a difficult trial. Let’s calm down the rhetoric. The editorial criticism was well-deserved.

MARY E. HARVEY

La Jolla