Mayer Convicted; Deputy D.A. Faces Jail, Disbarment

Wayne Mayer, a veteran prosecutor with the San Diego County district attorney’s office, was found guilty Tuesday of petty theft by a Municipal Court jury that took just more than two hours to reach a verdict.

Mayer, 41, faces a maximum penalty of six months in County Jail and a $1,000 fine when he is sentenced by Judge Dick Murphy Nov. 10. The misdemeanor conviction could also cost him his job and result in his expulsion from the California Bar.

D.A. Has Made No Decision

Linda Miller, a spokeswoman for the district attorney’s office, said that as of late Tuesday no decision had been made on Mayer’s future. She said Mayer’s superiors are “reviewing our administrative options” and had no immediate comment on the verdict.

A 10-year veteran of the district attorney’s office, Mayer was accused of stealing a power saw and a drill from the bed of a pickup truck parked at De Anza Cove at Mission Bay in June. He testified that stress caused in part by his role as co-prosecutor in the retrial of Sagon Penn prompted him to drink so heavily that he could not recall taking the tools.

Miller said Mayer is believed to be the first prosecutor convicted of a misdemeanor charge in San Diego County history. The only deputy district attorney ever charged with a felony offense--Forest Price--was ultimately acquitted on charges of tampering with evidence in a case but was fired from his post nonetheless in 1977.

Tuesday’s verdict comes five weeks after another jury deadlocked, 9-3, for conviction on the misdemeanor charge. Jurors in that trial said they were divided over whether Mayer may have been so drunk when he took the tools that he could not have formed the intent to commit a crime.

Dressed in a gray suit and sitting hunched over the defense table with his chin resting in his hands, Mayer, maintaining the stone-faced calm that he demonstrated throughout both trials, showed no emotion Tuesday morning as the court clerk read the verdict. Mayer’s wife, Gayle, seated in the front row, closed her eyes tightly and appeared to tremble when her husband was pronounced guilty of the charge.

Refused to Talk to Media

The couple walked quickly from the courthouse after the verdict was delivered, declining to talk to reporters.

Defense attorney Peter Hughes said he was “obviously very disappointed” at the outcome and expressed surprise that it took the jury so little time to reach a verdict.

“The most important thing for us right now is the impact this will have on (Mayer’s) future,” Hughes said, adding that he did not know whether the conviction would result in Mayer’s disbarment and had not yet discussed the possibility of an appeal with his client.

Deputy Atty. Gen. John Swan, who prosecuted Mayer after the district attorney’s office disqualified itself from the case, said he is pleased with the conviction and praised the jury for a job well done.

“I think the most impressive thing from my perspective is that the result here would have been the same regardless of whether the defendant was a deputy D.A., an attorney, a plumber or a nuclear physicist,” Swan said. “The jury did not let (Mayer’s) position or prominence affect them.”

Swan said that he interviewed jurors in the first trial and incorporated some of their suggestions into his presentation of the case in the retrial.

“They said that they felt a lot of the defense evidence was just a smoke screen, and they said I ought to have pointed that out,” Swan said. “Other than that, I don’t think either side made any major adjustments.”

Guilt Was Never in Doubt

As indicated by their relatively brief deliberations, which began late Monday afternoon and concluded at mid-morning Tuesday, jurors in the case said they were in agreement from the start that Mayer was guilty of the charge.

Jury foreman David Henricks, a semi-retired consultant, said jurors first determined whether they agreed Mayer had formed the intent to commit the theft. Once that was accomplished, he said, “the rest was easy.”

“It was unanimous from the start,” Henricks said, adding that no one expressed any pity for Mayer. Most of the deliberation time was spent making “sure all of the evidence was correct and usable under the law.”

While crediting both sides with presenting “solid, fantastic” cases, Henricks said Mayer’s claim that he experienced an alcoholic blackout simply wasn’t credible.

“There wasn’t any solid medical evidence to that effect,” Henricks said. “It wasn’t real convincing.”

Throughout both trials, the defense never contested the prosecution’s claim that Mayer took the tools. Instead, Hughes argued that Mayer’s heavy drinking had caused him to commit an “irrational” act that he could not recall because of an alcohol-related blackout.

Mayer testified that he drank five or six gulps of gin, three or four glasses of wine and half a bottle of bourbon before driving to De Anza Cove for a Sunday outing with three of his children.

“I don’t remember anything after I poured my last glass of bourbon,” Mayer testified.

Recalled Nothing of Theft

Later that day, a Yuma, Ariz., woman said she saw Mayer removing some power tools from the back of a pickup truck owned by Robert Pospisil, a San Diego plumber. Mayer said he knew nothing of the incident until the next morning, when he found a saw that wasn’t his in the garage and a drill on the floor of his dining room.

The prosecutor testified that he hid the tools in a locker at the courthouse because he was concerned about what impact their discovery would have on the Penn deliberations and his career.

Mayer said he had become a heavy drinker because of stress accumulated during his career as a prosecutor, including several years spent prosecuting child molestation cases. A psychiatrist who has been seeing Mayer since mid-June testified that the prosecutor’s stress was aggravated by his role in the Penn trial.

The psychiatrist, H. Douglas Englehorn, said Mayer had “doubts” about a key prosecution witness in the case--Police Agent Donovan Jacobs--and was “loaded with conflict” about the case, partly because his wife, a former police officer, was a friend of Jacobs’.

Swan, meanwhile, dismissed the alleged alcoholic blackout as the “ultimate, convenient memory gap” and noted that eyewitnesses’ accounts of Mayer’s furtive conduct before the theft were evidence that he knew he was committing a crime.

‘He Was There to Steal’

“He was there to steal, whether he was drinking or not,” Swan told the jury in his closing argument Monday.

According to a spokeswoman for the state Bar in San Francisco, a member convicted of a crime involving “moral turpitude” shall be disbarred unless “the most compelling mitigating circumstances predominate.”

Spokeswoman Anne Charles said the bar’s review department and a hearing panel will evaluate the conviction and make a discipline recommendation to the state Supreme Court, which makes the ultimate decision on disbarment.

Charles declined to comment on whether Mayer’s crime was one involving moral turpitude and therefore punishable by disbarment. But Hughes said petty theft definitely meets the moral turpitude test.

“Still, we can hope that they look at this in the context of his background and conclude that (disbarment) is a rather harsh penalty for a misdemeanor,” Hughes said. At the very least, Hughes said, Mayer’s license probably will be suspended pending a decision on disbarment.

If Mayer loses his license to practice, he must wait five years before asking the state Supreme Court to grant him readmission to the state bar, Charles said.

The conviction Tuesday represents Mayer’s second brush with the law. In 1982, he was charged with stealing a fishing rod from a drugstore and was placed on probation after pleading no contest to a lesser charge. Mayer never told his supervisors in the district attorney’s office about the incident and did not identify himself as a prosecutor to arresting officers.

Mayer was on paid administrative leave from his $65,000-a-year job until Sept. 29, when his accumulated vacation and compensatory time ran out. Since that time, he has been on unpaid leave, a status that will continue pending a decision on his future with the district attorney’s office.