Attorney Wins 1 Case, Loses 3 on Fast Track

Defense attorney Jack Alex, who was accused by the district attorney’s office of deliberately delaying misdemeanor trials as a strategic ploy, has been continuously trying cases in Citrus Municipal Court for two weeks.

His score card so far: one win, three defeats and a mistrial.

Judge Michael Rutberg, who ordered Alex to go to trial on seven cases, began with an onerous schedule that had Alex in court from morning to night, starting four trials in one day. That schedule was quickly abandoned and Alex is now trying his cases back-to-back on a 9 a.m.-to-5 p.m. schedule.

Alex says he was not able to give his clients his best effort in the simultaneous trials and that’s one reason he wound up with three convictions and a mistrial.

“I found that I was tired,” Alex said. “I was not as efficient as I could have been.”

Witnesses Forgot Evidence

The judge ordered the trials after prosecutors claimed that Alex was deliberately delaying cases, sometimes for so long that prosecution witnesses forgot evidence or disappeared.

To clear up the backlog, Rutberg ordered trials to begin on four cases at once, starting with a court session that ran more than 12 hours.

One of the cases ended in a mistrial because jurors were heard discussing it at a break and three others, all involving drunk driving, ended in convictions.

Alex, a 60-year-old former judge, said he has tried thousands of cases as a defense attorney and prosecutor and never heard of anyone juggling cases the way he did last week. The court set up a schedule in which each case was tried for a few hours a day. The district attorney’s office assigned a different prosecutor to each case, but Alex had to move his attention from one case to another, and he said he found it hard to maintain his concentration and keep his facts straight.

Before scheduling multiple trials, Rutberg asked Alex if he was able to handle the heavy caseload. Alex assured him that he could, based on his wealth of experience.

Nevertheless, after trying four cases at once, Alex said he was so overworked that his clients have good grounds for appealing their convictions.

One of Alex’s clients, Mark Columbus, 29, of Escondido said he might have won acquittal if his case had not been strung out for several days and tried in piecemeal fashion. Columbus said the way the trial was conducted enabled the prosecution to destroy his credibility.

Columbus, who was charged with drunk driving, said he was working on a construction project in Baldwin Park and living with other workers at a West Covina hotel in August, 1987. One evening, he said, he and a group of co-workers had some drinks in a room at the hotel. Columbus said he was not accustomed to drinking hard liquor, and gulped down some rum and cola. Immediately afterward, he said, he jumped into his car to head for a nightclub and was pulled over by police.

Because he drank the rum all at once and was stopped on the highway less than five minutes later, Columbus maintained that there was no time for the alcohol to take effect, and thus, he was not under its influence while driving. He did not dispute that he was legally drunk by the time he took a blood alcohol test more than an hour later. His case was buttressed by a chemist’s testimony that it takes some time for the effects of alcohol to be felt.

Testified the Next Day

Ordinarily, Columbus said, he would have taken the witness stand immediately after the chemist, but because his trial was conducted in segments amid other trials, he could not testify until the next day. The result, he said, was that the deputy district attorney convinced he jury that he had spent the intervening night concocting a story to match the chemist’s testimony.

“I feel strongly that if we hadn’t had that break in the trial, I would not have been found guilty,” Columbus said. “It 100% killed me.”

In this case and the others, Alex said, his clients were at a disadvantage because jurors may have read news stories about his dispute with the district attorney’s office over trial delays and blamed him for the fact that some of them were detained long hours in court to try the cases.

After the first four cases were tried, Rutberg abandoned the experiment of trying cases simultaneously and began scheduling trials back-to-back. Rutberg is devoting full time to Alex’s cases, shifting his usual caseload to other courts. Presiding Judge Robert O. Young said the backlog is being cleared up and Rutberg should be able to resume his normal caseload on Monday.

Trying cases back-to-back “is working out fine as far as I’m concerned,” Alex said. Indeed, the first verdict under the new schedule was an acquittal for his client, a 70-year-old man accused of using a gun to threaten his young wife in a drunken dispute over $500 telephone bills and whether the windows in their house should be kept opened or shut.

The trial of a petty theft case began Tuesday. The retrial of the drunk driving case that had ended in a mistrial was scheduled next, but is being postponed to allow time for transcripts of earlier court proceedings to be prepared. Conclusion of these cases will clear up the backlog in Rutberg’s court.

Old Cases Still Pending

But Richard Sullivan, deputy district attorney in charge of the West Covina office, said Alex will still have a number of other old cases pending before other judges. Citrus judges have adopted a policy of attempting to dispose of misdemeanor cases within six months, and Sullivan is filing motions to seek Alex’s removal on cases that are a year or two old whenever Alex tries to continue them.

None of the motions to remove Alex have been successful so far. Rutberg chose to order immediate trials rather than remove Alex, saying that he doubts he has the authority to deprive a defendant of a private attorney of his choice.

Alex, who ranks himself at the top among San Gabriel Valley trial lawyers, claims to have an extraordinarily high rate of acquittals, and said the district attorney’s office is attacking him because of his success.

But Deputy Dist. Atty. Diana Smith said Alex has lost more cases than he admits and is being singled out only because of his frequent requests to continue cases.

‘Egregious’ Offender

Smith said other attorneys also are guilty of delaying cases unnecessarily, but “we can only take on one attorney at a time. We can’t do them all. He was the most egregious offender.”

Alex has served notice that he intends to fight future attempts to remove him as defense attorney by subpoenaing court records to find out how many other attorneys have a large number of old cases scheduled for trial.

Alex said that despite the heavy workload, he has benefited from the number of trials he has completed in the past two weeks and now can take on new clients attracted by news stories about his dispute with the district attorney’s office.

“I’m getting a lot of new clients,” Alex said. “If they (the district attorney’s office) think they are hurting me, they are not.”