Hicks Won’t Seek Reelection as District Atty. in ’90

Orange County Dist. Atty. Cecil Hicks, an institution in law enforcement after almost 23 years as the county’s top prosecutor, said Thursday that he will not run for reelection.

“I’ve been in the district attorney’s office 31 years and you grow attached to it. But I’m not going to run next year, and I’m not going to change my mind about it. It’s time for me to do other things,” said Hicks, who turned 63 on Wednesday.

Hicks refused to answer questions about his decision, and emphatically refused to discuss a possible successor. But it has been widely accepted within the rank and file of the district attorney’s office that Hicks favors Michael R. Capizzi, his protege and chief assistant.

Hicks had been a deputy prosecutor for eight years when the Board of Supervisors appointed him district attorney in 1966 to replace Kenneth Williams, who had become a judge. He ran for his first election in 1970, and has never had serious opposition since.

In the past, Hicks has said that integrity was what he hoped to make the hallmark of his office.

During his tenure in the 1970s, his office got indictments and eventually convictions of Supervisors Robert Battin for misuse of county staff, Ralph Diedrich for soliciting a bribe and Philip A. Anthony, who pleaded no contest to a campaign fund laundering misdemeanor. Anthony subsequently was defeated when he sought reelection. A political power broker, Dr. Louis J. Cella Jr. went to prison on fraud convictions.

Hicks’ office also won conviction of Rep. Andrew J. Hinshaw, Republican congressman and former Orange County assessor, on charges of misuse of county staff in his successful 1974 congressional campaign.

But among current and former prosecutors, Hicks is most praised for the independence he allows them in handling cases.

“If Cecil Hicks never showed up to work at all, he would still be the best prosecutor in California,” one deputy district attorney told The Times in 1986. “The way he set this office up, we’re the envy of prosecutors everywhere.”

Hicks, who wrote at age 11 in a school paper that he wanted to be a prosecutor and “put bad guys in jail,” said Thursday he had not expected to announce his decision for a few weeks, until after returning from a 10-day vacation visit to his daughter in Denver, Colo.

“But it looks like I’ve preempted myself,” he said.

Hicks explained that he was speaking informally with friends at a meeting of state prosecutors in Santa Barbara Thursday afternoon when one of them casually asked if he planned to run again. It had been widely assumed by staff members in Hicks’ office that he would not seek reelection in 1990, but Hicks had never said so publicly.

But Hicks said he told the acquaintance, no, he would not run.

By evening, word had spread back to the Orange County Courthouse in Santa Ana.

“My secretary said the rumors were all over the courthouse that I had made an announcement, but I didn’t,” Hicks said.

But there were so many media inquiries after he returned home Thursday night to Orange County, he said, that he decided he might as well make it official.

Capizzi, who said he views Hicks as his mentor, all but announced his plans to run for district attorney.

“The likelihood of my not running is slim to none, but any formal announcement will await a future date,” he said Thursday night in Santa Barbara, where he also was attending the conference of prosecutors.

Capizzi said he would hope that he would win Hicks’ endorsement for the campaign, but quickly added that any announcement of that sort would have to come from Hicks himself.

Asked whether he had known his boss would not seek another term, Capizzi replied, “I had anticipated the possibility, but nevertheless he’s an institution in this county and I’ve derived much pride and pleasure in working for (him for) 25 years.”

Capizzi praised Hicks for “the honesty, the integrity and the purity in which he has run the office. . . . The total atmosphere of having prosecuted those cases that should have been prosecuted are his greatest hallmark.”