Reiner and the Art of Setting Priorities

Ira Reiner has a problem. The Los Angeles County district attorney spends so much time thinking about what he wants to be that he sometimes seems to forget what he is. When that happens, his problem becomes everyone’s problem.

Reiner wants to be attorney general of California; at the moment he is this county’s chief prosecutor and an officer of its courts. His ambition makes demands; so does the position to which he already has been elected.

Reiner’s campaign for attorney general was set back when he was ensnarled in a snafu about whether his office had offered a plea bargain to Raymond Buckey, who is being retried on eight charges of child molestation left unresolved in the McMartin Pre-School case. During a debate with his opponent, San Francisco Dist. Atty. Arlo Smith, Reiner said, “There has never been any offer whatsoever in any form, direct or indirect, to Mr. Buckey’s attorney with respect to any disposition of the case.” However, Buckey’s lawyer subsequently released a tape recording of conversations in which Reiner’s deputies discussed the possibility of Buckey entering a plea of no contest in return for serving no additional time in jail.

The day news of that story first appeared, Reiner, acting through one of his office’s investigators, attempted to contact the judge in the McMartin case, Stanley Weisberg, who was in New York. According to Weisberg, the investigator attempted to arrange a phone conversation between the judge and Reiner for the following day. Weisberg correctly refused, since California’s rules of professional conduct prohibit such private conversations between judges and one party to a pending case. “I personally can’t conceive of why Mr. Reiner attempted to contact me ex parte (outside the presence of opposing attorneys) and off the record,” Weisberg said.

Tuesday, Reiner said, “I instructed someone from our office to call and find out if the judge would be available for a conference call involving all the parties in the case. Unfortunately, that was misunderstood.” Several facts render that description less than fully credible. The manner in which the call was made--in secret and through an investigator--was highly improper. Weisberg is a careful, fair-minded judge with extensive experience as a prosecutor. It is highly improbable that he misunderstood what was said to him on so critical a matter. Finally, the two deputy district attorneys prosecuting the Buckey case told the judge they knew nothing of the call.

Meanwhile, there is the question of justice for children who may have been molested, for a man who may have been falsely accused of heinous crimes and a public which has a right to expect that their chief prosecutor puts their interests ahead of his own.