15 Federal Prosecutors Added in S.D. : Crime: The U.S. attorney says they will help turn the tide in the battle on crime and drugs but critics say they will only swamp an already foundering federal court system.

So many new, eager prosecutors are coming aboard at the U.S. attorney’s office in San Diego that the office literally has no space to put them all.

The 15 new arrivals, with jobs funded by the so-called war on drugs and by a bill that takes aim at violent crime, might have to be quartered two to a cubicle, U.S. Atty. William Braniff said.

It is also uncertain how the San Diego federal court, already besieged by the low-level drug and immigration cases that account for nearly two-thirds of the criminal filings, is supposed to make room for them--since the newcomers will enable the office to generate even more “bottom-end” cases, Braniff said.

Still, he said, the staff increase means more than just more cases.

“More cases and better cases,” he said. “More resources to do a better job.”

Judges and defense lawyers--and even longtime deputy U.S. attorneys in his own office--remain skeptical.

One assistant U.S. attorney said, “I think I speak for a lot of people in this office when I say this: Bigger is not necessarily better.”

“Unless bigger cases get processed as a result of the new assistants, it really will not have any impact at all,” said the attorney, who asked to remain unnamed. “Just to continue prosecuting border busts doesn’t have any real overall impact on crime in San Diego.”

The 15 new deputies--formally known as assistant U.S. attorneys--represent the office’s largest one-time increase in new lawyers.

The nearly 25% rise--from 66 lawyers--is the latest step in an expansion that figures out at 125% since 1980, when there were 36 deputies.

That growth has not been matched in the two other central components of the criminal justice system.

No new federal judges have come to the San Diego court over the past 10 years, and there is only moderate growth forecast at the 17-lawyer federal public defender’s office, Federal Defenders of San Diego Inc., which opposes the U.S. attorney’s office in slightly less than half of all criminal cases brought in San Diego’s federal court.

But even with the five new lawyers that might be hired sometime in the next 18 months, the defenders will remain outnumbered by more than 3 to 1 by the prosecutors, Federal Defenders Executive Director Judy Clarke said.

Meanwhile, as the U.S. attorney’s office has grown, so has the criminal caseload.

U.S. District Judge Judith N. Keep already has gone on record as saying the San Diego federal court was “sinking in a mire of criminal cases”--and that was 14 months ago.

Because the court serves San Diego and Imperial counties, it is particularly burdened by arrests at the U.S.-Mexico border, mainly drug and immigration cases.

New Immigration and Naturalization Service Commissioner Gene McNary recently proposed sweeping changes in the agency that could, by the end of the year, place even more enforcement agents along the border. More agents can make more drug- and alien-smuggling cases, McNary said.

In addition, McNary announced June 21 that his agency would seek to formally deport or jail illegal aliens caught slipping repeatedly into the United States. That policy shift, a marked departure from the practice of allowing most illegal aliens to return voluntarily to their homeland soon after capture, could dramatically increase prosecutions.

So, with 15 additional prosecutors reporting for duty, the other participants in the daily grind of the criminal court wonder whether Braniff’s assertion--that more can also mean better when it comes to justice--can be made meaningful.

Defense lawyer Eugene Iredale predicted that federal agents, acting at the direction of prosecutors, will manufacture crimes by setting up sting operations. “I think we will see people unjustly tempted by unrealistic rewards in an unrealistic situation by the government, all for the purpose of creating crime,” he said.

Iredale, who is in private practice, added, “What I think is going to happen is you’ll have all these additional prosecutors and they’ll say, ‘Geez, we’d better make some cases.’ So instead of a reasonable number of prosecutors dealing with a reasonable number of cases, there will be an incentive for them to be creative and inventive.”

The 15 new slots are the creation of Congress, which has allocated money for new prosecutors at U.S. attorney’s offices around the country. Ten of the 15 slots are attributable to a 1988 anti-drug bill, while the remaining five come from a 1989 violent-crime law, Braniff said.

The new deputies began arriving in mid-March. In part because of the need to find and make space at the U.S. attorney’s office, the last ones are not due to start until October.

Many of the arrivals are young refugees from big law firms who are taking huge pay cuts along with their new jobs. Alana M. Wong, 27, who became a prosecutor last week, is two years out of law school and was making $75,000 a year at the San Diego office of Baker & McKenzie, the world’s largest law firm with 1,570 attorneys at more than 40 locations.

She signed on for $41,000 a year at the U.S. attorney’s office.

Wong said she enjoyed her two years of big-firm practice, but she wanted to handle more cases and better cases than civil disputes between big corporations.

“I think that working in a private law firm, the work can be kind of sterile,” Wong said. “I anticipate my work at the U.S. attorney’s office will be a lot juicier and for that reason a lot more interesting.

“The kind of stuff you can picture in your head and get emotional about. The kind of stuff you read about in the newspapers every day. I think it will be thrilling.”

Hundreds of applicants like Wong flooded the San Diego office earlier this year, looking for one of the 15 slots, Braniff said. For young lawyers, the allure is the opportunity to gain extensive courtroom experience and to “be where the action is,” he said.

If, that is, action means border busts, since 64% of the criminal cases filed last year in the San Diego court were drug and immigration cases, according to government statistics.

Plans call for the new arrivals to “take some of the bottom end of the cases” while they learn their way around the criminal courts, Braniff said. That will free up more-experienced prosecutors to handle more-complicated cases, he said.

With those “bottom-end” cases, the “emphasis is drugs,” Braniff said, adding that “that doesn’t preclude that some of the resources would be addressed to the border in general.”

“I don’t want to overstate the relationship,” Braniff said. “We’ve got (the new deputies) through a mandate under (federal) drug policy, part of which is to make efforts to seal the border.

“Related to that would be anything we could do in alien smuggling, because that’s part of the problem with the border. An open border lends itself to lots of abuse. We feel that it is consistent with the drug policy to try to improve the situation in various areas, including illegal immigration.”

The new deputies may be used, for instance, to implement McNary’s plan to deport or jail repeated border crossers.

INS is “trying to identify earlier a targeted group of repeat offenders who continually come through the system under different names, so they can be dealt with more harshly, consistent with the people they are rather than the people they represent themselves to be, “ Braniff said.

The complication with bringing more “bottom-end” cases is that the number of cases being filed at the U.S. Courthouse in San Diego has been climbing steadily for years, paralleling the increased number of prosecutors. And the judges are frazzled.

The office grew to 66 lawyers from 36 during President Reagan’s second term, when the “war on drugs” was begun.

In 1985, at the beginning of Reagan’s second term, the San Diego court recorded 989 criminal filings, according to the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts in Washington. In 1989, it counted 1,429, a 44% jump in four years.

Traditionally, the bulk of the filings have been drug and immigration cases. Last year’s statistics show how striking that pattern has become.

In 1985, 27% of the cases were drug-related, according to the Administrative Office, the staff arm of the governing agency of the federal courts, the U.S. Judicial Conference. In 1989, 43% were drug-related and 21% were immigration-related--916 cases in all.

Meanwhile, the number of full-time judges has remained at eight since 1980, said Judge Gordon Thompson, the chief federal judge in San Diego. For the moment, there are actually only seven full-time judges, since Judge William B. Enright turned 65 last month, entitling him to part-time duty, Thompson said.

No replacement for Enright is in sight, Thompson said.

Each of the seven full-time judges is handling about 420 cases, 85% of which are criminal cases, Thompson said. Enright and three other part-time judges help out, but the caseload is actually more daunting now than when Keep made the June, 1989, reference to sinking in the mire, Thompson said.

The problem is compounded, Thompson said, by “beefing up agencies and trying to run cases through courts that aren’t equipped to handle it, judgewise. So something’s got to give.” That something is usually the civil caseload, which is shunted aside because criminal cases involve speedy-trial rights, he said.

The San Diego court has asked Congress for two new judgeships, Thompson said. That request has been standing for months with no action, he said.

Braniff said he is sensitive to judicial concerns of overcrowding.

“We can turn the heat up so far, but then we’ve got to see what happens,” he said. “We don’t want to bring the process to a halt.”

Cases also might be handled in ways that make them go through the court system more efficiently, Braniff said. “We can do the cases better that we’re doing,” he said. That means “making a higher-quality product that can proceed through the court system more efficiently, not making it any more complicated than it has to be for the court system.”

Besides doing cases better, there’s also the matter of doing better cases, Braniff said.

The new arrivals’ focus on “bottom-end” work should “free up the people who presently do possess the talent to do very sophisticated cases, but have to deal with a wider range of cases because we have to deal with them,” Braniff said. “Maybe now they’ll be able to focus more of their time on the higher-end case.”

Four prosecutors will be added to the department that targets fraud and white-collar crimes, bringing that section’s total to 16, Braniff said. In addition, veteran prosecutor Larry Burns has been named a one-man “violent crime coordinator.”

Burns said it was likely that he might be involved in 20 to 25 more cases a year. He said he expects to make extensive use of a new federal law that permits prosecutors to seek life in prison without parole for repeat offenders convicted of using guns or weapons.

Already, in the past two weeks, Burns has indicted three ex-convicts under that law.

Defense lawyers, meanwhile, said they remained dubious--about the likelihood of seeing either more cases or better ones.

Clarke, the executive director of Federal Defenders, said the new federal laws that slam players in the drug trade with harsh mandatory prison sentences give defendants much less incentive to plea-bargain.