Charges Against Skipper Dismissed : Courts: The victim of a robbery and attempted rape in Newport Beach did not want to continue with the case, prosecutors said.

In a case filled with allegations of police misconduct and poor defense lawyering, criminal charges have been dismissed against a Newport Beach yacht skipper whose convictions of robbery and attempted rape were overturned by an appellate court in June.

At the request of the district attorney’s office, Orange County Superior Court Judge John J. Ryan threw out a 3-year-old felony case against Daniel DeHaven on Friday after the alleged victim declined to testify again in court.

DeHaven, 65, was found guilty in 1990 of attacking a 25-year-old woman at knifepoint on Jan. 5, 1988, in a dimly lighted parking garage underneath a Newport Beach apartment complex. In early June, after DeHaven served nine months in jail, an appellate court threw out his three felony convictions on the grounds that his attorney was incompetent. Prosecutors had the option of refiling charges.

“I am not jumping up and down, nor do I have any really happy feelings. Maybe I’ve been hurt too long by this,” DeHaven said in an interview Tuesday. “As far as I am concerned, the Newport Beach police handled this case with complete dishonesty, and my attorney, Deputy Public Defender Tony Mesa, was completely incompetent.”

Mesa could not be reached for comment Tuesday.

DeHaven said he is now considering a civil lawsuit against the Newport Beach Police Department and the district attorney’s office to expose what he considers to be a pattern of misconduct during his prosecution.

Deputy Dist. Atty. Mel Jensen, who supervises felony trials in Superior Court, said a key factor in the prosecution’s decision not to refile charges was the reluctance of the alleged victim to continue with the case.

“She has already been through a considerable amount of trauma and did not want to go forward to avoid further trauma,” Jensen said. “She has suffered enough.”

DeHaven, a retired yacht broker with no previous criminal record, was convicted largely on the strength of the victim’s emotional testimony, in which she identified DeHaven as the man who accosted her as she sat in her car.

DeHaven, who now works as a professional skipper, has steadfastly maintained that he was misidentified and that he was actually at a business lunch with an associate at the time of the attack.

After his trial, family members, friends and John K. Depko, an investigator for the Orange County public defender’s office, had joined DeHaven in his effort to vindicate himself. Depko and DeHaven said they were convinced that the conviction came about partly because Newport Beach police diverged from their own policies and investigative procedures in making the case.

They contended that, among other things, detectives used shoddy methods that improperly influenced the identification of DeHaven as a suspect, ignored major contradictions in the victim’s statements, and planted evidence in an attempt to link the accused to an unrelated burglary.

As DeHaven’s appeal moved through the court system, Depko compiled an extensive report on the apparent discrepancies and faulty police work and submitted it to the district attorney with a request that the matter be fully investigated.

Newport Beach police admitted that errors were made in handling evidence, and an officer was disciplined. Authorities have repeatedly asserted, however, that the DeHaven investigation was proper. The district attorney also concluded that there was no evidence to warrant further inquiry into allegations of police misconduct.

Jensen said that the controversy surrounding the allegations of police misconduct was not a factor in his office’s decision not to refile charges. But DeHaven said prosecutors knew that he and his current attorney, Jack Early, would have made an issue out of the allegations of police misconduct at any retrial.

In his appeal, DeHaven argued that there was not enough evidence to convict him and that his then-attorney should have, among other things, called character witnesses to testify on his behalf.

Appellate justices ruled in a 2-1 decision that “the evidence was sufficient” to warrant a guilty verdict but that “it was far from overwhelming.” The court agreed that DeHaven’s attorney was incompetent in not calling character witnesses to the stand.

In a hotly worded dissent, Justice Sheila Sonenshine concluded that she was “loath to reverse” the jury’s verdict. She said the defense attorney’s decision not to call character witnesses was “sound” because the prosecutor might then have been able to introduce other evidence to attack DeHaven’s character.