Program Puts Investigators Back in Class

Investigators for the county public defender’s office have been going back to school through a program involving that agency and the Administration of Justice Department at Ventura College.

Arthur Jimenez, chief investigator for the public defender’s office, began sending his investigators to the college four years ago and has developed a program where members of his staff can take a minimum of 220 hours of classes in criminal investigation, history, criminal law, community relations and rules of evidence.

“We will have in-house training,” Jimenez said, “and use the school for book training.”

The link between the college and the public defender’s office is the first of its kind in the state, said David Fortman, secretary-treasurer of the state’s Defense Investigators Assn.

And Jimenez wants to take the program statewide. He will present his idea at the Defense Investigators Assn. conference in May. The hope is to get each county in California to devise a similar program and then to have the state formally adopt certification requirements for public defender investigators.

The training would be specifically aimed at investigators who lack a law-enforcement background, thereby failing to get the legal training provided through the state’s Peace Officers Standards for Training program. Presently, public defender investigators are not required by state law to have a minimum amount of experience or education in their field.

“Defense investigators are an extremely busy lot. We’re not very numerous. The ratio to attorneys is very low and we have to work our butts off,” Jimenez said. “It’s all we can do to get our annual seminars. We’ve been talking about putting together a training seminar for as long as I can remember. We’ve finally decided to sit down and do the darn thing.”

“We want to see that (public defender) investigators are properly trained and that they meet state-recognized standards, and try to upgrade the profession,” Fortman said.

“It would benefit the communities because your tax dollars are paying for us to do the job,” he said. “It would give better service to the defense community and better ethics to the criminal justice field in general.”

Fortman said a state-certified public defender investigator would also carry more weight when testifying at a trial.

One trick, Fortman said, would be to get more colleges to offer courses that would be applicable to public defenders, as does Ventura College.

“If you look in a college catalogue, they have administration of justice or criminal justice, and they are geared toward law enforcement,” he said. “We need to get colleges to recognize our profession and start a certification program.”