Judge Says Firing of Deputy Was Justified

A Superior Court judge has ruled that the Ventura County Sheriff’s Department was justified in firing one of its deputies for making a Moorpark woman show him her naked chest during a battery investigation.

The ruling by Judge Barbara A. Lane overturns a decision by the county Civil Service Commission that Bernard McMahon should have been suspended for 30 days without pay rather than be fired more than two years ago.

In a stinging rebuke to the commission, Lane suggested that sexual bias and a lack of objectivity prompted the commissioners to accept the word of McMahon over the female victim in the case, a 24-year-old Bank of America supervisor.

“The Civil Service Commission’s decision is devoid of any rationale for its result,” Lane wrote in her 27-page opinion.

McMahon had been with the Sheriff’s Department for 5 1/2 years when he was fired in September, 1991, for asking the Moorpark woman to show him her chest by contending he needed to assess she had injuries there.

McMahon admitted during an internal investigation that he asked the woman to raise her shirt so he could look at her chest, but in later testimony before the Civil Service Commission he denied it.

Lane said the commission “utterly ignored” McMahon’s tape-recorded prior inconsistent statements about the incident, while never explaining why it disregarded the fact there were no discrepancies in the woman’s testimony.

Lane also noted that commissioners refused to listen to evidence that McMahon had been the subject of at least two prior investigations after female jail inmates complained that he had looked at their breasts and touched them while they were bathing.

She said those earlier investigations put McMahon on notice that he should be careful when dealing with women.

Neither McMahon nor his attorney could be reached for comment Wednesday.