TORRANCE : Deputy D.A. Says Tough Stand Led to Demotion

The top prosecutor in the district attorney’s Torrance office says she is being demoted partly because she questioned what she called a too-lenient policy of plea bargaining by her predecessors.

Monika Blodgett, a 17-year district attorney’s office veteran, alleged in an interview Thursday that her refusal to allow plea bargains in serious criminal cases has ruffled feathers among colleagues, defense attorneys and judges in the Torrance courthouse. Blodgett, who came to the United States from Germany as a teen-ager and speaks with an accent, also said she has been harassed because of her heritage, often being referred to as a “Nazi”--a word she finds abhorrent.

Complaints about the alleged harassment, and about over-generous plea bargains by her predecessors, led to her impending reassignment to non-supervisory duties, Blodgett said. She said she was told the transfer was because of her “management style.”

Suzanne Childs, spokeswoman for the district attorney’s office, declined to comment on Blodgett’s allegations, saying it was a “personnel matter.”

Blodgett, who has held the Torrance head deputy position for about a year, provided statistics showing that during her tenure the number of murder trials handled by her office more than doubled --an indication, she said, that defendants were not being allowed to get reduced charges in return for guilty pleas.