Extra Caution Used in ’72 Petitioning, Ex-Chair Says

The Orange County chairman of a 1972 initiative campaign on Wednesday disputed a Republican activist’s newly surfaced claim that Dist. Atty. Michael R. Capizzi sanctioned the same misdeeds 24 years ago that his prosecutors are now pursuing as a felony linked to the election of Assemblyman Scott Baugh.

At a news conference called Monday by U.S. Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, who has been publicly attacking Capizzi ever since district attorney investigators raided Baugh’s Huntington Beach home with a search warrant, Republican gadfly Howard Garber, a retired Anaheim optometrist, said Capizzi told him he could falsely sign some petitions as though he had circulated them.

Less than two weeks ago, Capizzi’s prosecutors persuaded the Orange County Grand Jury to indict Rohrabacher’s campaign manager, Rhonda J. Carmony, on felony charges for getting Assembly candidate Laurie Campbell to sign petitions she did not circulate.

Larry McNeely, who was appointed by then-state Sen. George Deukmejian to head Orange County’s effort to get an initiative restoring the death penalty on the ballot in 1972, sharply disputes Garber’s claims. “We were extra, extra cautious at the time because [former Gov.] Jerry Brown was the secretary of state then and he had said publicly he was opposed to capital punishment and planned to really examine these petitions.”

Mindful of Brown’s threat, McNeely said, the initiative’s volunteers ended up discarding nearly 30,000 petition signatures because they were either improperly certified or gathered. They did so on Capizzi’s advice, he added.

McNeely said he felt compelled to speak out after reading accounts of statements Garber made at Monday’s news conference. He said Garber’s memory was “totally inaccurate.”

“Mike [Capizzi] gave us good legal advice and clearly instructed us that the signature of the circulator was just as important as the signature of the person signing the petition.”

McNeely, now an investigator with the state Public Utilities Commission in San Francisco, said volunteers were instructed to be “very careful.”

For example, McNeely said that at the time, the elections code “required petitions to be printed with black ink.” Numerous forms printed with blue ink were thrown away.

Garber said that just before the petitions were turned in, Capizzi reviewed them and discovered that 20 to 25 had not been signed and told him he could sign them.

Although he considered it “a minor technicality” back then, Garber said he rationalized signing his name because of his strong belief in the death penalty.

Capizzi called Garber’s allegations “absolutely not true.”

Garber said Monday he decided to come forward after Baugh, the assemblyman’s chief of staff and Rohrabacher’s campaign manager were indicted by the grand jury on perjury and election fraud charges.