Time for Capizzi to Cut Our Losses on Bankruptcy Case

It’s not written down somewhere that I must understand every single move the district attorney makes, but I’d like to. After all, I help pay the guy’s salary. Being a pinch-penny, I want to know how my money’s spent.

So it is with an increasingly furrowed brow that I follow Michael Capizzi’s argument for prosecuting Supervisors Roger Stanton and William Steiner over Orange County’s bankruptcy.

You prosecute people because you believe they violated the law. In the cases pending against Stanton and Steiner, let’s concede that Capizzi believes they violated their charge in letting the county’s investment portfolio unravel. Essentially, the two (along with Auditor-Controller Steve Lewis) are charged with willful misconduct while in office. In layman’s terms, that means they were crummy supervisors.

My position for quite some time has been that they should have pleaded guilty to being crummy supervisors and resigned, if only to acknowledge their responsibility in what became the country’s largest municipal bankruptcy. Two other supervisors (Tom Riley and Harriett Wieder) ended their terms shortly after the bankruptcy occurred and a third, Gaddi Vasquez, resigned to go into private business.

That left only the heads of Steiner and Stanton available for political guillotining, and Capizzi went for it. Surely, the voting public would have saved him the trouble had their terms been up any time proximate to the bankruptcy, but, alas, that wasn’t the case.

I’ve always suspected Capizzi used the charges to spur the two holdout supervisors to resign, but they chose to stand and fight. I don’t see anything particularly heroic in that, but I’m sure they convinced themselves they were protecting, for all who come after, the holiness of elected office against a rapacious district attorney.

Fine. Let them say that. But as long as they’ve taken that position, Capizzi ought to just forget the whole thing.

Why? Because it just doesn’t matter anymore.

Their trials aren’t scheduled until fall, and convictions carry only the banishment from office. In Stanton’s case, that would mean only a few months before his term expires at year’s end. That’s like executing a 95-year-old man for a murder he committed when he was 30. Steiner has more time to serve in office, which means that he would be the only one of the original five supervisors who paid the price with his job.

That wouldn’t be a travesty, but Steiner merely joined his colleagues in endorsing then-Treasurer Robert Citron’s investing strategy. It’s hard to make a convincing case that he engaged in willful misconduct. Whatever the burden of proof for that charge is, it doesn’t square with the public perception of what happened to cause the bankruptcy.

From the start, what irked the public was that the supervisors were in the middle of the fiasco but got off scot-free. Capizzi may have been attempting to rectify that, but the case has lost its sizzle.

As a public servant, Capizzi’s other responsibility is to taxpayers. The three defendants are being defended with public funds, and that’s almost enough all by itself to justify dropping the case. We could stomach the cost if some principle were being made in the prosecution, but none is.

The public, through polls and comment, has rendered its verdicts on the job performance of all the supervisors involved in the bankruptcy. It’s guilty, guilty, guilty--of ineptness, not venality.

Capizzi the politician has made some good calls on principle in the last year. In the face of strong opposition from state and local Republican Party leaders, he pursued the election-fraud case involving Assemblyman Scott Baugh.

Maybe he thinks he’s applying the same standard in going after Stanton and Steiner.

A year ago, that argument might have made sense. Today, it doesn’t. The public isn’t getting the bang for its buck in this prosecution.

Lawyers for the supervisors say they’re fighting the case so their clients can leave office with their heads held high. Too late for that. The legacies of all five supervisors from the Class of ’94 will be forever linked to the bankruptcy.

For Orange County citizens who have spent enough money on this already, that will have to suffice as our pound of flesh.

At this point, it ought to satisfy the district attorney too.

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Dana Parsons’ columns appears Wednesday, Friday and Sunday. Readers may reach Parsons by writing to him at the Times Orange County Edition, 1375 Sunflower Ave., Costa Mesa, CA 92626, or calling (714) 966-7821.