The D.A. Office That Comes Close to Being Unmanageable

It appears that Dist. Atty. Gil Garcetti has barely avoided his close encounter of the unemployed kind and will be reelected to a second term. Unfortunately for him, there will be no honeymoon.

Deputy district attorneys who backed challenger John Lynch can’t be fired because Civil Service rules bar any such retaliation. Yet, the customary price for being on the losing side of their boss’ election is banishment to a courthouse geographically farthest from a deputy’s home. When Garcetti himself was demoted after unsuccessfully challenging Ira Reiner’s authority while he was chief deputy, his personal Elba was the Torrance branch court.

The spinmeisters characterized the D.A. race in terms of the O.J. Simpson double-murder trial: “Gil the Loser vs. Johnny One Note” (Lynch’s campaign centered on the Simpson case). Both Garcetti’s and Lynch’s advertising was frequently dirty, dishonest and personal. Their in-house partisans took their opponent’s canards as private attacks.

At the apex of the criminal-law business, everyone keeps a mental accounting of “pays” and “owes”--and memories are long. What Garcetti must realize is that his reelection has left the district attorney’s office fractured, and while the same would be true if Lynch had won, Lynch would have the new boss’ prerogative--and advantage--of “a new broom sweeps clean.”

Since it is likely that at least half Garcetti’s deputies voted against him, his immediate second-term management problem is how to justify reassigning 500 lawyers to the Lancaster branch office or some similarly isolated location.

The main deterrent of yet another bloodletting in the D.A.’s office may be a book on the Simpson criminal trial. Journalist Joseph Bosco’s “A Problem of Evidence” candidly chronicles the depth and intensity of the in-house problems.

In a chapter titled “Bunker Arrogance,” Bosco reports that Garcetti’s best prosecutors work in branches that are geographically farthest from the downtown Criminal Courts Building. In other words, they are as far “outside the loop” as Garcetti’s jurisdiction will allow.

Consider the case of Peter Bozanich. Prosecuting is the business of the Bozanich family. Peter’s older brother, Dinko, is the “mad dog” of the Long Beach branch of the D.A.’s office. Peter’s wife, Pamela, was the lead prosecutor in the first Menendez brothers’ trial. At the beginning of the Garcetti administration, Peter was its “golden boy.” He was assistant chief of central operations, being groomed to move up.

When Bozanich saw how his boss was handling the early stages of the Simpson case, Bosco relates, every bell and whistle in his early-warning system went off. When he tried to express his concerns to Garcetti, he was shunned, as were numerous other highly placed trial deputies in the office. Encountering obstacles at every turn, he withdrew from Garcetti’s inner circle, was demoted and exiled to the Compton branch.

This time around, fortunately, Garcetti lacks the mandate, both in-house and from the voters, to banish more deputies who opposed him. He has other problems as well:

* Nothing has angered the deputy prosecutors as much as the bonuses and compensated time off that Marcia Clark and Christopher Darden received after losing the Simpson trial. The concept of a “bonus” disturbs Garcetti’s prosecutors, for several reasons. First, many prosecutors believe that a bonus for putting people in prison is the equivalent of bounty hunting. A bonus violates the canons of ethics because it places the prosecutor’s obligation to seek the truth in potential conflict with lining his or her own pockets by suppressing exculpatory evidence to obtain a conviction.

Second, the attorneys correctly argue that they, too, hurl themselves into the furies every day of their working lives, and rewarding Clark and Darden for just doing their jobs, while failing to reward other prosecutors, is unconscionable.

To make amends and obviate a potentially intractable management problem, Garcetti should start his second term by admitting he committed a mistake of judgment and apologize to the thousand prosecutors he employs who did not receive bonuses.

* During his first term, Garcetti’s policy of deciding which “three strikes” cases were worthy of pursuing life-imprisonment sentences for varied from courthouse to courthouse. Although he claimed to have a comprehensive three-strikes policy, no defense attorney has been able to figure out what the policy is. More than 70% of third-strike convictions were for small drug beefs or petty thefts. Sometimes, using a garbage-can offense to take a felon off the streets for life may be appropriate. Usually, it is not.

Like everyone else in this time of government cutbacks, Garcetti must redefine his prosecution strategy with an eye on having the greatest possible effect on the crime rate. The crack-cocaine problem cannot be eradicated by building a wall out of millions of one-gram “rocks” and thousands of low-grade felony prosecutions that are the police equivalent of shooting fish in a barrel. Putting thousands of small-time pushers in prison has simply had no effect on the flow of cocaine into Los Angeles.

* The current U.S. attorney in Los Angeles is Nora M. Manella. She is extraordinarily capable, widely admired and almost never seen on television. Should he win reelection, Garcetti should go low profile, evading, for a while, all TV cameras.

Finally, perhaps the best reflection of morale in the D.A.’s office comes from a hallway Q&A; with a group of deputy prosecutors:

Q: “Are you guys getting Gil anything for Christmas?”

A: “Yeah. We’re all chipping in for an albatross-on-a-rope.”