Thoughts About Citron Hard to Sum Up in One Sentence

Out in the hallway after court, even the prosecutor, who two hours earlier had argued forcefully for seven years in state prison for Robert Citron, refused to call the one-year County Jail sentence a slap on the wrist.

“It is a very serious sentence,” Deputy Dist. Atty. Matt Anderson told a battery of reporters. “It would be inappropriate to call it a slap on the wrist.”

Well, this won’t be the first time I’ve said something inappropriate. If a year in Theo Lacy (which would mean a few months, at most) isn’t a slap on the wrist, they should redefine the term. Especially when it’s still possible that Citron could qualify for home detention.

Tuesday was the long-delayed sentencing day for Citron, whose world began collapsing almost exactly two years ago when the county’s investment portfolio losses were first revealed and he was forced out as county treasurer. The last two years have probably seemed like 200 to Citron, who pleaded guilty in April 1995 to six felonies.

His name is forever linked to the bankruptcy--the largest ever for a municipality--and his attorney, David W. Wiechert, argued in court Tuesday that shame alone is punishment enough. He argued for probation for the 71-year-old former treasurer, saying a protracted prison sentence would be tantamount to a life term and would wreak havoc on Citron and his wife.

I was hoping Judge Stephen Czuleger wouldn’t accept that reasoning, because people are always shamed . . . after they’re caught. Until they’re caught, they act like Citron did--as some kind of financial guru only too happy to accept accolades.

For a while there, it sounded like the judge wasn’t buying it. He bore in immediately on the public trust issue and how the one thought that dominated as he considered the case was that “you don’t gamble with public money.” Citron played fast and loose with the money, the judge suggested, because it wasn’t his and because the excess earnings came too easy for too long.

That was, indeed, the nub of the case and the severity of the sentence would indicate how seriously the judge honored that concept. Others may bear some responsibility, the judge said, but Citron had the ultimate responsibility. Had Citron not signed off on a plan to divert some investment pool participants’ earnings, Czuleger said, the financial fiasco never would have occurred.

Not only did Citron damage the county’s finances, the judge continued, but he advanced public mistrust of elected officials. Saying it was not his place to forgive but to punish, the judge said he had to give “some sense of justice” to those harmed by Citron’s actions.

The judge then backed up his tough talk with a six-year prison term.

And promptly stayed it, substituting the jail term.

He also fined Citron $100,000 and put him on five years’ probation, but probation for someone like Citron is tantamount to waiving the sentence. It’s not Citron’s future conduct that is threatening; it’s the past conduct that is the issue.

Why, after the lecturing about the public trust and zeroing in on Citron’s responsibility, did the judge cave?

I can’t answer that, because I would have done pretty much the same thing. Even after listening to the lawyers and finding myself more receptive to Anderson’s argument than to Wiechert’s, I still jotted down “six months” in jail as the most severe sentence I would give Citron.

Even after being largely unsympathetic to talk about Citron’s personal “tragedy,” I couldn’t picture sending him to state prison. Was it his age? The forlorn persona he has presented the last two years? His wife of 40 years seated in the front row?

Or, when it comes down to it, am I like a lot of people who say they care about white-collar crime but don’t have the stomach to send people to jail for it?

Many months ago, I talked to another Superior Court judge and asked for his thoughts on Citron. “We’ve got lots of injured bodies in this case,” the judge told me. “We just don’t see them.”

Basically, the judge said, the law provides that “the primary purpose of sentencing is punishment. Not rehabilitation. Punishment. And in white-collar crime, traditionally, the difficulty is in balancing a serious crime against a previously blameless life.”

A dilemma, it is. I’m sure Czuleger meant what he said about public trust, but I wonder how it squares with his sentence. The six felonies that carried a statutory maximum of 14 years in prison may get Citron nothing more than an ankle bracelet with a beeper.

Should there be that much of a gap between guilty-as-charged and sentencing? Do we mean what we say when we identify these crimes as serious?

Boiling it down to the Citron case, I’m left with this puzzler:

Why does the sentence seem so wrong, and yet so right?

Dana Parsons’ column 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.