Now Words, Wine Ex-Prosecutor’s Strong Suit

Carol Nelson had never planned to take up this rich diet of volunteerism and teaching, winemaking and fiction writing.

But now she loves the taste of it, the sight of her hillside home in Atascadero and the feel of the quiet, new country life she took up after her career nose-dived 2 1/2 years ago.

“Ultimately, it obviously has been a blessing to me,” said the former Ventura County prosecutor. “Isn’t that funny how things work out?”

Murderers, frauds and other major criminals had been Nelson’s bread and butter as her 16-year career propelled her to become one of the top prosecutors in the Ventura County Courthouse.

By 1993, Nelson had won nearly every case of her career, against small-time gangbangers, stone-cold killers and big fish like James T. (Tom) Ely, the Ventura County Community College District trustee convicted of embezzlement.

Then Nelson ran afoul of Dist. Atty. Michael D. Bradbury. And everything changed.

Bradbury had given Nelson an important assignment: Probe the death of Malibu millionaire Donald Scott, who was slain by Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputies when he refused to drop his pistol during a fruitless drug raid on his ranch.

Nelson spent 4 1/2 months looking into Scott’s death, only to be yanked off the case as she reached her conclusions, muzzled by her boss and relegated to prosecuting sex crimes.

Nelson’s report concluded that the deputies and other agents had not conspired to seize Scott’s ranch through the raid. But Bradbury put two other prosecutors on the case and they soon issued a highly controversial report accusing the agents of just that.

Nelson toiled in relative obscurity for close to a year, prosecuting rapists and child molesters. Then she quietly resigned in March 1994.

On her final day as a prosecutor, she finally got to speak to Bradbury for the first time since being pulled from the Scott case.

“He said something like, ‘I’m sorry it had to end this way,’ ” she recalls. “And I was just like, ‘Well what can I say?’ ”

She has not spoken to him since, she said. And she does her best not to look back.

She moved to Atascadero and married her second husband, Michael Selby, a Cal Poly professor and neuropsychologist who works part time at the California Men’s Colony.

She volunteered to run a juvenile justice system for the San Luis Obispo Probation Department, where teen-age minor offenders face justice at the hands of their peers, and sometimes serve as jurors and judges.

“It works really well,” said Nelson-Selby, who took her husband’s name but kept her own, too, to retain membership in the state bar.

“The kids who are offenders have the opportunity to sit as jurors in other people’s cases,” she said. “They get to think about who was harmed [by the crime], how serious was that, and how can we get this kid not to be constantly in conflict with the law. It puts them in sort of a parenting position.”

Nelson-Selby also teaches at two Atascadero high schools 10 days a year, introducing students to the criminal justice system and intricacies of the law.

“I really like spending my efforts on people for whom there is truly a chance of living to have a protected life,” she said.

Retirement gave her time to write fiction and make wine--she and her husband make cabernet sauvignon and merlot wines that have won gold and silver medals at the Mid-State Fair.

And it gave Nelson-Selby a sense of perspective.

“I was doing homicides for probably eight or 10 years,” she recalled. “And at the end of the case, the victim is never going to come back, and the defendant is not going to get better. And those families are completely devastated. In many ways it was a lose-lose situation.

“I’m not a competitive enough person to enjoy winning enough to overshadow my sense that [any murder case] was a compound personal tragedy, so while I felt the job was a wonderful job and I was doing very worthwhile work, it was certainly at a personal cost.”

In the end, the clash with Bradbury crystallized some of her doubts about her job.

“I think I spent 16 years doing that job without a single day of cynicism,” she says. “I always really believed in what I was doing, really believed in what the office is doing. But that is more difficult when you are gagged. When you’re told, ‘Don’t say what you believe to be true.’ ”

She began to question herself over and over in trials, making sure hers was the accurate argument of the facts.

“I really would not do something as serious as taking away someone’s personal freedom unless I was absolutely, personally convinced that that was the right thing to do,” she said.

In the final months, “I simply felt that that type of personal perspective wasn’t valued in the same way as it had been when I most loved the job. I think it sneaked up on me. . . . In fact, I was told I could not give my view. My report was quashed, and I was silenced. That’s not a comfortable position to be in.”

But with her new career, her new home, her new husband and new life, she said, “It turned out to be a real blessing to me. It’s not something I grieve over at all.”

She makes her way back to Ventura occasionally to visit family and old friends, but she said firmly: “I don’t miss the district attorney’s office.”