Counties Not Liable for DA’s Errors, Court Says

The California Supreme Court, examining one of the state’s most notorious child molestation cases, decided Thursday that a county cannot be held responsible for overzealous prosecutors whose misconduct leads to faulty convictions.

The court ruled for Kern County in a lawsuit brought by five of seven former criminal defendants who served five years in prison before an appeals court overturned their child abuse convictions. That court found that prosecutors had engaged in misconduct in their “blind quest to convict.”

The six children who testified against the seven eventually recanted their stories, and Kern County Dist. Atty. Edward Jagels decided not to retry the nationally publicized case.

Ricky Lynn Pitts and four of the other defendants said in their civil rights suit that the Kern County district attorney’s office had intimidated and coerced the children into making false claims and failed to reveal evidence that would have helped the defense.

Under Thursday’s 5-2 ruling, the former defendants will receive no compensation for their ordeal. A civil jury has already rejected their claims against a deputy prosecutor and sheriff’s deputies who investigated the alleged crimes.

The ruling also spares other California counties from potentially mammoth jury awards when prosecutors err and gain convictions of innocent defendants in similar situations. A court of appeal had held that California counties could be liable for damages, and courts in other states have made similar rulings.

“If that decision had been allowed to stand,” said Jagels, “it would have been a disaster for district attorneys. They would have been forever at war with county governing bodies” over whether a prosecution might make a county vulnerable to a lawsuit.

Pitts and six others were convicted in 1985 of numerous sex offenses with children, including their own children, grandchildren, nieces and nephews. The defendants were sentenced to terms ranging from 285 to 405 years each, making the collective sentence of more than 2,600 years the longest in a child molestation case in state history.

Pitts and his wife, Marcella, were the first to be accused. They were charged with molesting Marcella’s son from a previous marriage. Marcella and her former husband were in the midst of a custody fight at the time.

By the time authorities completed their probe, they had arrested the Pittses; Grace Dill, Marcella’s mother; Colleen Bennett Forsythe, another of Dill’s daughters; Forsythe’s husband, Wayne; Dill’s son; and a family friend.

The alleged victims testified at trial that they were sexually abused while cameras filmed them. Some said they were forced to take drugs or drink alcohol and engage in sex acts with both adults and other children. There were no adult witnesses, and no videotapes were ever found.

Prosecution of child sex abuse was a major priority of the Kern County district attorney’s office at the time, and a foreman of the grand jury later described the county as “gripped in hysteria” about child sexual abuse.

Law enforcement authorities elsewhere also were targeting alleged child sexual abuse rings, with scandals exploding in different pockets of the nation. In the same year as Pitts and the others were arrested in Kern County, Los Angeles County authorities charged the McMartin Pre-School defendants with sexually abusing children. No one was convicted in the McMartin case.

In their lawsuit, Pitts and four co-defendants charged that Kern County should be held liable for the actions of prosecutors because Jagels fostered an atmosphere that condoned misconduct. Jagels, who has played a prominent role in statewide efforts aimed at making it easier to convict criminals, flatly denied the charges and said he would have been vindicated had the Supreme Court allowed the suit to proceed against the county.

At issue legally was whether Jagels was acting as an official of the state or a county policymaker at the time. The state has immunity from such civil rights suits, but county policymakers do not.

The state Supreme Court decided that district attorneys in California are acting on behalf of the state both when they prepare prosecutions and train other lawyers in the office. To rule otherwise would be “nonsensical” and would “impose local government liability under the most arbitrary of circumstances,” wrote Justice Janice Rogers Brown for the majority.

“It gives a measure of comfort to counties to know that their treasuries are not going to be exposed [if] the county district attorney is allegedly engaged in conduct that is contrary to the Constitution,” said Mark Nations, chief deputy county counsel for Kern County.

He noted, however, that police officers can still be sued, and counties can be held liable for their actions. Prosecutors also can be sued for slander or for activities outside the scope of their prosecutorial duties, he said.

Deputy Atty. Gen. Thomas F. McArdle, who represented the California District Attorneys Assn. in the case, said counties can be forced to pay monetary compensation when they adopt a policy whose execution causes an injury. But county boards of supervisors do not set policies for district attorneys, and counties should not be liable for their actions, he said.

Justices Stanley Mosk and Joyce L. Kennard dissented in the ruling, arguing that a district attorney clearly acts as a county official in training, supervising and managing his or her staff and should be held responsible for violating the civil rights of defendants.

Mosk wrote that such lawsuits should be limited to cases where there is a “pattern of action that amounts to a custom or policy of deliberate indifference” to civil rights. “But if such a custom or policy did exist and caused plaintiffs’ injuries, they should be entitled to some relief,” he added.

Stanley M. Becker, who represented the Pittses and his former co-defendants, could not be reached for comment.