And the Winner for Cheap-Shot Election Mailer Is . . .

Two years ago, I singled out Robert K. Dornan for having the most shameful cheap-shot election mailer around. It included doctored pictures of his congressional opponent, then-newcomer Loretta Sanchez, that made her look like a vampire.

My candidate this year for top eleventh-hour nastiness was going to be state Sen. Rob Hurtt (R-Garden Grove). He would have won for a mailer with a cartoon depiction of his opponent, Democrat Joe Dunn, standing in a pile of excrement. The heading says, “Oh-oh, Joe Dunn’s stepped in it again.”

As I said, Hurtt was going to win. But Dornan has come up with something at the last minute that twists the truth deeper into the gutter than even Hurtt’s mailer.

Voters in the 46th District this week got a Dornan mailer chastising opponent Sanchez, now the incumbent, with this attention-grabber in large type:

“If drunk drivers threaten our families, then why did Congresswoman Loretta Sanchez let one off?”

And the first paragraph reads: “Last year, Sanchez served as a juror in a drunk driving trial. She was the only one of 12 jurors who voted against convicting the drunk driver. The only one!”

Wow. If you hate drunk drivers--and don’t we all?--wouldn’t you think twice about voting to reelect Sanchez?

Truth is, Dornan has shamefully turned this one just about inside out.

Here is what really happened:

Last year, Sanchez was called for jury duty here in Orange County. The defendant in her case, Carlos C. Cervantes, now 38, was charged with two counts of drunk driving. He was stopped by the California Highway Patrol on the Costa Mesa Freeway in Santa Ana on Nov. 16, 1996.

He was arrested after the officer conducted a field sobriety test and then had Cervantes take a Breathalyzer test. The Breathalyzer showed his blood-alcohol content at 0.11%, above the 0.08% legal limit allowed for driving.

The district attorney’s policy in Orange County in first-offense drunk driving cases is to allow the defendant to plea bargain. Otherwise, our courts would be so overrun with trials we’d go on overload. It’s almost impossible to beat those Breathalyzer results, so few defendants choose to go to trial.

Prosecutors think maybe Cervantes thought he could win because there had been an error in his Breathalyzer paperwork. Perhaps he hoped to win on a technicality.

But he didn’t. He was convicted of drunk driving. Sanchez--despite what Dornan’s mailer says--voted with the other jurors to convict him. He was sentenced to three years’ probation, paid a $300 fine, and was ordered to pay $100 to cover the cost of the Breathalyzer test. That was the exact same sentence he would have received if he had plea bargained his case.

Dornan’s mailer is actually about a second count in the case, which does not specify any blood-alcohol content. This count protects law enforcement in case the driver was on drugs instead of alcohol, or failed to take a Breathalyzer test. Prosecutors usually take both counts to trial, just to cover their bases.

On this count, Sanchez did vote no and the 11 other jurors voted yes. But it was meaningless.

A conviction on that count could not have added a day of jail or probation or a single dollar of fine to Cervantes’ sentence. And prosecutors didn’t give a second thought to pursuing that count after there wasn’t unanimous consent to convict. That would have been idiotic.

At first, I figured that Dornan boldly chose to mislead voters with this mailer out of arrogant disregard for the truth. After interviewing him, I realized something different:

He misled voters in part because he was simply mistaken in his facts.

“She let him off on the drunk driving count, then went along with the others to convict him on a softer, drunk in public count,” Dornan told me in a telephone interview.

Well, Dornan is just flat wrong. Cervantes was never charged with being drunk in public.

It is indeed an interesting question why Sanchez voted against the other jurors on the second count. She wasn’t available Friday for me to ask her that.

Maybe Sanchez believes the prosecutor simply failed to prove his case “beyond a reasonable doubt” on that second charge. I wasn’t in court; neither was Dornan.

When Dornan screams in his mailer headline that Sanchez “let one off,” he leads you to believe she let a drunk driver off. All she “let off” was a redundant count that meant nothing once a guilty verdict was in on the other count.

Elsewhere in his mailer, Dornan states: “When Loretta Sanchez had a chance to send a clear message to drunk drivers, she failed.”

Actually, the clear message she sent was: Show up in court after blowing the Breathalyzer test, buddy, and I’ll vote to convict you.

Also, Dornan makes quite a deal out of Sanchez signing an autograph for the defendant’s wife. He makes it sound as if she slipped out of the jury box to accommodate the woman. What really happened was that Sanchez was hit by a parade of autograph seekers in the hallway going to court. She signed for everybody, having no idea the defendant’s wife was among the autograph seekers. The judge in the case did admonish the defendant’s wife about it, but not Sanchez.

Dornan isn’t the only candidate with negative campaign mailers. In our interview, he accused Sanchez of brutal distortions, and he says he never went negative until after she did. But I’ve reviewed all her mailers from recent weeks. Actually, most don’t mention Dornan at all. Those that do, I haven’t seen anything as out of whack as the number he’s done on Sanchez about drunk drivers.

But after discussing all this with Dornan, his response was: “We stand behind this one.”

That’s too bad, because this mailer is a flagrant misrepresentation of the truth. To paraphrase Rob Hurtt: “Oh-oh, Bob Dornan’s stepped in it again.”

*

Jerry Hicks’ column appears Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday. Readers may reach Hicks by calling the Times Orange County Edition at (714) 966-7823 or by fax to (714) 966-7711, or e-mail to jerry.hicks@latimes.com