Capizzi Served County and Justice

* Your lead editorial on Jan. 17, “New Leaders for a New Era,” confused me. You noted that government employees should be held to high standards of accountability and ethics. No dispute there.

But you made a passing reference to the outgoing district attorney, Mike Capizzi, as “the local enforcer for political prosecutions.”

It is unclear whether you meant “prosecutions of allegedly corrupt politicians,” in which case you are right, or “partisan prosecutions,” in which case you are dead wrong.

Capizzi has long been a prosecutor of politicians accused of corruption. In the 1970s he prosecuted a county supervisor, Ralph Diedrich, and a political kingmaker, Dr. Louis Cella, for political corruption. Both Diedrich and Cella were Democrats.

Democrats howled in protest that these were partisan prosecutions of men who never would have been held accountable if they had been Republicans. The Democrats pilloried Capizzi as the toady of the county’s Republican monopoly. Both men were convicted.

election to the state Assembly.

Capizzi was at the heart of the Republican establishment, albeit in an “independent” slot (in the district attorney’s office) for over two decades.

Then, in recent years, Capizzi did something that was breathtaking in either its stupidity or its bravery. He prosecuted Rhonda Carmony and Scott Baugh for election fraud. If partisanship was his goal, Capizzi was stupid, because he was a political “Wrong-Way Corrigan.” Both Carmony, later Mrs. Dana Rohrabacher, and Baugh are Republicans. As a Republican, Capizzi was reviled by the extremists in his own party.

Capizzi leaves office with his head high as a career prosecutor respected for precisely those qualities you endorse: devotion to public accountability by elected officials and unassailable personal ethics.

STUART P. JASPER

Newport Beach

Editor’s note: By “political prosecutions,” the editorial referred not to partisan prosecutions but to prosecutions of political cases.