Growing Faction in Kern County Claims Zealous D.A. Crosses Line

Ed Jagels was a rich kid from San Marino, fresh out of law school, when he signed up to be a Kern County prosecutor in 1975. His prep school pedigree--prominent lawyer dad and society page mom--didn’t exactly resonate with the Dust Bowl Okies and Arkies who built this town.

So Jagels found another way to get inside California’s insular farm belt, highlighting the summers he spent as a cowboy on the family cattle spread in Lake County. “I knew how to hunt, I knew how to ride,” he said. “And I already liked country-western.”

It didn’t take long for Kern County to see in Jagels one of its own. He was elected district attorney in 1982, and no one has run against him since. His record as the toughest prosecutor in the state is a matter of great pride here.

But the crime-fighting zeal that so many find comforting in this conservative bulwark has come back to haunt him. A growing swell of voices say Kern County’s war on crime--which proportionally has sent more people to prison than any county in the state--has unleashed a terrifying assault on constitutional rights.

Defense attorneys, families of the convicted and now a respected journalist contend it isn’t simply justice that drives Jagels, but a single-mindedness that blinds him to a tragic reality: Prosecutors and Kern County sheriffs have employed bogus evidence and trumped-up charges to win convictions against innocent people.

On his watch, they point out, a number of high-profile convictions have been overturned by state appellate courts decrying the misdoings of Jagels’ office.

“For years, we’ve been shouting about the injustices and the misconduct of the district attorney’s office, and no one has listened,” said Margaret Lemucchi, wife of a local defense attorney.

She stood at the front counter of Russo’s bookstore, buying a first edition of “Mean Justice,” a new nonfiction work by Edward Humes, published by Simon & Schuster. It is the first book to peel back Bakersfield’s intolerant past and connect that history to the more recent transgressions of some cops, prosecutors and judges.

On the day of publication last month, in what may be nothing more than a bizarre coincidence, the son of the book’s main figure turned up dead inside the county jail after being subdued by sheriff’s deputies.

Townsfolk like Lemucchi say the book reveals to the outside world what they’ve long suspected. “Finally, someone has connected the dots and put the whole picture together,” she said.

Humes, the author of four critically acclaimed books, details case after case of Kern County citizens wrongly convicted because of evidence he contends was manufactured, tainted or withheld.

“It was startling to find out that hundreds of people in Bakersfield have had their lives devastated by wrongful prosecutions,” said Humes, 41, whose wife, a Los Angeles Times editor, oversees coverage of the Central Valley. “Case after case overturned by the appellate courts and never once has Jagels admitted a mistake.

“There’s no middle ground with him,” Humes added. “You either believe in his vision or you support criminals, and that attitude has permeated law enforcement throughout Kern County.”

Nevertheless, much of the citizenry in this tight-knit community--where right-wing invective and Pentecostal exhortation often ring out from the same pulpit--continue to support the pugnacious Jagels.

Chamber of Commerce President Chris Frank said the district attorney is “very hard on crime, and that’s certainly not viewed as a negative in Bakersfield.”

With residents taking both sides of the issue to the airwaves and addressing the matter in letters to the editor, the book has become the talk of the town in some circles.

Jagels, 49, sits in his office, surrounded by a stuffed pheasant and photos of himself posing with big-name conservatives. His boyish face is perpetually puckered and there’s not a disobedient hair on his perfectly silver head.

As his top prosecutor thumbs through a copy of the book--yellow note stickers here and there to mark the pages most troubling--Jagels says he couldn’t stomach reading the whole thing.

One of the book’s many misrepresentations, he said, is the claim that his office has seen an inordinate number of convictions overturned by higher courts. Jagels said the proportion of reversals is actually small compared with the county’s exceedingly high number of convictions.

“I think Mr. Humes inadvertently revealed an ideological agenda,” he said. “I don’t just mean his characterization of this county as a place of pickup trucks and shotguns, which I found to be simplistic and offensive, but his sneering contempt for Kern County’s attitude toward public safety.”

Pinched by mountains and surrounded on all sides by farm and oil fields, this implacable corner of California has a rich heritage of intolerance.

Over the decades, journalists looking for a tinge of the Confederacy out West have found Kern County to be more than obliging. Horse rustlers were executed in public and at one time the Ku Klux Klan controlled every branch of government. John Steinbeck’s “Grapes of Wrath” was burned on the library steps.

In the 1980s, Kern County found itself gripped by a new fear. Eight child molestation rings involving hundreds of parents were unearthed.

Many of the children, who at first denied being molested to social workers and detectives, were pressed and offered goodies until they delivered the graphic testimony that county investigators believed they were hiding.

Jagels, the new district attorney, formed a special unit. The Bakersfield Californian, which had ignored decades of civic corruption, did a breathless series. Before it was over, 50 parents were arrested and charged; half of them were sent to prison with sentences of 100 and 200 years.

There was only one problem with this, the largest prosecution of child molestation in the nation, defense attorneys say. Many of the parents were innocent; testimony had been wheedled out of brainwashed children.

Indeed, appeals courts have overturned half the convictions in the years since. In one remarkable reversal in 1990, the court excoriated the judge and the district attorney’s office, striking down seven convictions and more than 2,000 years in collective prison sentences.

“The record is replete with examples of an overzealous prosecutor who, in his blind quest to convict, forgot or ignored his constitutional and ethical duties,” the court wrote.

“Mean Justice” recounts the molestation saga, but its main focus is the 1992 murder of developer Sandy Dunn and what author Humes contends is a district attorney’s office so fixated on a single suspect that it ignored exonerating evidence and the excesses of sheriff’s investigators.

That summer, the body of the 56-year-old Dunn was found in a barren canyon 60 miles east of town. She had disappeared two weeks earlier and the possibilities of foul play seemed endless. She was a native New Yorker who insisted on taking long walks at 3 in the morning through rough neighborhoods.

For sheriff’s investigators, Humes writes, there was only one possible culprit. Detectives believed that Pat Dunn, a retired history teacher and principal, had repeatedly stabbed his wife of five years and then disposed of her body--half buried, half mummified in a strange sitting position--near their favorite mountain.

The case against Dunn lacked any physical evidence. Family members argued that the crime and the man didn’t fit: Yes, Dunn was a drunk and his quirky manner could cast suspicion on him if you didn’t know him. But he hadn’t so much as raised a hand against his first wife during 25 years of marriage.

He was so fat and out of shape from a lifetime of thick steaks, beer and Salems, that he couldn’t walk a flight of stairs without panting, they said. “No way could he pick up a body and stuff it in the car and bury it anywhere,” his daughter Jennifer said.

But that’s precisely what Jerry Lee Coble said he saw Dunn do the night of the murder. Kern County deputy sheriffs and prosecutors believed Coble’s story, even though he was a longtime heroin addict facing prison time and desperately looking for a way out.

In fact, a year before the murder, he practically begged one detective to let him provide bogus evidence against any suspect, Humes asserts. The detective determined that Coble was too unreliable to be trusted.

The prosecution argued that Dunn coveted his wife’s extensive real estate holdings from her first marriage. But Humes and family members point out that Sandy Dunn was in the process of giving her husband a bigger stake in her finances. The papers were set to be signed days before the murder.

“The detectives went in with a preconceived notion and their theory kept changing whenever the facts showed otherwise,” Humes said. “When they found out that the motive made no sense, it didn’t matter.”

But lead prosecutor John Somers said Dunn, who is in prison, was convicted on the totality of evidence. “I don’t know what makes Mr. Humes more qualified than our jurors to judge guilt or innocence,” he said.

After 15 years of growth, much of it coming over the same mountain that brought Jagels here, Bakersfield isn’t the unflinchingly conservative backwater it used to be. Jazz clubs, art houses and a gay bar dot downtown, and people seem more willing to question what’s done in the name of justice.

Last month, for instance, when Pat Dunn’s troubled son, Danny, died in a local jail, some residents wondered if the sheriff’s account--that he died after getting a short burst of pepper spray--was the whole truth.

As it turned out, sheriff’s deputies had used a good deal of force to subdue the 37-year-old Dunn. An autopsy showed that he died after receiving trauma to the midsection, enough force to lacerate his liver.

None of his family is ready to say that Dunn’s death was retribution for the book. But they do think that the sheriff’s deputies--perhaps unwittingly--underscored one of the major themes of “Mean Justice.”

“My brother died in Kern County jail and now the sheriffs are investigating themselves,” Jennifer Dunn said. “Isn’t that part and parcel of this county’s infamous past?”