Prosecutor an Island of Calm in D.A. Office Whirlwind

Ventura County prosecutor Bill Redmond, once a genial national park ranger at Alcatraz, remains an island of calm amid the crush of criminal cases he directs as legal gatekeeper in the district attorney’s office.

For the last two months, Redmond, 46, has supervised both the misdemeanor and general felony units of the 10th-largest prosecutor’s office in California. Before his appointment, two people oversaw the office’s 20,000 misdemeanor and 5,000 new felony cases a year.

For felonies alone, that’s 20 new cases a day. Redmond analyzes each one, assigns a lawyer and helps decide what charge to file and what penalty to seek.

Redmond and 27 other attorneys handle the load, down from a staff of 44 lawyers for the same duty a decade ago, even though the number of cases is up 27%.

“It’s the type of job [that] if he hesitates or is indecisive, the cases and issues just pile up,” said Chief Assistant Dist. Atty. Greg Totten. “He makes decisions all day long. It’s one of the toughest jobs in the office.”

Redmond stands out, however, not because of the job he holds, but by the way he holds it.

In a high-pressure office where top managers are not always beloved, Redmond is embraced.

“If I was in the middle of battle and I had to pick one person to be in a trench next to me, I’d pick Bill,” said fellow Deputy Dist. Atty. Ernesto Acosta. “He’s loyal to his friends and he’ll back you up. He makes you feel good about doing your job.”

In a profession known for its rabid advocacy, even defense lawyers say Redmond seeks justice.

“I’m not in the business of tooting the horn of prosecutors,” said defense lawyer Kevin DeNoce, a former prosecutor himself. “But you can talk to Bill, and that’s not code for ‘Bill gives good deals.’ It means you get a fair hearing.”

In an office torn apart this spring by a bitter race to decide who will succeed retiring Dist. Atty. Michael D. Bradbury, Redmond was the only top prosecutor to decline to sign an advertisement endorsing Totten, the odds-on favorite and eventual winner.

“He was a big supporter, but he did it behind the scenes,” Totten said. “He took his responsibility as a prosecutor first. To me, that is a measure of the man.”

Redmond is known as a straight shooter who works hard, filling in for his staff members in court when they are sick and regularly rolling out of bed when police need to serve a late-night search warrant.

But if one trait defines Redmond--a stocky 6-footer with the square-jawed mug of an Irish cop--it is his knack for thinking before he speaks.

When Redmond finds himself in a tight spot, when he senses his face reddening, his anger rising or his good humor failing, he remembers his firefighter father.

“You don’t rush into burning buildings,” Redmond said. “You don’t want to be in the flames wondering do I turn right or do I turn left. You need to step back before you step in.”

One measure of Redmond’s cool is a poster attached to the front of his office door in the county courthouse in Ventura. For several years, the “Billometer” posted by an underling has alerted colleagues to his moods.

They move Redmond’s mug shot from one end of a scale to another, from pale white to bright red.

At 7:55 a.m., for example, a low-pressure Billometer reading alerts colleagues to “Be Prepared to Hear About Alcatraz Island or Days As a Park Ranger.” As the day progresses, however, the chart describes Redmond this way: “Lips Don’t Move When Talking. Eyes Don’t Move.”

“People do actually move the picture. Someone moved it down after they brought me some cookies,” Redmond said with a smile. “I don’t think I’ve ever made it all the way to the far end.”

Redmond is the third of four sons born to Peter and Rose Redmond, a 35-year San Francisco firefighter and a career clerk in the city’s data processing department.

Raised in the blue-collar Mission District, a student at strict Jesuit schools, Redmond said his was a no-nonsense family that got up and went to work. A good student, he graduated from San Francisco State University in 1979 with a political science degree and a desire to teach high school civics and coach sports teams.

But teaching jobs were scarce, so he parlayed his summer employment as a supervisor with the U.S. Youth Conservation Corps into a job with the National Park Service. After stints at Point Reyes and Alcatraz--”eight months, exactly 832 tours” as a guide at the old federal prison--he moved to the Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area, where he became expert in flora, fauna, fires and trailhead mediation among hikers, bikers and horseback riders.

In 1986, a 30-year-old Redmond enrolled in Ventura College of Law night school, and the next year joined the Ventura County Probation Department in charge of 80 troubled juveniles in group homes and boys’ schools.

“I visited each one every month,” he said. “First I’d chew them out, then I’d spend the next half hour shooting baskets and talking. To those kids, I was both mom and dad. I loved that job.”

But in 1990, Redmond passed the State Bar of California exam. And Totten, whom Redmond had impressed with his questioning in a law school class, hired him. By 1997, after prosecuting misdemeanor, fraud and embezzlement, juvenile crime and drug cases, Redmond was in charge of the general felony unit and its two dozen lawyers.

He has done that job, essentially, ever since, but now with the misdemeanor responsibilities as well.

A recent meeting, headed by Redmond, suggested the pace at which he and his lawyers make decisions. It was a regular Friday session called to analyze the strength of felony cases once a judge decides there is probable cause for a suspect to be held for trial.

Front-line lawyers evaluate their own cases, then Redmond and other senior prosecutors ask questions and offer advice. A decision is reached on what charges to drop and which ones will go to trial.

“Give us the nickel tour,” Redmond says to Daniel Feldman, a three-year prosecutor from New York. The meeting takes only a few minutes.

Feldman said later that he likes Redmond’s fatherly mentoring. A few days earlier, Redmond had canceled his schedule for half a day to walk Feldman through the quickest way to get an arrest warrant for a robbery suspect.

“When he’s in one of those situations, he calls you ‘lad,’ ” Feldman said. “He says, ‘Pay attention, lad, this is an education moment.’ ”

But Redmond is nobody’s patsy, Feldman said.

“When you meet with him, you have to make sure you have prepared,” Feldman said. “If you haven’t, you won’t want to be around him. He’ll remind you why you were hired.”

Redmond doesn’t want to be thought of as softie, especially by defense attorneys.

“We’re supposed to be holding the bad guys accountable for their crimes, and we do,” he said. “There are cases where we absolutely go after the maximum penalty: A drunk driver, I’m going to put him away as long as I can. He took someone’s life because he wanted another beer.”

A few years ago, after a new law allowed the prosecution of young teenagers as adults, Redmond’s unit got an attempted murder conviction against a 14-year-old Oxnard gang member who shot three kids who had given him a hard time at school. The sentence was 34 years to life in prison.

“When someone uses a gun or a knife I’m at my most inflexible,” Redmond said.

But there are also cases where people commit crimes that are out of character and a response to some singular disruption in their lives: “We’ll consider that, too, in the penalty or rehabilitation.”

Redmond is married to former probation officer Terry Redmond, whom he met on the job. He says his goal is to work another decade in the district attorney’s office, then to see the world with his wife.

Others say he might want to readjust his sights.

“I’d vote for him in a second for district attorney or for judge,” said veteran defense lawyer Louis Samonsky.

“He’s bright and he just has that certain something that gets the job done well without irritating people,” Samonsky said. “Even if you don’t get what you want, you feel you’ve been dealt with fairly. That’s a good characteristic for a judge, let alone a D.A.”