D.A. Gains Perspective on Grand Jury System

As a veteran prosecutor, Tony Rackauckas knows his way around a grand jury room. No doubt he has heard plenty of crybaby defendants and weaseling defense lawyers complain about how the whole thing is rigged against them as indictments are handed down.

Oh how those complaints must have provided a parade of chuckles for Mr. Rackauckas.

He’s not laughing now. In fact, it is the Orange County district attorney himself who’s doing the yapping.

Now Rackauckas, fresh from a big reelection victory in March, is the one indicted by the county grand jury. Not indicted in the legal sense, but indicted in the layman sense. After taking testimony for eight months, the grand jury concluded that Rackauckas has been far from the moral exemplar he’s supposed to be and claimed to be.

The jurors’ lengthy report chastised Rackauckas for intervening in cases involving friends, for political cronyism and for a variety of poor management practices.

Among other things, the panel found that from the outset of his first term beginning in 1999, Rackauckas “set the wrong tone, which continues to the present, that loyalty to the district attorney, personally, is of prime importance.”

Rackauckas has said the report is riddled with inaccuracies and that he’ll offer an extended rebuttal in the weeks ahead.

It’s a tight little box the D.A. is in.

His defense, in essence, is that the grand jurors were led down the primrose path by his accusers.

It’s a little fuzzy whether he thinks the jurors aren’t overly bright (They are, after all, allowed to question the accusers.) or whether the grand jury system--which historically favors the accuser--is skewed against poor old innocent people like himself.

Either way, we have the mildly comic scenario of the county’s top legal officer being rebuked by an arm of the system that is usually a prosecutor’s handmaiden. It has left Rackauckas in the awkward position of having to discredit the findings.

They must be howling over at defense bar headquarters.

In his first remarks on the subject, Rackauckas said that some of the “inaccuracies” in the report could have been avoided if he had “had an opportunity to read and discuss a preliminary report with the grand jury in order to verify the accuracy of their findings.”

No defense lawyer could have said it better.

The beauty of all this is that Rackauckas may be right. Maybe the grand jury got it all wrong. Maybe jurors didn’t ask the right questions. Maybe they bought into the stuff said by Rackauckas’ “enemies” and have issued a distorted picture of the way he does business.

So what?

What’s Rackauckas going to do the next time he needs something from a grand jury? How’s he going to convince us we can trust that the indictment is worth the paper it’s printed on?

There’s another troubling element here, which didn’t seem to bother voters who gave Rackauckas an overwhelming endorsement at the polls even after his election opponent had raised these same issues. Namely, what if the grand jury got it right?

The jurors have backed up what Rackauckas’ detractors have said. Remember how when this all started he suggested that the grand jury investigation was routine maintenance, no big deal? That the accusations were petty politics?

The district attorney might somehow be vindicated, but at this stage, you have to conclude that his opponents weren’t just blowing smoke. The grand jury could have come back with kudos for the job Rackauckas was doing.

No such luck. The grand jury jilted him. Now the county Board of Supervisors has hired an outside law firm to review the jury’s findings.

I wonder if the district attorney knows where to find a good lawyer.

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Readers may reach Dana Parsons by calling (714) 966-7821 or by writing to him at The Times’ Orange County edition, 1375 Sunflower Ave., Costa Mesa, CA 92626, or by e-mail to dana.parsons@latimes.com.