Two D.A. Offices Are Open and Shut Cases

Orange County District Attorney Tony Rackauckas has gone through two spokeswomen in the last year -- one quit and the other was fired last week. Both complained about how the boss dealt with the news media. The office is under orders not to talk to a long list of reporters, including anyone at The Times or O.C. Weekly.

But this won’t be a dissertation about Rackauckas’ problems with the press. Instead, let’s look inside a district attorney’s office:

Prosecutors really care about putting bad guys away. They engage in gallows humor about cases. They bring an embattled “us-against-them” mentality to their jobs of winning convictions. The best ones have immense empathy for crime victims. The in-house competition for high-profile cases ranges from petty to intense. They sometimes think cops are fools -- high praise compared to what they say about defense attorneys, the media and sometimes judges.

How do I know? I’ve just finished “The Prosecutors,” with the subtitle, “A Year in the Life of a District Attorney’s Office.”

Sacramento Bee reporter Gary Delsohn spent 2001 in the halls of Sacramento D.A. Jan Scully’s office and chronicled it in a book due out this August.

I didn’t intend to plug the book, even though Delsohn has been a close friend for more than 20 years. But the contrast between Scully’s decision to open her doors and Rackauckas’ refusal to return phone calls is too obvious to ignore.

No doubt Scully gave Delsohn the unprecedented access because he promised to save up what he learned for the book, thereby gaining greater perspective before writing than newspaper reporters might have. During the year he spent working only on this project, Delsohn saw reporters chastise Scully for not being more forthcoming on certain cases. But despite her misgivings about the press, Scully “genuinely believes” it’s in both her and the public’s interest to see how her office operates in real life, he says.

“It’s not TV,” Delsohn says. “It’s not ‘Law and Order’ on TNT every night. There are a lot of gray areas and difficulty in some of these cases.”

A D.A.’s office is a goldmine of stories. “I think it’s the richest source of human drama in any of the institutions we cover,” Delsohn says. “When it comes to cops and prosecutors, they’re constantly dealing with this drama, this loss, this conflict, this being victimized and wanting justice.”

He watched the heated meeting between prosecutors and the husband and son of Myrna Opsahl, killed in a 1975 bank robbery committed by members of the Symbionese Liberation Army. As strenuously as son Jon Opsahl insisted that charges finally be filed, a veteran prosecutor angrily told him it’s not that simple. “[The prosecutor’s] face has turned crimson,” Delsohn writes. “He’s jabbing his index finger -- hell, he’s jabbing his whole hand -- at the younger Opsahl.”

For every high-profile case, hundreds of riveting ones that take a toll on prosecutors and victims’ relatives go unnoticed. Delsohn devotes much space to the Bread Store case, a garden-variety robbery that ended in the pointless shotgun slaying of a 23-year-old clerk. He quoted at length from the parents’ anguished testimony at trial and the prosecutors’ contempt for the killer who was convicted.

A reporter for 28 years, Delsohn came away impressed with prosecutors’ “level of devotion and commitment to doing the right thing and keeping bad people away from the rest of us for long periods of time.”

Back in Orange County, fired D.A. spokeswoman Michelle Emard said in an e-mail made public last week that she was told it was her job to “be an advocate for Tony, not to be a spokesperson for the office.”

A pity. So many tales to tell.

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Dana Parsons’ column appears Wednesdays, Fridays and Sundays. He can be reached at (714) 966-7821, at dana.parsons@latimes.com or at The Times, 1375 Sunflower Ave., Costa Mesa, CA 92626.