District Attorney candidate Robert Brewer basks in the admiration of Dan Shinoff and Leslie Devaney

Robert Brewer

Leslie Devaney's and Dan Shinoff's endorsements of Robert Brewer can be found HERE.

“I have had the great privilege of knowing Mr. Brewer for over 30 years. He is an outstanding individual who is the consummate professional who treats everyone he deals with with great respect and always is a person of tremendous integrity. The County would be most fortunate to have Robert Brewer as District Attorney.”

Daniel R. Shinoff
STUTZ ARTIANO sHINOFF & HOLTZ

I imagine Mr. Shinoff is quite incensed at Bonnie Dumanis for indicting his clients Manuel Paul, Bertha Lopez, and others at Southwestern College, Sweetwater Union High School District, and San Ysidro School District.

Of course, it's sort of strange that Dan Shinoff feels he has to muzzle a retired teacher in order to protect his own reputation as person of integrity. (See my San Diego Education Report blog posts re Stutz v. Larkins.) Does Mr. Shinoff really think that people who have known him for years will think his ethics are questionable just because of something I say? Most of the facts that I discuss have been published in newspapers, or at least in court documents, and few people read my websites, anyway. Why does Mr. Shinoff see me as a threat to his reputation?

Shields is not the only person arrested in Oceanside whose recorded interview has disappeared

Defendants’ Lost Voices
San Diego Reader
By Dorian Hargrove
May 26, 2010

On March 23, after deliberating for 40 minutes, a jury emerged from the jury room inside the courthouse in Vista. The 12 members had reached a verdict. As they filed into the jury box, the defendant, Michael Shields, stood beside his attorney, David Boertje. Shields’s heart pounded as the foreman announced the verdict: not guilty of assault with a deadly weapon. It was a quick and easy end to a long and difficult year.

It started on the evening of February 25, 2009, when Shields, a licensed mortgage broker and full-time college student, was driving his red Jeep Liberty southeast on Barnard Drive in Oceanside after attending guitar class at MiraCosta College.

...“I almost took the plea to avoid a very scary prison sentence,” said Shields. “I stuck to my guns against the advice of my parents and attorney. They all said the risk is too great. I knew I was innocent.”

Two days before the trial began, Boertje said, he received news from deputy district attorney Elisabeth Silva that a notation in an evidence log saying “audio CD” had been discovered. Silva told Boertje that she didn’t know what was on the audio CD.

“The recorded statement should have been something that was disclosed immediately,” Boertje said. “In the report, there was no mention of a recorded statement, no mention that they had the tape.”

“Before they released the recording, it was basically my word against the Oceanside police,” interjected Shields. “Who is the jury going to believe, the police officer or the ‘baby punching’ criminal?”

At 8:30 on the morning of March 15, the first day of the trial, Boertje went to the district attorney’s office, located one floor above the courtroom in the North County Regional Center, to listen to the audio CD. He confirmed that it was Shields’s missing statement. Silva asked Boertje if his client would like to reschedule the trial. He said no.

On the second day of trial, Officer Dominique took the stand. During cross-examination, Boertje asked him about the audio statement. Deputy district attorney Silva objected. The lawyers and judge met in a sidebar. Silva indicated that she was filing a motion to exclude the recorded statement from evidence.

“I couldn’t believe it,” said Boertje. “I said, ‘First off, you didn’t give [the recorded statement] to me until yesterday, and now you don’t want the jury to hear what my client said right after the incident?’ There was no basis to exclude it.”

The judge allowed the statement to be used in court. A week later, Shields was exonerated.

“The judge in my case was completely outraged at the district attorney,” Shields wrote to the Reader on March 23, the day of his acquittal. “[He] scolded the District Attorney and asked her why the audio statement was disclosed the day of trial. [Silva] claimed that she ‘read the police officer the riot act.’… My audio statement was crucial evidence that proved I was innocent.”

Shields, however, is not the only person arrested in Oceanside whose recorded interview has disappeared...


COMMENT:

...The cops, while not all bad guys, have tacit permission to conduct these phony arrests, perpetrate the most heinously violent brutality on innocent, law-abiding citizens, falsify police reports and tamper with evidence, and the DA's are corrupt as hell.

...Threatening the falsely accused victims with long jail sentences, and talking them out of their right to a fair trial is the terrorism the DAs use to put innocent people away and ruin their lives with criminal records that will never be allowed to be cleared, which is a Constitutional right.

Because this is big government at the highest levels, Woody Higdon's attempts to apply justice to the misconduct and corruption within the Oceanside Police Department via complaints to the FBI, etc., will also nowhere. Most complaints of this nature go nowhere, not even with the ACLU.

The ACLU will spend hundreds of thousands to defend someone whose Islamic religious rights are violated because someone looked at them sideways, but innocent people being grossly victimized every day are s*** out of luck.

What kills me is that the police had NO EVIDENCE against Mr. Shields, and yet he was going to be CONVICTED???

After prosecuting the innocent Cynthia Sommers, Bonnie Dumanis moves ahead in her apparent quest for the Mike Nifong award

I don't understand why Bonnie Dumanis isn't investigating where the arsenic in some tissue samples came from. Dumanis is more and more exhibiting a resemblance to Paul Pfingst (who prosecuted Stephanie Crowe's 15-year-old brother), Ed Miller (who prosecuted Dale Akiki) and Mike Nifong (who prosecuted the Duke LaCrosse players). It's one thing to make a mistake. It's another to keep prosecuting an innocent person just to gain political capital as your mistakes grow from simple errors into abuse of the justice system.

How about putting Patrick O'Toole charge of finding out who put the arsenic in some of the tissue samples? He should have some time available now that a jury has found Chula Vista councilman Steve Castaneda not guilty of Dumanis's politically-motivated charges of perjury during an investigation that found no crime.

From CNN.com
by Beth Karas, In Session correspondent
April 21, 2008

"When I interviewed Cindy Sommer at the Las Colinas Women’s Detention Facility here a week ago, neither one of us had any idea that she was spending her last days behind bars. She was a free woman four days later...

"...As I look back on the developments in her case from her conviction in January 2007 to her release last week, lessons come to mind from my years as a DA in Manhattan. A senior DA took me aside during my first year and told me to watch the old Western movie, “The Oxbow Incident,” which deeply moved him. In the movie, based on the book, three innocent men were lynched by a mob when law and order were abandoned.

"My colleague wanted me to understand the immense power of a prosecutor and the need to reign in a “rush to judgment” mentality. He emphasized that doing justice doesn’t always mean trying to secure a conviction but doing what’s right whether it’s lowering the charges or dismissing them outright.

"Sommer’s case may not have been a classic rush to judgment since there wasn’t even a criminal investigation until 15 months after Todd Sommer’s death. Moreover, Sommer wasn’t arrested until November 2005, more than three years after her husband’s death. Despite the holes in the prosecution’s case—the most glaring being no link between Sommer and arsenic—a jury of twelve San Diegans found her guilty. She was facing a sentence of life without parole.

"San Diego District Attorney Bonnie Dumanis says the system worked in Sommer’s case. When they recently found more tissue samples of her late husband, the D.A. sent them for testing at a private lab. The absence of arsenic in the tissues led to Sommer’s release last week. The most Dumanis will now say is that there is reasonable doubt. She won’t go as far as Roy Cooper in North Carolina when he declared the three former Duke lacrosse players innocent. But in the eyes of many who followed her case closely, Sommer has now been totally exonerated."

Click here for CNN link.

Patrick O'Toole goes looking for a friend--and finds one!

Patrick O'Toole, head of the Public Integrity Unit in Bonnie Dumanis' San Diego District Attorney's office, has been having a hard week. He's been trying to convince a juror that when Steve Castaneda asked how much a condo would cost, that proved he intended to buy one. And that even though O'Toole didn't uncover wrongdoing during his lengthy investigation, Castaneda should be convicted of perjury FOR SAYING HE DIDN'T INTEND TO BUY A CONDO, WHICH HE, IN FACT, DID NOT BUY.

So you can see how O'Toole would be going around scouting up someone who would make him look professional.

O'Toole found Martin Garrick, R-Carlsbad, who agrees that O'Toole needs not one, but TWO, grand juries to help him find public officials who might say something he disagrees with during grand jury proceedings.


Martin Garrick is the sponsor of the two-criminal-grand-juries-for-San Diego bill, who apparently thinks that San Diego prosecutors have done such a fine job with the Public Integrity Unit and cases such as the indictment by a grand jury of the innocent 15-year-old brother of murder victim Stephanie Crowe, that we really should skip preliminary hearings more often.

After all, who needs a judge deciding if prosecutors should go to trial?


Garrick and O'Toole seem like petty, malicious versions of Don Quijote, tilting at people who oppose their favorite politicians.

They say a prosecutor can get a grand jury to indict a ham sandwich. Maybe Martin Garrick thinks there are too many ham sandwiches walking around free.

Or maybe he needs another grand jury to investigate Cheryl Cox?