LA County DA Garcetti
Here's part of it...
In 1999, in the small-unincorporated community of Basset, not far from La Puente, Los Angeles County Sheriffs came across what they believed was a stolen and stripped pick-up truck. In a sworn affidavit used to obtain a search warrant, the deputies claimed that they followed some tire tracks from the truck up a "driveway" to a house where they discovered contraband. An arrest was made and People v. Cusky was born.
As Mr. Cusky's case wound it's way through the criminal justice system, Richard Ceballos, a calendar deputy in the Pomona Branch of the Los Angeles County District Attorney's office decided to investigate the case. When he did, he discovered that the "driveway" was actually a street (which wouldn't have retained tire tracks) and the "house" was actually nine houses. Ceballos came to believe that the Sheriff's deputies had misled the court in order to get the warrant. He wrote a memo to his supervisors recommending that that Cusky's case be dismissed.
Instead, it was Ceballos who nearly was.
After a series of contentious meetings, Ceballos's supervisors not only decided to proceed with the prosecution, they removed Ceballos from the case. Rather than seeing his memo as the honorable decision of a prosecutor ethically bound to report misconduct, Ceballos's actions were seen as traitorous. He was accused of "acting like a public defender," and was demoted, denied a promotion and transferred to a distant office for what he described as some "freeway therapy." More than merely being the basis of Mr. Ceballos's lawsuit, the District Attorney's reaction to Ceballos's memo is an object lesson in the obstacles to doing justice even from within the prosecutor's office...
The rest of the post is Here.
my controversial book about a day in my life as Public Defender in the South Bronx is finally available for Kindle and Ipad.
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