Mean Justice (10 page)

“If a couple of victims of these homicides wore black robes, appellate black robes, instead of being gas station attendants and ranchers and jewelry store clerks, we’d start getting a little bit different decisions,” District Attorney Jagels told reporters in one of his most notorious press conferences. “I guarantee that.”
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When Jagels announced his candidacy for district attorney, he surprised most everyone but the cadre of similarly minded young prosecutors he led, a new generation of prosecuting attorneys who were less interested in the cushy private practices sought by their predecessors, and more concerned with remaking the justice system in their own image. As DA, Jagels promised to crack down on child abusers like no one else before him. Never again would a criminal like Glenn Fitts be allowed to roam free. His would be the most aggressive DA’s office in the state, Jagels promised, an office that would push the envelope on the streets and in the courtrooms, doing whatever it took to put crooks away. He would draw the line against elevating “criminals” ’ rights over victims’ rights, he vowed. His campaign slogan: “Ask a cop.” His most ardent supporters: the Mothers of Bakersfield and their leader, a self-styled child-abuse expert named Jill Haddad, who later would play a pivotal role in the DA’s office and the then-nascent Witch Hunt cases.

Together, they wanted to transform the justice system of Kern County into the nation’s toughest, a virtual criminal-conviction machine.

All they had to do was win.

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Ed Jagels stood perfectly still, watching the moment—his moment—play out in the crowded debate hall. For many of those present, it seemed the 1982 election was being decided right in front of them, just weeks before the vote. And the best part was, all Jagels had to do was sit back and enjoy it as his opponent, one of the hated judges, crashed and burned right next to him. It was almost like prosecuting some scumbag defendant and watching him self-destruct on the witness stand, the lies unraveling like cheap socks.

“I can’t really respond to that,” the judge sputtered to the implacable woman in the audience, the one with the tightly curled hair and the file of legal papers held overhead like a bludgeon. “I don’t really recall the case you’re referring to.”

But the woman kept waving those papers, legal files from an awful case of abusive parents and a murdered child, a bad ruling pulled out of the judge’s past, one that demanded an explanation not even Learned Hand could have conjured.

Jagels supporters in the audience thrilled at the unexpected confrontation. There was one of Kern County’s best-known and most powerful jurists, Judge Marvin Ferguson, the cigar-chomping courthouse insider, double chin quivering, vainly searching the faces in front of him for some clue as to what to say to this woman who would not sit down. Until this moment, Ferguson had been the easy favorite to win the district attorney’s race, the candidate with all the support from the legal community, the one with the political connections and the campaign war chest. He had dismissed the upstart Jagels with a wave of his stubby hand, refusing to call him by name, referring to him instead simply as “that young guy.” He mocked Jagels for his inexperience, saying the young guy had tried a mere eight cases before a jury in his brief career—and had been harshly criticized by an appeals court in one of them. Ferguson considered Jagels impertinent and dangerous, and he had vowed to crush him. And for a long time, it had looked like he would do just that. Now everything was about to change. The room seemed filled with crossed arms and stony stares, all of them directed at Judge Ferguson—and all because a community activist named Jill Haddad had a question.

Why was it, Haddad wanted to know, that five years ago, Judge Ferguson had sent a four-year-old girl named Mary Ann Azevedo home to abusive parents after county welfare workers asked the judge to put the child into protective custody? “I think that shows a pretty cavalier attitude,” Haddad suggested, “with overwhelming evidence of child abuse.”

The judge looked blankly at the small, intense woman with the thick sheaf of paper. He vaguely recognized her as someone the newspaper occasionally wrote about, identifying her most often with the ambiguous title of “child-abuse crusader.” He didn’t know what she was getting at now, but he sensed that whatever was in that folder wasn’t going to be pretty. “I resent the implication that I’m soft on child abuse,” he finally huffed. His inquisitor continued as if he hadn’t spoken.

When the case came to you, Haddad said, Mary Ann had been beaten by her stepfather. The girl was left with a broken collarbone, a burned hand and a possible concussion and skull fracture. Mary Ann’s mother did nothing, waiting all day to bring the girl to the hospital, then refusing to report the beating to police. The emergency room had to do that. “Yet you sent Mary Ann back home with her.”

Haddad paused as the audience listened raptly. Everyone knew what was coming, yet dreaded it, too. Ed Jagels still just stood there and nodded slightly, lean, silver-haired, a grim smile on his face—a cool and calm contrast to the flustered judge next to him. For Jagels, it didn’t get any better than this: First the old DA had been pushed out of the way after mishandling Dana Butler and Glenn Fitts, and now he had Ferguson on the ropes. Haddad reached the inevitable end of her story: As soon
as the stepfather got out of jail a few months later, he and the mother moved with Mary Ann to Mississippi, where he promptly beat the girl to death. “Thanks to your order,” Haddad concluded.

Ferguson stood stammering at the front of the room. Somehow, Haddad had gotten hold of confidential child-welfare files that were never supposed to see the light of day. They came to her anonymously in the mail, she would later say. The files revealed one of the most unfortunate rulings of Ferguson’s career. He knew, as every judge knew, that one bad decision could erase a thousand good rulings so far as the public was concerned. Unable to recall any details of the case—the blur of plaintiffs and defendants make it impossible for any busy judge to remember cases by name—he finally offered a threadbare response: “Since it is against the law to divulge juvenile matters, it’s difficult to defend myself.”

The audience seemed almost as shocked by the judge’s reliance on rules of secrecy as it was by the awful story itself. Thanks to Dana Butler, violence against children had become a hot-button issue in Bakersfield even as a national movement was taking root as well to end what had been a tendency to treat child abuse as a mere “family problem.” Ferguson, thanks to Haddad, was being cast as part of the old guard, and Ed Jagels, recognizing a devastating blow when he saw one, knew how to finish it off—just as he would finish up a summation in the courtroom.

“We have some very good judges in Kern County, and I’m happy with them,” Jagels told the audience. Then he turned to look at Ferguson, voice heavy with trademark sarcasm. “We also have some very bad judges who worry too much about being reversed.”

There was only one thing to do about it, Jagels continued: They had to put the bad judges out of office, the ones who were more concerned with protecting criminals than the rights of crime victims. Jagels promised, as he had throughout his campaign, to make the task of removing bad judges part of his job description as DA. He’d start with the chief justice of the California Supreme Court, the wildly unpopular Rose Bird, and work his way down, he vowed.

The one hundred fifty members of the audience applauded loudly. Suddenly the race for DA was not about experience or standing in the community or courtroom smarts, the issues Ferguson wanted to argue. It was about vigor and youth and new ideas versus the old, corrupt system that got us where we are now. It was about Ed Jagels versus the baby-killing judge.

This contrast in images became an enduring theme for the rest of the campaign. Ferguson never recovered from Jill Haddad’s seemingly spontaneous surprise, and Jagels never looked back. The death of one child, Dana Butler, had made it possible for Jagels to run for district attorney. And the death of another, Mary Ann Azevedo, made it possible for Jagels to win.

What no one knew at the time was how Jill Haddad, the head of Mothers of Bakersfield and a member of Jagels’ campaign committee, had obtained those confidential records on the murdered little girl. Later it was revealed that another supporter of Jagels’ candidacy—a prosecutor colleague of his named Colleen Ryan—had gone to the courthouse while on maternity leave and, with a group of other supporters and DA employees that included a good friend of Jill Haddad’s, obtained the records. The clerk who handed over the confidential files
was unaware that Ryan was on leave and assumed the prosecutor sought the records for official business of the district attorney’s office. But there was no official business—just political dirty work. Ryan turned the records over to Jagels’ political consultant and, two weeks later, Jill Haddad was waving them during that fateful campaign debate. What had seemed at the time to be a spontaneous confrontation between a citizen and a candidate—a pivotal moment in the election—had in reality been a campaign ploy.

Had it come to light then, such a revelation might have altered the outcome of the election. But word of this escapade remained hidden until long after Jagels had won by a comfortable margin and sat securely in office. A county grand jury investigating a citizen complaint finally uncovered the ploy, however, and recommended that Colleen Ryan be reprimanded for her misconduct. During the grand jury investigation, Ryan steadfastly denied that Jagels himself had anything to do with the plot, and Jagels, just as steadfastly, refused to discipline her, no matter what the grand jury said. He defended her throughout, and later backed her bid for a judgeship, which she won and still holds in Kern County. The
Bakersfield Californian
editorialized against Jagels for a time, accusing him of tolerating prosecutorial misconduct and calling him the new “law and no order” district attorney, but the controversy soon died down, Jagels’ indignant denials winning out in the end.

What everyone seemed to miss in the furor was the fact that the confidential documents raided on Jagels’ behalf really told a very different story than the one put forth at that debate. Jagels’ opponent did make the fateful order to send the girl home; that much was true. But
it turns out the district attorney’s office, through inaction, had left the judge no other choice—no prosecutor even appeared at the hearing. Furthermore, it was Jagels’ own office that plea-bargained the murderous stepfather out of jail after only a few months, not the judge. In the end, not only had a prosecutor’s misconduct helped get Ed Jagels elected. It had also allowed blame for a child’s murder to be heaped on the wrong man—and the wrong part of the justice system.
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Few outside the clubbish world of the Kern County courthouse even knew who Ed Jagels was back when he announced his candidacy for district attorney. Many who did know him found Jagels a cold and distant man, excruciatingly formal—though he took pains to overcome this side of his personality during his campaign, carefully posing with jacket slung over a shoulder, his tie loosened, as he knocked on doors with groups of cops and deputies. He was a consummate politician, always, and he looked the part, with his helmet of straight, silver hair that somehow could not add a day to his smooth, boyish face. His lips seemed perennially pursed, as if he were on the verge of a smirk. Only his eyes seemed old, pale blue and heavy-lidded, with purplish circles beneath them, almost like bruises—“a zealot’s eyes,” the local newspaper wrote during the campaign. Jagels liked that.

A college student during the Vietnam War, he is said to have provoked several fistfights with war protesters and to have been shot at once for his trouble—though these experiences apparently did not spark in him any particular interest in law enforcement as a career. As Jagels has told it, he simply drifted into law school, deciding to earn his degree for lack of any more compelling interests. It
was just something to do. He ended up in Bakersfield on a whim, pulling off the highway while driving from Los Angeles to a job interview in San Francisco. On impulse, he interviewed at the Kern County DA’s office on a Friday. There was a deputy DA spot open. He started work the following Monday.

By the time he wrested control of that office seven years later, there was nothing indifferent or whimsical about Jagels’ approach to his job. His fervent desire to attack crime—and to control the machinery of justice in Kern County—had become increasingly obvious to those close to him, as he came to refer to the halls of justice as “my courthouse.”

Still, the speed with which Jagels rose to prominence astonished his opponents. Before announcing that he would seek the DA’s office, Jagels had been barely visible, at least as far as his cases went. He did not make headlines and, within the legal community, was known around the courthouse principally for his skirmishes with judges.

The most dramatic of these came shortly before he announced his candidacy, in the form of an appeals-court opinion on a simple armed-robbery case he had prosecuted two years earlier. It seems Jagels had a virtually airtight case against a stickup artist named Tony Perez. Two eyewitnesses had identified the defendant, including a clerk who had waited on Perez several times at the Circle K convenience store he later robbed. There was really no doubt about the outcome of the case—it was what prosecutors like to call a slam dunk.

Yet Jagels still managed to create controversy, earning the distinction of being upbraided by the California Court of Appeal for blatant misconduct in the courtroom, where he was accused of infecting an entire trial
with racist appeals and contemptuous and insulting behavior. During the Perez trial, the judge on the case repeatedly had to order Jagels to calm down, lecturing him as if speaking to a tantrum-prone child, and at one point unfavorably comparing the prosecutor’s behavior to his teenage son’s. “There cannot be any doubt that the district attorney, in this case, exceeded the bounds of good taste and proper courtroom decorum,” the Fresno-based Fifth District panel of the state appeals court later wrote. “The instances of misconduct are legion: Jagels’ rantings, ravings, constant apologies, characterizations of defense counsel and defense counsel’s objections, personal attacks, allegations of impropriety, attacks on defense witnesses, improper questions, defiance of rulings, and the need for the court to continually admonish counsel. . . . He should have been severely reprimanded.”
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