O.C. Dist. Atty. Capizzi: Trials and Tribulations

SANTA ANA —  Never mind that it was Friday the 13th. The jury deadlock that ended the first criminal trial arising from Orange County’s bankruptcy couldn’t have come at a worse time for Dist. Atty. Michael R. Capizzi.

The mistrial--coming Friday after jurors indicated they were stuck 9 to 3 in favor of acquitting former Budget Director Ronald S. Rubino--was the latest in a string of high-profile courtroom setbacks for Capizzi prosecutors pursuing bankruptcy-related charges against former county officials and separate election fraud charges against a Huntington Beach assemblyman.

On Tuesday, a Superior Court judge tossed out 17 of 22 charges that Capizzi’s office had secured against Assemblyman Scott Baugh, a fellow Republican. A week earlier, a panel of appellate judges raised questions about the propriety of civil misconduct accusations against two Orange County supervisors for their roles in the 1994 bankruptcy.

The same panel earlier had backed a judge’s decision to dismiss one of those charges, and the California Supreme Court ruled against the district attorney’s office when it took the matter up on appeal.

The 4th District Court of Appeal in Santa Ana has yet to decide whether it will dismiss the remaining accusations against Supervisors William G. Steiner and Roger R. Stanton, but the three justices who heard arguments on the matter indicated they had serious questions about the legality of the charges.

The recent stumbling blocks have beset some of the district attorney’s most celebrated ongoing cases and strike at a time when Capizzi, who became Orange County’s top prosecutor six years ago with a long history for zeroing in on public corruption, is contemplating a run for state attorney general. Capizzi has said he is “exploring” a run for the office, which would be vacant if Atty. Gen. Dan Lungren runs for governor in 1998, as widely expected.

The reversals also have sparked fresh criticisms from detractors, including a number of prominent fellow Republicans, that Capizzi was guilty of grandstanding in choosing to prosecute the political cases in the first place.

“Mike Capizzi wants to be attorney general, and he needed a high-profile case to ride into office. He thought this was the case. He wanted to grandstand,” Baugh said after Superior Court Judge James L. Smith threw out most of the election fraud charges listed in the indictment.

“He failed to do his job in stopping the bankruptcy, and he was looking for a way to draw attention away from that,” Baugh said. “We’ve said all along that this was a politically motivated prosecution.”

Capizzi dismissed such charges as “scurrilous accusations” that “do not reflect the feelings and the attitudes of the average Orange County citizen.”

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Capizzi acknowledged during an interview last week that the mistrial and the other recent court rulings amounted to setbacks, but said he still expected to win each of the cases.

“We’re optimistic we’re going to reach a successful conclusion in them,” Capizzi said after the Rubino trial ended with most jurors rejecting the prosecution case.

Capizzi said his office plans to retry Rubino and reinstate fraud charges against Baugh, either through an appeal of Smith’s ruling or by refiling the dismissed charges on a direct criminal complaint. The latter step would most likely require a preliminary hearing at which a judge would decide whether there is enough evidence to merit a trial.

“The case can be put back on track,” Capizzi said.

Capizzi said he was not considering the effect of the recent slump on any possible campaign for attorney general.

“I’ve never weighed the political ramifications of cases we’ve handled and I’m certainly not going to start now,” he said. “Political considerations have nothing whatsoever to do with our decisions to charge or not charge criminal cases.”

A future statewide Capizzi campaign probably would suffer little even from outright failures in the Orange County cases because voters in other parts of the state know little about them, said Joseph Cerrell, a Los Angeles-based political consultant who has worked on one attorney general campaign.

“What’s going on down there is not an O.J. [Simpson] situation,” said Cerrell. “It’s almost a no-lose situation. He’ll get a lot of credit if he does well. Not that many people will care if he doesn’t do well.”

Capizzi said the chain of recent courtroom setbacks would not dissuade him from pursuing the cases--or detract from his office’s 90% conviction rate.

As a prosecutor in the 1970s, Capizzi won about 40 convictions on public corruption charges, including those against two county supervisors and a former congressman.

During last week’s interview, Capizzi held up a yellowed 1975 newspaper highlighting several of the year’s high-profile cases, including more than one in which the district attorney’s office was criticized for pressing criminal charges. They ended in conviction, Capizzi said.

“We’ve found you’ve got to ride them out to the end and when the dust settles, you’re going to be 90% victorious. . . . Because a case might be a tough case is no reason to walk away from it,” Capizzi said.

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The district attorney is not entirely winless in the bankruptcy cases. Former Treasurer-Tax Collector Robert L. Citron pleaded guilty to six felony charges in connection with his role as manager of an ill-fated investment pool for the county and about 200 schools and other government entities. Citron’s former assistant, Matthew Raabe, awaits trial on the same charges.

But critics charge it is unbridled political ambition pushing Capizzi to seek new charges against Baugh and a second trial of Rubino.

“At what point is the public going to pull the financial plug on that guy?” said defense attorney Wylie A. Aitken, who represents Stanton. “What possible public service would be served by such an action unless it’s a desperate attempt to salvage a political career?”

Attorney Allan H. Stokke, who represents Steiner, said the Rubino mistrial demonstrates that Capizzi should not be prosecuting county officials who did not engage in corruption or personally profit from the transactions that caused the county’s fiscal mess.

“It doesn’t seem very likely they will ever get to 12” jurors, he added. “That seems to be a massive expenditure of public funds to try and get a few more [juror] votes.”

But Capizzi disagreed that charges were unwarranted because no officials pocketed any money.

“On the surface, that’s true,” Capizzi said. “But there were personal benefits that were derived; they got the raises and promotions and so on.”

Also contributing to this report were Times staff writers Michael G. Wagner and Dexter Filkins.