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CA Supreme Court: Film/Book Consulting, Not Conflicts Mandating Recusal
It was prosecutor vindication time at the California Supreme Court in May. In unanimous rulings authored by Justice Kathryn Mickle Werdegar, the state high court held that the Second District Court of Appeal erred when it ordered three deputy district attorneys removed from separate cases each was handling. The ruling chastised the Second District's Ventura branch for failing to grant appropriate deference to a trial court judge's decision that no disqualifying conflict existed for Santa Barbara County prosecutors Joyce Dudley and Ronald Zonen. Justice Werdegar also criticized one of the appellate court's L.A. divisions for punishing Los Angeles County Deputy DA Kenneth Chiu for vigorously trying to block the release of a sexual-abuse victim's medical and psychotherapy records.
All three cases had riveted the Southern California legal world for a couple of years, but the two involving Dudley and Zonen ' both senior deputy DAs ' provided the entertainment value that truly screamed Hollywood. Dudley had been recused for writing 'Intoxicating Agent,' a book that the Second District felt had too many parallels to a rape case she was prosecuting, while Zonen was removed for providing highly sensitive files to producers interested in making a movie about a sensational murder case he had prosecuted. In both instances, the trial court judges had found no reason for disqualifying the prosecutors. The Supreme Court said the trial judges were correct.
'The trial court's role, and the court of appeal's and ours, is to examine the record for evidence of a disqualifying conflict, not to act as literary critic,' Werdegar wrote. 'That a prosecutor may pursue an independent writing career does not alone create a conflict with the public interest and disqualify her from future prosecutions, absent proof her writings create a material conflict in a particular case.'
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