I examined Mr. Sarsfield’s last report submitted to the Board of
Supervisors on his jury trial record for 2003.
Dear Editor:
I examined Mr. Sarsfield’s last report submitted to the Board of Supervisors on his jury trial record for 2003. He put that he had an almost perfect record yet a review showed a 30-percent conviction rate. His counting skills are dismal. The reason I say this is now he is again wasting taxpayers’ money trying to act like an accountant or some sort of auditor when he has zero experience in preparing a budget, mounds of experience in spending government money with no supervision, and has yet to put his time and energy inside the courtroom. I can assure all the readers that Mr. Sarsfield’s numbers are going wrong, likely misleading, if not out and out false accountings.
Remember, in March, Mr. Sarsfield was outed and his personal grudges were exposed to the community. Now, this beginner accountant is parading around as the emperor with no clothes. I ask the community to recall when Mr. Sarsfield said he had been “ordered” to investigate local corruption rising to the level of the Night Riders and Rampart corruption. Lo and behold, he was never ordered. What’s more, not even a single case was appealed, not a single charge, not even a traffic ticket was issued. Now he is being sued for his fiasco. He convinced the board to hire and pay John Picone, his friend, to represent him for his mistakes.
Mr. Sarsfield said back in March of 2003 that he was just about finished with this tremendous backlog of cases and would be finished in about one week. Recall in August, this backlog grew and was still unfinished. Recall when he accused the former District Attorney of furniture-gate. Well, the only furniture that was missing was the couch in the victim-witness office that then reappeared in his office. Mr. Sarsfield has been begging for four more deputy DAs, pleading in public on March 9th that his staff on the verge of going out on stress leave.
Now we learn that Mr. Sarsfield is playing fuzzy math and fuzzy law, while his deputies scramble to keep up with the work.
Here is his logic – Mr. Sarsfield needs to have his budget doubled, but he wants to cut the public defender budget in half and have Monterey do the work. He also has the Santa Cruz DA’s Office to do the election investigation. He has John Picone, a Redwood City personal intellectual property attorney, act as the prosecutor if management of money is involved.
If this sounds confusing welcome to club.
The majority of Mr. LaForge’s public defender clients are poor or Hispanics and need representation. His work has set the gold standard for what is fair and right for this county. Mr. Sarsfield’s ideas, legal opinions and reputation are becoming irrelevant in the legal community. I am sure it’s difficult in this small community to publicly criticize an elected official. In my opinion, this whole county suffers because Mr. Sarsfield has yet to mind his own business. In my opinion, so long as this man continues down the path he has taken, things will just get worse.
On Monday, I will be back in the court house doing the work of an attorney, but I promise the community that every time Mr. Sarsfield misleads the public I will be the first to set the record straight.
Arthur Cantu,
Hollister
