After hearing of Mr. Sarsfield have a
Howard-Dean-temper-tantrum, at the March 9 Supervisors meeting, I
decided to review the documents he submitted to the Board. One
document showed the DA’s 2003 jury trial record.
After hearing of Mr. Sarsfield have a Howard-Dean-temper-tantrum, at the March 9 Supervisors meeting, I decided to review the documents he submitted to the Board. One document showed the DA’s 2003 jury trial record. Suspiciously, Mr. Sarsfield left off any information of case names or numbers and handed it to the Supervisors during the meeting.
It is generally understood that the conviction rate for most county District Attorneys is about 90-95 percent. This, of course, only addresses case that make it to trial. Of the cases he cited, there were a total of 23 charges. In those cases by the end of the jury trial, only seven charges went to conviction. This results in this county having a 30 percent conviction rate for cases that actually went to trial. If you recall, Mr. Sarsfield represented to the Board (when talking about his job) that he took on the responsibility of deciding what charges to file for every case. This is important because his decisions have about 30 percent accuracy or 70 percent “you’re wrong” when put before the public. Any private employee with such a dismal performance would have been fired. I’m sure Donald Trump would have fired him. Unfortunately, the statistics provided gave no first names of the attorneys nor case names or numbers, so it was a bit difficult, but it appears that Mr. Sarsfield is losing 70 percent of his charges at or before jury trial.
More glaring is the loss of every felony charge of the cases Mr. Sarsfield listed. Of the three original charges against Mr. Orabuena and the two against Larry Castarena, all were dismissed or found not guilty. So his percentage for felonies of the cases he cited is zero percent success.
Apparently Mr. Sarsfield thinks that his staff of deputy DAs should be doubled based on his review of other counties and three attorneys is not enough. And almost in the same breath, but in the next Board meeting, he says we pay too much for the two attorneys for the Public Defender who get 1/4 of his budget. So to understand him, he believes we need to reduce the cost of the Public Defender to save money but double the staff, i.e. double his budget, that can’t handle the work. That by definition is called an oxymoron.
Finally, why is Mr. Sarsfield spending so much time working on the budget for the Public Defender? It’s obvious from his correspondence that he is frustrated with successive losses in court and is looking for a way out. If his staff is overworked, then perhaps this county should ask him to take on cases and reduce the work on his deputies by 25 percent.
I will do more to review Mr. Sarsfield’s statistics in the future and give our Board and this county a true picture of the current state of affairs in the courtroom.
Arthur Cantu,
Attorney At Law
