We welcome the scrutiny the California State Bar is giving to
Los Valientes lawyer Michael Pekin, who was recently indicted by
the grand jury, at the behest of District Attorney John Sarsfield,
on several counts of inducing perjury and maintaining a frivolous
lawsuit. Mostly, we’re glad to see some outside authority begin to
look into the events that have roiled San Benito County politics
for more than a year now. If there is unethical lawyering going on
in our county, the State Bar will be doing the community a favor by
curtailing it.
We welcome the scrutiny the California State Bar is giving to Los Valientes lawyer Michael Pekin, who was recently indicted by the grand jury, at the behest of District Attorney John Sarsfield, on several counts of inducing perjury and maintaining a frivolous lawsuit. Mostly, we’re glad to see some outside authority begin to look into the events that have roiled San Benito County politics for more than a year now. If there is unethical lawyering going on in our county, the State Bar will be doing the community a favor by curtailing it.
In that vein, the State Bar should expand the scope of its investigation to look into Sarsfield. The investigation is an opportunity to clean up a lot of the county’s messes, including the myriad problems in the district attorney’s office.
The members of the local San Benito County Bar Association plan to ask for a State Bar investigation of Sarsfield after they placed a vote of no confidence in the prosecutor because of their concerns about his tactics. The Bar should not hesitate.
The conduct by the District Attorney, as confirmed by a county investigator, and the serious concerns raised by his colleagues in the local bar, certainly warrant such an investigation. The investigator, hired by the county to look into allegations of harassment in his office, found that Sarsfield retaliated against his own employees for political purposes; that he was openly contemptuous of women in his office; that he demoted an experienced deputy district attorney to handling misdemeanors; and that he took resources away from the Victims Witness office needed for the sensitive nature of its work.
Those findings, coupled with Sarsfield’s failed attempts to force Supervisor Jaime De La Cruz out of office for making trivial paperwork errors while campaigning and a failed attempt to press felony charges against a women who voted twice in the District 5 election – clearly an accident – paint a picture of a district attorney who abuses his authority.
If Pekin’s tactics invite scrutiny from the State Bar, surely the same association cannot ignore how Sarsfield runs his office.
Otherwise the State Bar is just playing politics, and, in San Benito County, we’ve had quite enough of that.
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