by Edward Humes
What no one knew at the time was how Jill Haddad, the head of Mothers of Bakersfield and a member of Jagels’ campaign committee, had obtained those confidential records on the murdered little girl. Later it was revealed that another supporter of Jagels’ candidacy—a prosecutor colleague of his named Colleen Ryan—had gone to the courthouse while on maternity leave and, with a group of other supporters and DA employees that included a good friend of Jill Haddad’s, obtained the records. The clerk who handed over the confidential files was unaware that Ryan was on leave and assumed the prosecutor sought the records for official business of the district attorney’s office. But there was no official business—just political dirty work. Ryan turned the records over to Jagels’ political consultant and, two weeks later, Jill Haddad was waving them during that fateful campaign debate. What had seemed at the time to be a spontaneous confrontation between a citizen and a candidate—a pivotal moment in the election—had in reality been a campaign ploy.
Had it come to light then, such a revelation might have altered the outcome of the election. But word of this escapade remained hidden until long after Jagels had won by a comfortable margin and sat securely in office. A county grand jury investigating a citizen complaint finally uncovered the ploy, however, and recommended that Colleen Ryan be reprimanded for her misconduct. During the grand jury investigation, Ryan steadfastly denied that Jagels himself had anything to do with the plot, and Jagels, just as steadfastly, refused to discipline her, no matter what the grand jury said. He defended her throughout, and later backed her bid for a judgeship, which she won and still holds in Kern County. The Bakersfield Californian editorialized against Jagels for a time, accusing him of tolerating prosecutorial misconduct and calling him the new “law and no order” district attorney, but the controversy soon died down, Jagels’ indignant denials winning out in the end.
What everyone seemed to miss in the furor was the fact that the confidential documents raided on Jagels’ behalf really told a very different story than the one put forth at that debate. Jagels’ opponent did make the fateful order to send the girl home; that much was true. But it turns out the district attorney’s office, through inaction, had left the judge no other choice—no prosecutor even appeared at the hearing. Furthermore, it was Jagels’ own office that plea-bargained the murderous stepfather out of jail after only a few months, not the judge. In the end, not only had a prosecutor’s misconduct helped get Ed Jagels elected. It had also allowed blame for a child’s murder to be heaped on the wrong man—and the wrong part of the justice system.13
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Few outside the clubbish world of the Kern County courthouse even knew who Ed Jagels was back when he announced his candidacy for district attorney. Many who did know him found Jagels a cold and distant man, excruciatingly formal—though he took pains to overcome this side of his personality during his campaign, carefully posing with jacket slung over a shoulder, his tie loosened, as he knocked on doors with groups of cops and deputies. He was a consummate politician, always, and he looked the part, with his helmet of straight, silver hair that somehow could not add a day to his smooth, boyish face. His lips seemed perennially pursed, as if he were on the verge of a smirk. Only his eyes seemed old, pale blue and heavy-lidded, with purplish circles beneath them, almost like bruises—“a zealot’s eyes,” the local newspaper wrote during the campaign. Jagels liked that.
A college student during the Vietnam War, he is said to have provoked several fistfights with war protesters and to have been shot at once for his trouble—though these experiences apparently did not spark in him any particular interest in law enforcement as a career. As Jagels has told it, he simply drifted into law school, deciding to earn his degree for lack of any more compelling interests. It was just something to do. He ended up in Bakersfield on a whim, pulling off the highway while driving from Los Angeles to a job interview in San Francisco. On impulse, he interviewed at the Kern County DA’s office on a Friday. There was a deputy DA spot open. He started work the following Monday.
By the time he wrested control of that office seven years later, there was nothing indifferent or whimsical about Jagels’ approach to his job. His fervent desire to attack crime—and to control the machinery of justice in Kern County—had become increasingly obvious to those close to him, as he came to refer to the halls of justice as “my courthouse.”
Still, the speed with which Jagels rose to prominence astonished his opponents. Before announcing that he would seek the DA’s office, Jagels had been barely visible, at least as far as his cases went. He did not make headlines and, within the legal community, was known around the courthouse principally for his skirmishes with judges.
The most dramatic of these came shortly before he announced his candidacy, in the form of an appeals-court opinion on a simple armed-robbery case he had prosecuted two years earlier. It seems Jagels had a virtually airtight case against a stickup artist named Tony Perez. Two eyewitnesses had identified the defendant, including a clerk who had waited on Perez several times at the Circle K convenience store he later robbed. There was really no doubt about the outcome of the case—it was what prosecutors like to call a slam dunk.
Yet Jagels still managed to create controversy, earning the distinction of being upbraided by the California Court of Appeal for blatant misconduct in the courtroom, where he was accused of infecting an entire trial with racist appeals and contemptuous and insulting behavior. During the Perez trial, the judge on the case repeatedly had to order Jagels to calm down, lecturing him as if speaking to a tantrum-prone child, and at one point unfavorably comparing the prosecutor’s behavior to his teenage son’s. “There cannot be any doubt that the district attorney, in this case, exceeded the bounds of good taste and proper courtroom decorum,” the Fresno-based Fifth District panel of the state appeals court later wrote. “The instances of misconduct are legion: Jagels’ rantings, ravings, constant apologies, characterizations of defense counsel and defense counsel’s objections, personal attacks, allegations of impropriety, attacks on defense witnesses, improper questions, defiance of rulings, and the need for the court to continually admonish counsel. . . . He should have been severely reprimanded.”14
This was not simply a matter of a wayward prosecutor failing to follow some dry legal principles or niggling technicalities. Appellate opinions going back sixty years have warned that when district attorneys don’t play by the rules, the safeguards built into the justice system begin to crumble. Misconduct by any player in the justice system is serious—jurors, judge, a defense lawyer. But the consequences can be most devastating when the culprit is the prosecutor, now the single most powerful figure in the justice system, or in all of government, for that matter.15 Even presidents must bend to the will of prosecutors, special and otherwise, who are accountable to none, operate largely in secret, and who are themselves immune from prosecution or lawsuits even when responsible for gross or deliberate miscarriages of justice. Most justice system participants and observers agree that the majority of professional prosecutors behave honorably and adhere to the rules (which, in any case, more often than not favor their cause over their defense attorney opponent’s anyway). But the temptation to bend or break the rules to gain additional advantage can be enormous, given the lack of any meaningful supervision or sanctions for prosecutorial misbehavior. The courts have long recognized this imbalance of power and the enormous stakes involved, for prosecutorial misconduct not only serves the intended goal of making convictions more likely for the guilty, it also increases the possibility that the innocent will be convicted as well.16
Had it been a close case, Tony Perez could have had his conviction overturned because of the prosecutor’s actions. Instead, the appeals court decided that Jagels’ misconduct made no difference in this case—it was, to use a catchall legal principle that appeals courts frequently employ when they find problems but don’t wish to set a criminal free, “harmless error.” In other words, the evidence against Perez was so overwh
elming that he would have been convicted regardless of Jagels’ behavior. The prosecutor had gone over the line for no good reason, according to the appellate justices, and risked the loss of a conviction that should have been a cakewalk.
Far from being contrite about his performance, Jagels later seemed quite proud of the opinion railing against him, saying he would do the same thing again.17 He explained his conduct in the Perez case by saying he had to take control of the courtroom because the judge was letting the defense lawyer run amok. Indeed, in touting his qualifications to be the next district attorney, Jagels expressed disappointment to one newspaper reporter that he had not been criticized or reversed by appellate courts more often. If the criminal-coddling judges criticized him, Jagels reasoned, he must be doing his job. His opponent in the DA’s race, Judge Ferguson, tried to make a campaign issue out of the Perez case, citing it as an example of Jagels’ inexperience and ethical lapses. But with typical rhetorical skill, Jagels managed to turn his own bad behavior into an example of his going the extra mile for public safety—in contrast to judges who liked to stand by and carp about technicalities.
“It is not enough for a district attorney simply to go to the office and put in eight hours,” he told reporters during the campaign, voice thick with indignation. “The district attorney . . . is the only person who understands the system and has the victim’s and public’s perspective.”
Jagels’ protectiveness of this turf he had staked out as his and his alone would eventually become legendary. One day after he became DA, he chased a news photographer up a stairwell, trading insults and profanities with him after the photographer had taken a picture of a murder victim’s family crying in a courthouse hallway. The photographer had every right to take pictures in a public area of a public building, but Jagels appeared incensed. “You’re not going to do this in my courthouse,” he is said to have shouted. The DA had previously tried to prosecute the same photographer for shooting the scene of a child’s drowning—a case thrown out of court after the judge lambasted Jagels for overstepping his authority. “What are you going to do, Ed? Arrest me?” the photographer taunted back. “You already tried that, and it didn’t work.”
The dig infuriated Jagels. According to the photographer, a red-faced and shaking Jagels hissed “Fuck you” in response just as they emerged from a stairwell into a lobby where more news reporters, including a TV crew, were milling about. The camera swung toward the tight-lipped DA, and the photographer recalls smirking, “Would you like to repeat that, Ed?”
“You heard me,” was all Jagels replied, then stalked off.18
The story gets told and retold by reporters in the Kern County courthouse as an example of Ed Jagels’ zealousness. But what it really shows—beyond sheer arrogance, a common enough trait among successful DAs and other high-powered lawyers—is Jagels’ political acumen. He knew he didn’t need the law on his side on this one. Sure, the photographer might have the constitutional right to take snapshots of tearful parents of a murdered child, or to record for posterity the image of an eight-year-old boy’s sodden, limp body being pulled from a canal. That didn’t matter. Jagels knew the public would be on his side for trying to stop it, for trying to spare victims from pain and the insensitivity of newsmen. (It also didn’t hurt that journalists are even less popular with the public these days than lawyers, and that there are no actual sanctions written into the law for prosecutors who exceed their authority in this way.) That sort of approach—putting victims first—became a Jagels trademark. It is one reason why no one has even bothered to mount a serious campaign against Jagels in subsequent elections.
Not that anyone envisioned such electoral invulnerability back in 1982, when Jagels first sought the DA’s office. Most observers at the time considered him an unlikely choice for the job, young and inexperienced, an unknown to the general public, lacking support from the Republican good ol’ boys who ran the county. Many of the senior prosecutors in his office threw their support to his opponent, as did most of the Bakersfield legal community. Jagels had no hallowed Okie bloodlines (over the years, the Oklahoma immigrants had risen to power out of sheer numbers; even the term Okie gradually lost its bite, becoming instead a source of folksy pride). He wasn’t even a native of Kern County. He had come over the Grapevine from the old-money Los Angeles enclave of San Marino, a wealthy second-generation lawyer whose mother frequently appeared in the society columns, and whose father had ties to Washington power brokers like Attorney General William French Smith, as well as ample cash to support his son’s campaign. Jagels’ campaign-donor list was like no one else’s in Kern County. It read like a who’s who of corporate California, with the president and vice president of Occidental Petroleum kicking in, along with a host of corporate, society and legal luminaries from Los Angeles—friends and contacts of the family back in San Marino.
Such a pedigree might have been deadly to other would-be office-holders in Kern County, where out-of-town job applicants at the district attorney’s office were routinely warned they were about to enter “redneck country,” and where loathing of carpetbaggers from the “big city” can be palpable. But Jagels had something better than local roots or experience or political chits or even that greatest currency of public life, name recognition. He had timing, incredible timing.
Ed Jagels had sensed something new on the horizon in the first years of the eighties, a powerful undercurrent roiling through his community and ready to crest: a profound change in the way people looked at their justice system. He had seen, far more clearly than his contemporaries and competitors, that a new and cynical public perception of the courts was taking hold, one that made professional experience in the justice system a negative, not a positive. Jagels’ message, then, became as simple as it was compelling: The system had been perverted by the judges and the defense attorneys. It had been turned into something that served the bad guys instead of the good guys. And that, in turn, enabled Jagels to ask, So what if the insiders, the lawyers and the judges, were against him? They defend criminals for a living, he would say in his stump speeches. If they are against me, what does that say about the kind of district attorney I’ll be?
Jagels quickly saw he had struck a cord with this pitch—supporters began flocking to him. Once in office, he became particularly adept at bashing Rose Bird, the California Supreme Court chief justice and civil libertarian who had become the bull’s-eye on every conservative’s target after she repeatedly overturned death sentences. The “Bye, Bye Birdie” bumper stickers he and his political organization put together were immensely popular—they couldn’t print them fast enough—as was his characterization of her rulings as “pro-defense fanaticism.” His campaign to oust the chief justice spread far beyond the boundaries of Kern County, bringing him headlines and stature throughout California, and when his campaign succeeded and Rose Bird was voted out of office, Jagels’ name was bandied about as a likely candidate for state attorney general. From the moment he launched his first election campaign, law enforcement fell in behind Jagels in droves. Every police agency, association and union in Kern County, the largest and smallest departments alike, endorsed him, convinced this newcomer would never have let Dana Butler’s murderer roam free. Jagels knew, then, that he had tapped into something big—indeed, he began building his whole career on it, feeding the outrage, the notion that the justice system was broken and needed radical surgery to restore common sense to the courtroom and safety to the streets.
It was an unassailable position in so many ways, and a relatively novel one for the time. Frustrations were just beginning to build back then, not just in Bakersfield, but all over the nation—over repeat offenders, escalating violence and criminals who seemed to walk out of prison just days after getting there. And Jagels found a natural constituency who shared these views: Long before he chased a news photographer up a courthouse staircase, he became one of the first prosecutors in the country to ally himself with the then-nascent crime-victims’ movement. He sensed ea
rly on the enormous political clout that movement would one day attain. He championed a Crime Victims Bill of Rights that has since become law in California (though portions of it were later found to be unconstitutional), and he has been rewarded with the undying support of crime-victims’ groups, which themselves have risen from obscurity to become potent lobbying forces in state legislatures around the country.
In forging this alliance, Jagels redefined the job of district attorney. No longer would he be merely a prosecutor of criminals, an upholder of the law. Kern County’s DA, in Jagels’ view, would also be an advocate for the victims. He would be their lawyer, their avenging angel. And his enemies were the judges, the black-robed symbols of everything wrong with the justice system—splitting hairs, defying common sense, perverting the law to benefit criminals, he’d say in speech after speech.
His prescription for fixing the system was also groundbreaking for the times, and always the same: Change the law to shift legal discretion—the code word for power in the justice system—away from the dreaded judges and toward prosecutors. Despite the fact that prosecutors already were the most powerful figures in the justice system, Jagels continually portrayed himself as a crime-busting underdog, bereft of the laws and powers he needed to do his job right. To remedy this supposed handicap, Jagels has throughout his career pushed for laws that not only would stiffen punishments for criminals, but that would also limit judges’ choices as they made rulings on evidence and passed sentences. That way, it would be prosecutors, in choosing what charges to file and what evidence to use, who would decide a criminal’s sentence. Jagels also helped pioneer the ultimate weapon in this approach, California’s “Three Strikes and You’re Out” law, which puts three-time offenders—even nonviolent ones—in prison for life, whether a judge wants it that way or not.