Gary Lowenthal, a law professor at Arizona State University, spent one year at the County Attorney's Office during Romley's tenure. According to the excerpt I was given, Lowenthal felt that Romley was overly concerned with keeping his conviction rate high.
"What could be politically troublesome for the county attorney in routine cases was not a refusal to file charges but, instead, the risk that a significant percentage resulted in either acquittal or a dismissal," Lowenthal wrote. "The need to drive up aggregate conviction rates translated into a policy of rejecting prosecutions when the evidence was a little shaky — or the facts lacked 'jury appeal.' Thus, a combination of economic and political forces caused the charging bureau to decline prosecution in many of the cases the police submitted and to send others back for further investigation."
No dogs were harmed in the making of this column. Suffice it to say, this Chihuahua is not the alleged "victim."
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Obviously, nobody wants a prosecutor who's obsessed with keeping up conviction rates for political reasons. But I honestly can't understand why Thomas' people thought the rest of the excerpt was so damning. Shouldn't we want the police to do more investigating in a case where the evidence is "shaky"? Surely, we can agree that it's a giant waste of time and money — not to mention morally problematic — to indict the innocent.
I'm afraid that's exactly what Thomas has been doing. Then, thanks to his ban on making plea bargains for certain offenses, his prosecutors have been taking these lousy cases to trial. And they've been losing.
It isn't just Dr. Joshua Winston, although he's Exhibit A. Remember Tom Lovejoy, the Chandler cop charged with killing his police dog by leaving it in a hot car? Or how about Dan Pochoda, the ACLU legal director who was charged with "trespassing" at a demonstration in front of Pruitt's Home Furnishings? Both of those men were "investigated" by the Sheriff's Office. Both were crappy cases, brought for political reasons.
And both times, the County Attorney's Office wasted a lot of money and time, only to lose at trial.
The proof is in Thomas' own statistics. Using numbers provided by his office last week, I compared Romley's last three years as county attorney with the first three years of Thomas' tenure. Thomas has averaged an additional 120 trials per year — and notched an average of 54 more losses annually.
I don't think those numbers are unrelated: You take bad cases to trial, and you're going to lose more trials.
Indeed, even ignoring the increase in trials, the percentage of defendants found not guilty at trial has been increasing. Romley lost 16 percent of his trials; Thomas has been losing 20 percent. That's not as bad as Tim Nelson was claiming last week, but it's not good. (Nelson, as it turns out, had put in a public-records request with the court, asking for the results of every jury trial. The court gave him an incomplete set, he says, leading to some faulty numbers.)
Beyond the stats, there's a real problem here — a problem that's crystal clear in the excerpt from Lowenthal's book. Lowenthal notes that Romley's office chose not to proceed with felony charges in roughly 50 percent of the cases submitted by police.
The cops weren't happy about it.
"Although the police believed they had sufficient evidence of a crime to support felony prosecution, the prosecutor's office disagreed," Lowenthal writes. "Not surprisingly, within the ranks of law enforcement agencies, there was a great deal of resentment."
I'm sure that's all true. But here's where Thomas' spinmeisters are wrong.
It's not a bad thing for cops to be resentful.
I didn't always understand this. Of course the two agencies should work in tandem, right? But you only have to watch one episode of Law & Order to know that the best prosecutors serve as a sort of check on the cops. They push them to make their cases better, to get more proof, to make sure they've got it right.
Sometimes, they'll even turn them down.
So what would have happened if Andrew Thomas had refused to charge Dr. Joshua Winston? What if he'd taken one look at the sheriff's shoddy "detective" work and told Sheriff Joe that he couldn't possibly charge Winston with a felony?
Arpaio would be angry, I'm sure. The old guy knows that the best way to get on TV is a case involving animals. But certainly, justice would have been better served.
"I never had one board complaint, was never sued for malpractice, and was never written up," Winston told me. "When they investigated this, everything in my background was clean. But a thousand years from now, someone will Google me, and everything I've done has been tainted forever."
None of this is one bit funny, but I have to admit, Winston's lawyer, Tracey Westerhausen, told me a story about the trial that made me laugh out loud. When Westerhausen and the prosecutor were questioning prospective jurors, one man volunteered that he couldn't judge Winston with an open mind: The crime of punching a dog was just too heinous.
Then a female would-be juror piped up.
"I can't believe we're all here over the fact that some dog's eye partially popped out — and the dog is fine!" she said. "What a waste of taxpayer dollars!"
The man was struck from the jury pool, and so was the woman. Fair enough. But I couldn't help but think that even though the woman was dismissed before the trial even started, she summed up this one perfectly.
