Another Example of a DA's Power

Crusading Calif. D.A. retires, leaves painful wake
By GARANCE BURKE (AP) - Nov 14, 2009

BAKERSFIELD, Calif. - The molesters drank blood, the children said, 
and hung them from hooks after forcing them to have sex with their 
parents. They murdered babies, prosecutors told jurors, and snapped 
photographs as the horror unfolded.

Ed Jagels, renowned as one of California's toughest district 
attorneys, built his career on the Kern County child molestation 
cases of the 1980s, putting more than two dozen men and women behind 
bars to serve decades-long sentences for abusing children.
Appellate judges now say most of those crimes never happened.

Still, generations of voters have embraced the crusading prosecutor's 
tough-on-crime agenda in this blue-collar basin just a mountain range 
north of Los Angeles.

Now, as Jagels prepares to retire, the get-tough laws he championed 
are being criticized in a state crippled by soaring prison costs. And 
some of those he put away are going public with stories of wrongful 
conviction in a documentary film narrated by Sean Penn, one of his 
most ardent critics.

The Bakersfield trials - and half a dozen similar cases that rippled 
across America during the hysteria of that period - are widely 
acknowledged to have punished the innocent. Most convictions relied 
solely on children's testimony, and the state attorney general 
ultimately found county investigators coerced their young witnesses 
into lying on the stand and that the probe "floundered in a sea of 
unproven allegations."

But the silver-haired prosecutor maintains that justice was done in 
the cases that made him a darling of California's conservative movement.

"Innocent people may have been accused at one point or another, but 
what I really fear is that perfectly legitimate convictions have been 
overturned," Jagels said, sitting in his wood-panelled office among 
portraits of himself with Ronald Reagan and other Republican leaders. 
"How the people of Kern County feel about what I've done is much more 
important than what anyone else might think."

Such stunning setbacks might have derailed other elected officials, 
but Jagels, 60, has thrived amid the oil fields and orchards 
surrounding Bakersfield. He holds fast that he was right to form a 
special task force to investigate alleged molestation rings, right to 
assign his young attorneys to the cases and he has fought the release 
of those convicted.

He has been reelected six times, is leaving office on his own terms 
and hopes to leave the reins next year to a handpicked successor.

That brings little comfort to Brandon Smith, who grew up without his 
parents after they were sentenced to prison for gruesome sex crimes 
he and his younger brother described on the witness stand. Smith said 
he only repeated what he heard during weeks of group therapy, and had 
no inkling his false statements would mean he would be separated from 
his family and assigned to live in foster homes for nearly a decade.

"They basically coached me through my whole testimony, and told me 
that I had to say that my parents had sexually abused me," said 
Smith, whose parents Scott and Brenda Kniffen served 12 years on 
molestation convictions before they were reversed by an appeals 
court. "We've all put it behind us, but the one thing I would love is 
a verbal apology from Ed Jagels for tearing my family apart."

Since the late 1980s, all but one of 26 convictions Jagels secured 
have been reversed. Kern County has paid $9.56 million to settle 
state and federal suits brought by former defendants and their children.

Penn, who met Smith through the film, says the Bakersfield cases 
struck a chord because he did a short stay in a Los Angeles County 
jail cell next to a man accused in a major Southern California child 
abuse case.

Raymond Buckey and his mother, who ran the McMartin Pre-School in 
Manhattan Beach, ultimately were acquitted of 52 child molestation 
charges in 1990.
"There is no question that we have to take these kinds of questions 
very seriously, but in these cases a pretty good system was used 
really corruptly," said Penn, who also executive produced the film 
"Witch Hunt," which has been airing nationally on MSNBC. "Jagels 
orchestrated the rape of these children emotionally, not to mention 
the illegitimate prosecution of the adults."
Jackie Cummings fled Bakersfield with her husband and two sons in 
October 1984, when plainclothes police started casing their house 
looking for members of molestation rings. The family moved from 
campsite to campsite for a year, terrified that sheriff's deputies 
would arrest them because they knew a couple on trial for alleged 
child abuse.

When investigators tracked down the Cummings at a motel, they seized 
the children, arguing the couple were devil-worshipping molesters. 
After a year in foster care, their sons were pressured to testify 
against them in custody hearings.

"He's destroyed hundreds of people's lives," said Cummings, who was 
never charged with a crime, and whose custody case ultimately was 
thrown out. "We came back to Bakersfield and the jails were just 
filling up with people. We knew all those people were innocent, 
because we were innocent, too."

Since the 1980s, Jagels and county law enforcement officials have 
made major reforms to their investigative procedures, and now assure 
all interviews with child witnesses are videotaped and do not include 
suggestive questioning.

Jagels also has cut a wide swath through California politics in the 
last 30 years, leading a voter-driven campaign that unseated three 
liberal justices from the state Supreme Court, and fighting for 
California's stringent three-strikes law. He was once contemplated a 
run for state attorney general, but now says he plans to spend his 
retirement hunting elk. Conservatives praise Jagels' persuasive 
advocacy for victims' rights and tough sentencing laws, and his 
record of putting more people behind bars per capita than almost all 
other California counties.

"Anybody who has spent any time as a prosecutor knows Ed Jagels 
because he's had such a massive impact on the criminal justice system 
in California," said Steve Baric, secretary of the California 
Republican Party.

Now, however as California and other cash-strapped states face dire 
budget crises and prisons bursting at the seams, officials are 
rethinking whether it makes fiscal sense to keep locking up so many 
people for so long.

"As the economy has tightened, policymakers from both parties are 
asking much tougher questions about whether this tough-on-crime 
agenda is producing enough of a return for public safety," said Adam 
Gelb, a public safety policy expert at the Pew Center on the States 
in Washington.

Scott Thorpe, who leads the California District Attorneys Association 
in Sacramento, called Jagels a "prosecutor's prosecutor" who helped 
to popularize support for the death penalty.

Jagels remains adamant that putting more criminals in prison has kept 
a tight lid on crime in his rural pocket of the Central Valley, and 
says he'll retire assured that he used his power to keep his 
constituents safe.

"One thing we know for sure is criminals can't commit felonies when 
they're locked up," Jagels said. "If California prisons are 
overcrowded it's not because we have too many people in prison. It's 
because we don't have enough prisons."

Copyright © 2009 The Associated Press