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Response to the Kern County District Attorney's report on “Mean Justice”District Attorney Ed Jagels’ report is a misleading and error-laden diatribe. Mean Justice is not based on my opinion of events, but is a factual account well documented throughout. Anyone who reads the book can judge for himself. This report is the latest spin control from a District Attorney who would rather go on the attack than admit that his office had made mistakes that led to people wrongfully going to prison. The courts have documented his office’s mistakes, miscues and misconduct time and again. Surely Mr. Jagels must have better things to do with his time and tax dollars than to launch vanity opinion polls and to deploy his staff to produce a self-serving missive masquerading as a factual report. MEAN JUSTICE has been out for five months, and I find it incredible that Mr. Jagels has spent all this time crafting such a sorry response. The distortions and false claims in this report’s Executive Summary alone are too numerous to detail. But here’s a sampling of his attempts to mislead: • The report distorts the facts about the only eyewitness and star prosecution witness in the Dunn case, the career criminal and felon Jerry Lee Coble. Mr. Jagels’ report ignores the irrefutable fact that a key sheriff’s report about Coble was never disclosed to the Dunn defense by the prosecution, as required by law. Instead, the D.A. tries to excuse its failure to disclose this important report by falsely (and irrelevantly) claiming it was public record available to the defense. In fact, the defense sought the file containing the report and could not obtain it from the court clerk’s office as anyone who took a moment to read the latest Kern County Superior Court filings in the Dunn case would know. • The report makes false statements about attorney Teri Bjorn’s key testimony at Dunn’s trial. The Jagels report falsely claims Bjorn, Dunn’s civil and real estate attorney, was unequivocal about when an important phone conversation with Dunn occurred. Not so: the record of an in camera hearing clearly shows she was not sure if the call came before or after Dunn reported his wife missing a critical point at trial. And the Jagels report skirts the most important matter on this subject: Mean Justice reveals that Ms. Bjorn never testified in open court that Dunn asked her to help him gain illegal access to his wife’s money. The DA has falsely claimed the contrary for years indeed, this has been one of the key facts used to buttress the D.A.’s case but prosecutors have finally conceded in recent court filings that Bjorn never said such a thing. Mr. Jagels, get your story straight -- you are contradicting your own office’s court filings! • The report misrepresents a prosecutor’s version of events as fact. The recitation of the Dunn case "facts" in the report is just a repackaging of the prosecution’s original, error-filled case against Dunn. It ignores the reams of evidence, testimony and transcripts quoted and referenced at length in Mean Justice that refute much of these so-called facts. • Mr. Jagels has falsely claimed that he and his office were somehow surprised by the information in Mean Justice. This is false. Mr. Jagels has been aware for two years about my findings in the Dunn case, because I wrote a detailed letter to him, to his deputy John Somers, and to Sheriff’s Detective John Soliz. They chose not to provide their input. Instead, Mr. Jagels now belatedly launches an attack in a sad attempt at having the last word. Interestingly, when I approached Mr. Jagels in a courthouse hallway many months ago — one of my many attempts to secure an interview with him — he asserted that pending and future litigation in the Dunn case and other cases mentioned in my book barred him from discussing anything with me. This was untrue. At that time, there was no pending litigation in the Patrick Dunn case and none contemplated, so the justification for his silence did not wash. Now, of course, there is pending litigation — an active habeas corpus plea pending in Kern County Superior Court in the Dunn case, based upon the information contained in Mean Justice. Yet Mr. Jagels suddenly feels free to call press conferences and to attempt to try this case in the press — a reversal that speaks volumes about the District Attorney’s ethics and sense of fair play. — July 1999
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