Former Chula Vista Aide Seeks To Undo Plea Deal Over Dumanis Call

Judge Seals District Attorney Office Records In Chula Vista Investigation
By Amita Sharma
KPBS

May 22, 2014

A San Diego judge today took possession of District Attorney Bonnie Dumanis's office records concerning an investigation of Chula Vista city officials.

Judge Louis Hanoian plans to hold the records until he rules on whether to allow an aide to former Chula Vista Mayor Steve Padilla to try to undo his plea deal.

The aide—Jason Moore—wants the court to set aside his misdemeanor guilty plea, to contempt of court, from 2007. Moore insists he would not have entered the plea—in response to perjury charges filed by the district attorney—if he had known that Dumanis had earlier contacted his boss, then-Mayor Padilla. Padilla said Dumanis asked him to appoint her aide to a vacant Chula Vista City Council seat.

A KPBS story last month reported that Dumanis started investigating Chula Vista city officials after Padilla refused her request.

Moore's attorney Knut Johnson contends that conversation created a conflict of interest for Dumanis in the subsequent probe.

"The facts seem to be undisputed," Johnson said. "Ms. Dumanis made the phone call to the mayor. The mayor refused her request and then she investigated the entire Chula Vista government."

Dumanis's spokesman Steve Walker called the effort to set aside the misdemeanor plea, "a fishing expedition seven years after the fact."

"The defendant pleaded guilty to lying to a grand jury and was held responsible for his crime," Walker said in a written statement. "Following that plea, the Attorney General's office was made aware of issues raised in this motion and found no reason to take any action or investigate."

Patrick O'Toole, the prosecutor in the Chula Vista investigation, handed a folder of records to the court. And the judge put them under seal.

Lawyer Johnson wants to review the records.

He said he's looking for internal emails, notes and letters from the DA's office of Dumanis's conversation with Padilla. Judge Hanoian is expected to decide in mid June if Johnson should be allowed to review them.

KPBS sought the same records two months ago through a California Public Records Act request. The office mostly released material that was already publicly available.

Moore has also asked the DA's office to recuse itself from his case. The DA calls that request premature and improper.

Meanwhile, with the June 3rd primary less than two weeks away, Moore's attempt to have his plea dismissed has turned into an issue in the district attorney race.

Dumanis's campaign spokeswoman Jen Tierney said the case was "nothing more than a publicity stunt orchestrated by our opponent less than two weeks before Election Day."

"Shame on him for wasting the court's time and resources for political gain," Tierney said in a statement.

The campaign of former federal prosecutor Bob Brewer, one of two of Dumanis's opponents, responded that the judge clearly didn't think the case was a waste of time.

"Dumanis can clear everything up very easily by releasing all the documents and answering one simple question: 'Did you or did you not secretly lobby the mayor of Chula Vista to have your friend appointed to the Chula Vista City Council?'" said Brewer's communications director Alex Roth. "Instead of answering these questions and releasing these public documents, she's stonewalling and hoping to run out the clock before the June 3 election."

Democrats and other opponents of would-be Chula Vista mayor Cheryl Cox were regularly targeted by District Attorney Bonnie Dumanis in the glory days of her "Public Integrity Unit". Now we know why.

Former Chula Vista Aide Seeks To Undo Plea Deal Over Dumanis Call
May 20, 2014
By Amita Sharma
KPBS

Former Chula Vista Mayor states in a sworn declaration that District Attorney Bonnie Dumanis asked him in phone call to appoint her aide to a vacant City Council seat.

An aide to former Chula Vista Mayor Steve Padilla wants a court to set aside his misdemeanor guilty plea he said he wouldn’t have made if he’d known about a call District Attorney Bonnie Dumanis reportedly made to his boss back in 2005.

The District Attorney’s Office charged Jason Moore with five counts of felony perjury in 2006. Moore was found snooping at an event for his boss’s political opponent during work hours. Moore was accused of lying to a grand jury about when he turned in a slip at work to take the time off. Testimony by another witness before the grand jury was that Moore was not required to submit a slip, according to court papers.

Moore later pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor. Now he wants that conviction overturned.

Moore's lawyer, Knut Johnson, said he would have advised against that guilty plea if he had known that District Attorney Dumanis had called Moore’s boss, Padilla, months earlier.

In a sworn declaration, Padilla said Dumanis asked him to appoint her aide Jesse Navarro to a vacant city council position. Padilla said he turned her down. Within weeks of the refusal, Dumanis opened investigations into Chula Vista city officials.

Johnson says the call was “a critical piece of information” because an impartial prosecutor is an essential feature of Moore’s right to a fair trial.

“Prosecution by someone with conflicting loyalties calls into question the objectivity of those charged with bringing a defendant to judgment,” Johnson wrote in court papers. “It is a fundamental premise of our society that the state wield its formidable law enforcement powers in a rigorously disinterested fashion.”

The DA's office said it could not comment on the case because it's pending litigation.

More On This Story-May 6, 2014: Dumanis Challenged To Release Records In Chula Vista Political Probe
District Attorney Bonnie Dumanis' decision to delay releasing the records sought by KPBS was questioned by her opponent in the DA's race and one of his supporters.

Instead of laughing at sex doll prank, school has student charged with felony

Teen faces prison after sex doll prank goes awry
The Associated Press
July 5, 2011

When 18-year-old Tyell Morton put a blow-up sex doll in a bathroom stall on the last day of school, he didn't expect school officials to call a bomb squad or that he'd be facing up to eight years in prison and a possible felony record.

The senior prank gone awry has raised questions of race, prosecutorial zeal and the post-Columbine mindset in a small Indiana town and around the country, The Indianapolis Star reported in its Tuesday editions.

Legal experts question the appropriateness of the charges against Morton, and law professor Jonathan Turley at George Washington University posed a wider question about Morton's case on his legal blog.

"The question is what type of society we are creating when our children have to fear that a prank (could) lead them to jail for almost a decade. What type of citizens are we creating who fear the arbitrary use of criminal charges by their government?"

A janitor at Rushville Consolidated High School saw Morton run away from the school May 31, and security footage showed a person in a hooded sweatshirt and gloves entering the school with a package and leaving five minutes later without it, according to court documents.

Administrators feared explosives, so they locked down the school and called police. K9 dogs and a bomb squad searched the building before finding the sex doll.

"We have reviewed this situation numerous times," Rush County Schools Superintendent John E. Williams told the newspaper last week. "When you have an unknown intruder in the building, delivering an unknown package, we come up with the same conclusion. ... We cannot be too cautious, in this day and age."

Morton was arrested and charged with disorderly conduct, a misdemeanor, and institutional criminal mischief, a felony that carries the potential of two to eight years in prison.

"I know there has been plenty of pranks done at that school," said Morton's mother, Cammie Morton. "I went to that school. When I heard what they was charging him for, my heart just dropped."

Joel Schumm, a professor at the Indiana University School of Law-Indianapolis, questioned the validity of the charges.

"Their reaction is understandable, but use the school disciplinary process," he said. "Don't try to label the kid a felon for the rest of his life."

The Rush County Prosecutor Philip J. Caviness told The Associated Press that he doesn't intend to seek a prison term for Morton, but said school officials acted appropriately and that the charges are warranted.

"I'm pretty comfortable with the charges that we've filed," he said.

Miami Herald columnist Leonard Pitts focused on Morton's case recently in his nationally syndicated column, suggesting that Morton's case was another example of unfair treatment for a black youth without a wealthy family.

Morton's father brushed off that suggestion when Pitts asked him about it, and Morton's mother declined to discuss that point with The Star.

Morton's attorney, Robert Turner, also downplayed race, suggesting that the size of the small blue-collar city an hour southeast of Indianapolis played a role.

"I don't think they do this sort of thing very often," Turner said. "Had this happened in Indianapolis ... they would not have had this kind of charge filed."

Morton's mother said Tyell Morton wants to attend college, but is worried about the case...

What did Bonnie Dumanis learn from former DA Ed Miller's prosecution of Dale Akiki? Ask Thad Jesperson.

The DA's Power to Disappoint
January 5, 2010
Voice of San Diego
By KELLY THORNTON

Part three of a five-part series.
...A prosecution in 2004 against Thad Jesperson, a popular and respected teacher accused of molesting eight second and third grade girls, conjured memories of the Dale Akiki debacle. Like Akiki, the case against Jefferson was built solely on accusations by children, made after they'd been questioned at length by investigators. There was no other corroborating evidence.

Under then-District Attorney Ed Miller, Akiki was charged in 1991 with 35 felony counts of sexual and physical abuse of children at Faith Chapel in Spring Valley, where he volunteered with his wife in the preschool. A jury took just seven hours to acquit him after a seven-month trial in 1993. He later won a $2 million lawsuit against his accusers.

Also like Akiki, Jesperson spent time behind bars. After three separate trials, Jesperson was finally convicted and sentenced to 15 years to life. He spent four years in prison before being released in January 2008 when an appeals court threw out the convictions and granted a new trial on grounds of juror misconduct and mistakes by his attorney and the trial judge.

Dumanis decided not to take the matter further.

Defense attorneys have said the prosecution is an example of poor judgment by Dumanis , who continued to pursue multiple trials in a case like the bogus one against Akiki which relied on the testimony of children alone. Jesperson's defense was primarily that the students' inconsistent stories were the result of suggestibility, in which interviewers' questions are leading and influence responses...