- Posted July 1, 2010 at 11:19 am
District Attorney Mike Ramos / Attorney General Jerry Brown
Thursday, July 1, 2010 – 10:00 a.m.
Once thing is for certain.
San Bernardino County District Attorney Mike Ramos drawing Attorney General Jerry Brown into his crusade against his political enemies was a smart move.
Even though Defendant Jim Erwin pushed him into it.
After Ramos arrested Erwin in March 2009 regarding alleged disclosure violations, Erwin pummeled Ramos in local newspapers. Erwin accused Ramos of selective prosecution in retaliation for budget actions by his former boss, Supervisor Neil Derry, and Erwin’s knowledge of Ramos’ various affairs with employees in his own office. Damaging Erwin’s credibility was paramount.
Erwin demanded the Attorney General take his case from Ramos. As a result, Ramos talked Brown into partnering with him on the case. A decision that may cost Brown.
Ramos squeaked by in the June primary and narrowly avoided a run-off in November. Brown however, faces former Ebay chief executive Meg Whitman in November. Brown doesn’t have anywhere near the resources Whitman commands.
In other words, Brown will have a tough go of it this time, and he may lose.
Whitman is already pounding on Brown, who is relying on labor unions to defend him until he can spend his own money in late September. Whitman’s outside fundraising is even keeping pace with that of Brown.
The already reelected Ramos has stuck Brown with several cases involving defendants that aren’t backing down. The mistrial yesterday in the Rex Gutierrez case is a prime example.
Gutierrez is factually the best case among four pending for Ramos and Brown, and it didn’t go well.
The key witness in three of the four pending political corruption cases, former assistant assessor Adam Aleman, was discredited. Newspapers are reporting that almost all jurors in the Gutierrez trial didn’t believe Aleman.
Sources say Guitierrez’s defense attorney Jim Reiss had around twelve hours of material on Aleman, but elected to use roughly ten percent of it against him. I doubt he’ll hold back during the re-trial.
Let’s take a look at the pending cases.
People v Postmus / Eyler
Attorneys:
For the People: Deputy District Attorney Lewis Cope, Deputy Attorney General Melissa Mandel
For the Defense: Stephen Levine (Postmus), Stanley Hodge (Eyler)
This case is also a result of alleged corruption in the assessor’s office. The charges against former Assessor employee Greg Eyler are essentially the same as against Gutierrez, absent the conspiracy angle. If prosecutors can’t convict Gutierrez of time card fraud they won’t be convicting Eyler, who was part-time salaried. The charges against former Assessor Bill Postmus involve such offenses as misuse of a computer wireless card. Yes. wireless card!
Both Postmus matters involve drug use charges that will likely be dismissed in accordance with Penal Code section 1000.
No guilty plea’s are likely in this case.
To read the rest of the article, click here.
Some of you are judge and jury yourselves. I put many a person in prison for life and can not believe what some of your thinking is. If I ever took this same case to the AUSA or even an SB DDA I would have been sent out of the building lookin like an idiot. If you have not been to law school, or worked in the law enforcement field for 20 years, your comments about most of these legalities are worthless. Last time I looked it was not a crime to be a shitty employee. Washington, Sacramento and San Bernardino are full of them. And Mr AG, shame on you for listening to this made up conspiracy theory case. That video of you standing with Mikey can never ever be taken away. Yor office had better think real quick on how to do damage control on this one. Arrest him before the FEDS do, and you look like the good guy. Let the FEDS do it and political careers are “OVER”. And I say this because you may be the true victim here. Your office was warned and your main man blew it. See, this is called freedom of speech. It’s not breaking the law, it’s not a conspiracy and it’s not an arrestable offense. Yet, Mikey has made it so anyone going against him is breaking the law. Yet again, he can pay his wife money and leave it off 700′s illegally, he can take questionable money from his Conflict Panel, he can, he can, he can. This is not what our forefathers stood for. I am not going to try and give a constutional law class here. You have Ivy League attornies scratching their balls, trying to figure out how and why these judges put their heads on the line for these crap cases, questionable search warrants and arrests. I have not a dog in this fight, but the tax payers will be paying for the civil law suites for years to come on this one. You have an elected dragging honest people through the gutter. I ask you this. What if this was your father or your brother going through all of this? Knowing that they have done good for this community. I have never met Jeff, but there is probably not a person here that could compair to a pimple on his ass. Enough said. P.S. I am not an English teacher or politically correct, so forgive my spelling and my language! And Rex, good luck on your next trial.
I am so over all of this political BS! We have are spending millions of dollars investigating, and attempting to prosecute Rex Gutierrez? For what? Because he took ten days off of work to attend City business meeting and used sick time, total amount of alleged fraud $2,800. I lost count of the number of DA employee’s that were present at his trial. Were they using sick time because they certainly weren’t doing anything!
If you don’t like what’s happening in our county, vote Rex and Paul out of office. It is a hell of a lot cheaper!
Send Rex off to sell papers, Paul can go back to real estate (good luck on that one), and Erwin can blog till the cows come home. Just don’t waste our tax dollars on these cases. If everyone is at Rex’s trial who is prosecuting the murderer’s, rapist, and gang bangers?
Does anyone really think they are going to successfully prosecute Burum or get back a penny of the 102 million? (See Biane for Florida land if you do),
The federal government just spent 9 trillion dollars and zero percent interest on our economy, and achieved a 3% growth in GNP. The stimulus dollars are gone. We are in the middle of the worst economy in a Century. Entire welfare programs to help the poor and disabled are being cut from state budgets, education is suffering major cuts, unemployment is 14%, prisons are on the verge of being taken over by the federal government because of mismanagement. People are losing their home and others have lost their retirements. Yet we spend millions to put Rex in prison for falsely claiming 10 days of sick time. Just fire his ASS, and move on.
We need to lower our taxes, give businesses incentive to expand, and create jobs. I hate to ever quote Bill Clinton but even he knew “it’s the economy stupid”.
If we don’t set our priorities straight and start creating jobs we are going to end up as the next Great Britain!
It is time to stop wasting our tax dollars on these political investigations and spend our efforts creating jobs!
I don’t see the right horses carrying the load in the DA’s office at times. I was in a civil trial this week with three sets of attorneys and while we were waiting for the judge to come out, the comment of a senior prosecutor walking out of chambers (after looking at thousands of pages in exhibit binders) was “not me, you people work too much”. Maybe more of the right kind of “too much work” is what some in the DA’s office needs.
I do not understand how getting paid for time not worked and using sick leave to cover time spent on non-county work is not ILLEGAL!!! That is stealing!!! There is no way around it…it is wrong. Forget about the issue of who “got Guitierrez the job…” He was not productive for the County Assessor’s office. As well as Postmus, Eyler and Aleman…they stole County general funds by misuse of the system…they need to pay the consequences as well as restitution. period.