The San Jose Police Officers Association’s decision earlier this month to take a pass on endorsing a candidate for district attorney appears to have emboldened potential challengers to first-term DA Dolores Carr.
(Bobby Lopez, president of the San Jose Police Officers Association, says his union, um, simply wants to see who the other candidates are.)
Currently there are no announced contenders, though Deputy DA Jeff Rosen and Assistant DA Rolanda Pierre-Dixon appear to be testing the agua. And Rosen, according the the county registrar’s office, just filed the papers that signal his intentions to run and organize a committee.
Rosen also sent out an email to his co-workers that opened with the attention-getting “I am scrupously [sic] following office policies. It is not a violation of office policy to receive this email.” (Memo to Jimro: Spell checkers come with most word processors.)
He went on to ask for coworkers’ personal email addresses, their cell phone numbers and names of friends, presumably so he can soften them up for contributions down the line. Rosen says he sent the email after hours using his personal email account, “It’s very important to follow the rules,” he explains.
Rosen says his colleagues fired back some encouraging emails. “They are very supportive of my running for DA, because they want change,” he reveals. “People have been encouraging me to run for DA because they respect my integrity, my fairness.”
Rosen says, however, that a formal announcement is “a few weeks away.” He believes that the issues will be “experience, integrity, ethics and judgment.”
“This race will be about DA Dolores Carr — her record over the last three years,” Rosen predicts.
“I think we need a prosecutor to lead the prosecutor’s office. I’ve prosecuted 65 jury trials. I have prosecuted every kind of case that can be prosecuted. It’s not the convictions, but how I achieved them — by being fair, respecting defendants’ rights, providing discovery to defense attorneys, being cordial,” Rosen says.
The Mercury News, which has been riding Carr’s derriere ever since she defeated Karyn Sinunu, appears to be goading Rosen into the race. This wasn’t always the case. The Mercury included Rosen as one of its poster boys for prosecutorial misconduct in its “Tainted Trials” series. The daily cited an appellate court decision finding that Rosen ignored a judge’s orders when cross-examining a defendant.
Rosen responded with a two-page rebuttal, quoting from transcripts and admitting that while he asked a “legally deficient” question, his follow-up questions were “appropriate.” Rosen jousted with the then-powerful daily, writing, “There are two sides to this story, and the Mercury News chose not to ask me about my side, preferring instead to report only the defendant’s side.
“Although the Mercury News spoke to a representative of the District Attorney’s Office about this issue, it chose to ignore that information,” Rosen said in the written response.
He told SJI that the incident occured more than 10 years ago, “after I had been in the office for three or four years” and that the conviction was sustained on appeal.
Rosen’s courtroom and spelling mistakes or public flogging by the Mercury News don’t seem to have affected his career much. He’s currently handling a thick docket of sensational murder cases, including the alleged paid snuffing of love-triangulated popular Los Gatos bar owner Mark Achilli, the prosecution of accused kid-stomper Samuel Corona in the brutal death and Arizona burial of his girlfriend”s son, four-year-old Oscar Jimenez Jr., as well as the case of Jing Hua Wu, who’s charged with gunning down the CEO, HR director and VP of operations at semiconductor maker SiPort after he was fired from the company last November.
Touché. Thanks for catching. We made the correction.
You may want to copy edit an article that criticizes someone’s spelling. Sinunu spells her first name with a y (Karyn). Oh and check the third paragraph. I’ll let you catch that one on your own.
I don’t know all the personalities involved, so I’m just going to make some conjectures that may or may not be true (and which might or might not be protected under the First Amendment – Is SJI considered Free Press?)
I think party politics drive Silicon Valley’s civic business. In the past, the valley was pro-business Republican with a powerful Chamber of Commerce and lots of folks kind of united in their approach to the shared goal of “lets grow this burg into something big, bigger than SF”.
Things changed, and by the 1970’s, (post Watergate) this was a solid Democratic county with most local, state and federal representatives coming up the ranks of the local Democratic Party organizations. The few exceptions were certain pockets where a non-Democrat could still win such as Almaden Valley or the West Valley. Even though the State of California by law requires that local elections be non-partisan, getting your people into those offices is all important for having the farm league ready to move up (Assembly, State Senate, Congress). So through the 80’s and 90’s every race has been about party as much as the so called issues. The exceptions have been Sheriff, DA and the South County Supervisor Seat where it was considered acceptable to have a non-Democrat. In the post 1994 (Contract with America GOP Congress) its been gloves off no-holds barred party fighting. I think this whole thing is about the party registration of Carr and her potential opponents and having lost the chance to capture a plum seat, the powers behind the scenes are going to keep trying and rather than concede the traditional unbreakable incumbent advantage, they are going to stir things up until they force another real election where they can capture the seat for their faction.
Anyway….that’s all BS conjecture, and I could actually just go to the registrar of voters on Old Oakland Road and look up some party registration information and use that as some flimsy basis for my quasi-journalism, but that’s not what blogs are about are they? They’re about getting your opinion out there without the slightest support of fact or research. I wonder if the Mercury will be able to achieve its own long sought after goal of emulating the blogosphere.
Anyway, I feel bad capping on the Merc these days (its like making fun of the football player in a wheelchair after a car accident.)
As far as public officials, I think we have the one’s we deserve, and I regret that we’re likely to get more of the same.
Jeff Rosen represented my brother’s murder case, which never went to trial because he settled with with a plea bargain for all suspects involved. Despite, there was more than enough evidence to go to trial. As a result of this plea bargain most of those suspects will be back out on the streets in a couple of years because Mr. Rosen did not want to spend the extra hours to go to trial.