Orange County Grand Jury • 2006-2007 • Agency Response

Orange County Disciplinary Procedures for Elected Officials?*

Published: July 30, 2007 3 pages
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Findings and Recommendations 1 findings

F1
Other than Penal Code section 919c which grants to the Grand Jury the authority to inquire into willfull (sic) or corrupt misconduct by public officers, there are no authorized published procedures by the county or agencies to investigate non-EEO misconduct by an elected official that does not rise to the level of willful or corrupt. District Attorney's Response to Finding No. The District Attorney agrees with this finding insofar as his office is concerned. Local Agencies do not have supervisory authority over the District Attorney. The California Constitution specifically grants that authority to the Attorney General. Article V, § 13 of the California Constitution provides in pertinent part that: Subject to the powers and duties of the Governor, the Attorney General shall be the chief law officer of the State. It shall be the duty of the Attorney General to see that the laws of the State are uniformly and adequately enforced. The Attorney General shall have direct supervision over every district attorney and sheriff and over such other law enforcement officers as may be designated by law, in all matters pertaining to the duties of their respective offices.... (Emphasis Added) Govt. Code § 12550, entitled, "Authority of Attorney General" confirms this power. It states in pertinent part, "The Attorney General has direct supervision over the district attorneys of the several counties of the State...." The Supreme Court of California has also confirmed the extent of the powers of the District Attorney and the entities that serve as a supervising check on the exercise any district attorney in the discharge of the duties of that office of those powers; The district attorney is the public prosecutor, vested with the power to conduct on behalf of the people all prosecutions for public offenses. (Citation) Except for the power of the electorate to remove him, his performance of these functions is subject only to the supervision of the Attorney General. (Citation) Hicks v. Board of Supervisors (1977) 69 Cal. App. 3d 228, 240. (Emphasis Added) . . ĵ RECOMMENDATION
Related Recommendations (1)
R1
Each Agency should generate and implement a set of procedures to facilitate an investigation of any non-EEO misconduct that does not rise to the level of willful or corrupt claim against its own elected official in Orange County. - ... - District Attorney's Response to Recommendation 1 The District Attorney declines to implement the recommendation as it is not warranted and not reasonable. As noted in the response to Finding No. 1, the California Constitution grants exclusive authority to supervise district attorneys to the Attorney General. Although Govt. Code § 25303 states in pertinent part that, "The board of supervisors shall supervise the official conduct of all county officers...," the same statute acknowledges this Constitutional limitation by also stating, "This section shall not be construed to affect the independent and constitutionally and statutorily designated investigative and prosecutorial functions of the sheriff and district attorney of a county." (Emphasis Added) An attempt to create procedures to facilitate an investigation of an elected official outside of that explicitly provided for by the Constitution would itself be unconstitutional. Accordingly, the District Attorney must respectfully decline to implement the recommendation. . . .

* This report's PDF did not contain easily extractable text and required Optical Character Recognition (OCR) for analysis. There may be minor errors in the extracted findings and recommendations due to OCR limitations with scanned documents.