District Attorney Bonnie Dumanis sliced a hot potato in half and handed the hotter half to the state Attorney General's Office.
This cleaving, which tweaked the interest of seasoned lawyers, can be explained in one of at least two ways.
Legal aesthetics – or political cover.
As we learned last week, Dumanis quietly drafted the attorney general's San Diego office in April to investigate and, if deemed appropriate, charge Rachel Silva in the March 15 road-rage incident that also involved Frank White, the off-duty San Diego police officer who repeatedly fired at Silva's moving car, wounding her and her then 8-year-old son.
Dumanis kept the blue half of the potato: the task of investigating and prosecuting – or, if history is a useful guide, not prosecuting – White, who returned to police work in April, albeit with a desk job.
Let's begin with the concrete and then work our way into the quicksand of amateur speculation.
As you've no doubt deduced, I've never taken the Bar, though, in the interest of full disclosure, I've tended a few.
Silva, 27, was very likely guilty of something that crazy Saturday night in March.
For starters, blood tests allegedly indicated she was legally drunk with marijuana in her system. Not good, especially for a mother with a child in the car. The word “reckless” comes to mind.
Granted, until the 911 tapes from Silva's cell phone – as well as from White's wife's cell – are released, the public is at a distinct disadvantage in figuring out exactly how a near-collision escalated into gunfire in a Lowe's parking lot in north Oceanside.
Still, no matter what the tapes reveal, it's unlikely Silva gets off scot-free. You can't get caught driving drunk on an expired license and expect to skate.
From that point, however, the attorney general's possible options slide up the criminal scale to assault with a deadly weapon (i.e., a car) and, ultimately, the Big One – attempted murder of a peace officer.
In explaining the district attorney's strange job-sharing agreement, Gary Schons, senior assistant attorney general in San Diego, said to a reporter that, in this complex case, justice would be better served if the attorney general takes the yin and the district attorney the yang.
Though this double-team may appeal to artful purists with more knowledge of potential conflict than I possess, I don't see it. To me, it seems less about legal beauty and more about the beastly avoidance of PR blame.
Think about it. The district attorney has prosecuted thousands of cases where charges were at least contemplated against opposing parties involved in violence. It's the district attorney's difficult job to identify the crime amid a fog of ambiguity and take what can be proved to a judge and jury.
If the Silva/White precedent were to apply, the district attorney should have handed off to the attorney general the prosecution of Lisa Maree Gaut, the hapless young woman who became the fall girl, the bystander convicted of assault with a deadly weapon in the 2006 Steve Foley shooting.
As Gaut was brought up on charges, the simultaneous possibility existed that Coronado off-duty Officer Aaron Mansker also committed a crime as he confronted Foley and Gaut near the former Chargers linebacker's Poway home.
In fact, a couple of months after Gaut was sentenced, Dumanis announced that charges would not be brought against Mansker. Doesn't that mean that there might have been?
Schons was being more candid, I think, when he acknowledged that the intense media publicity surrounding the Oceanside shooting was another reason Dumanis, who like most district attorneys has a solid record of exonerating cops when they shoot civilians, decided to farm out half of the hot potato.
On a political level, it's Solomonic.
Cut the bawling baby in half.
Diffuse the fallout without losing control of the fate of the officer.
Look, I'd believe in the “independence” of these separate reviews if they were conducted without any contact between the county and state offices – and if the findings were released at exactly the same time. No chance for the district attorney to pivot off the attorney general.
Let justice be truly blind.
That will never happen, of course.
In the end, this case hinges on whether a prosecutor will be willing to go up the scale, to sell the theory that Silva – or White – committed a serious crime against the other and, therefore, should be held responsible for the shots fired and the blood shed.
If the attorney general charges Silva with a violent crime like assault, it's game over, you'd have to imagine. White's vindicated, whitewashed with attorney general bleach.
If, on the other hand, the Attorney General's Office won't go up the scale – if it's conceded that Silva had reason to fear for her life and was trying to flee – the heated-up potato will be back in the district attorney's court.
To protect White from the logical inference – if Silva didn't trigger the shooting, he did – the district attorney will have to argue that White also had reason to fear for his life (and the life of his wife) before firing and, therefore, the case is too muddled to prove an assault.
In other words, no harm, no foul.
You know, if it does come to that pretty pass, Dumanis may be proven to have gotten it right after all.
Selling to the public a tale of sound and fury and five shots signifying nothing might require a little help from one's friends.
Logan Jenkins: (760) 737-7555; logan.jenkins@uniontrib.com.
