Last week the Vanguard noted that Jeff Reisig had lifted sections of his death penalty column from DA Jan Scully’s April Sacramento Bee column.
The Vanguard was not the only one complaining, as Deputy Public Defender Richard Van Zandt wrote: “Reisig goes one step further by extensively plagiarizing Sacramento District Attorney Jan Scully.”
He continues: “Mr. Reisig plagiarized an entire Sacramento Bee opinion by Ms. Scully, published April 26, 2012. He lifted her words, sentences and paragraphs.”
This week, Cosmo Garvin of the Sacramento News and Review, who last week noted the bizarre attack on the ACLU, unloads on the Yolo County District Attorney.
He writes in the column “bites”: “The truly remarkable thing about Reisig’s hit piece was only later uncovered by the cop watchers over at the People’s Vanguard of Davis: Reisig completely ripped-off the essay from Sacramento DA Jan Scully, who wrote an almost identical piece for The Sacramento Bee earlier this year.”
Mr. Garvin adds, “If Reisig were a college student, he’d be flunked for plagiarism. If he were a reporter, he’d be fired.”
However, apparently Chief Deputy DA and Spokesperson Jonathan Raven thinks this is all much ado about nothing.
Mr. Garvin quotes Mr. Raven: “Many of the DAs across the state (including Jan and Jeff) are part of the campaign team in opposition to the initiative to repeal the death penalty.”
“As I’m sure you are aware, sharing Op-Eds and word-for-word talking points is standard practice in such political campaigns,” Mr. Raven continued.
Mr. Garvin may have invented a new award for next year, as he comes up with the line of the year: “So, there you have it. When you do it, it’s stealing. When Jeff Reisig does it, it’s standard practice.”
The truly remarkable thing about the Jeff Reisig piece is that the responses have come in and are still coming in. Teresa Geimer has a letter in today’s Davis Enterprise.
She writes: “Our legal system cannot ensure only the guilty are convicted of their crimes. Don Heller who wrote the 1978 death penalty initiative, now supports reversing it. The execution of Tommy Thompson, whom Mr. Heller believes was innocent, convinced Mr. Heller that the death penalty doesn’t work.”
“Recently, Franky Carrillo was exonerated after 20 years in prison for a drive-by shooting he did not commit when he was 16 years old. The actual shooter tried to confess his crime at Franky’s trial, but the judge and prosecutor (Southern California) felt it was too late in the legal process to consider it. Luckily, Franky did not get the death penalty.”
Then she turns to the Yolo County District Attorney’s office.
“I have some concern about the lack of integrity in our own DA office, which makes me wonder how many innocent people are convicted of crimes they did not commit in Yolo County,” she writes. “One member of the Yolo DA’s Office who campaigned recently to become a judge was found to use innuendoes and half truths against his opponent, which help him to lose the election.”
She adds, “In his (July 29, 2012) Op-ed article, Jeff Reisig (Yolo County DA) stretched the truth when he talked about the 2008 Rand Corp. study on the costs associated with the death penalty. According to the Rand Corp. website, there was no study. All I found was a written 2008 testimony read before the California Commission on the Fair Administration of Justice, which expressed disappointment that their study on death penalty costs was tabled.”
“Then there are the articles on ‘Cash for Convictions,’ which also shows incentive to care more about convicting the accused than finding justice,” Ms. Geimer continues.
She concludes: “No one wants criminals to go unpunished. But having someone convicted of a crime they did not commit, allows the guilty to go free, which harms the victims and their families as well as ‘the someone’ and their families. I realize that no legal system can be perfect. Unfortunately, there will always be mistakes. But until our legal system is more interested in justice than winning the case, we morally cannot afford the death penalty.”
At some point, the DA may begin to recognize that his op-ed probably did his cause more harm than good. In the end, the inaccuracies were the start, but using a boilerplate without checking the facts was a critical error and one that a DA, with a professional staff, should never make.
Some have suggested that perhaps he has more important things to do than get into a war of words. We couldn’t agree more. But perhaps he should have stuck to those more important things rather than wading into a political campaign with less than the facts at his disposal.
—David M. Greenwald reporting
yes, we heard you the first 500 times.
Octane….LOL
“However, apparently Chief Deputy DA and Spokesperson Jonathan Raven thinks this is all much ado about nothing.
Mr. Garvin quotes Mr. Raven: “Many of the DAs across the state (including Jan and Jeff) are part of the campaign team in opposition to the initiative to repeal the death penalty.”
“As I’m sure you are aware, sharing Op-Eds and word-for-word talking points is standard practice in such political campaigns,” Mr. Raven continued.”
There you have it, now let’s move on.
91Octane and rusty49, The DA does not need any more apologists Jonathan Raven is paid to do just that. This reminds me of a time during my college years when a group of students “shared word-for-word talking points” for a test and papers that had to be turned in noting that it was “common practice” among some students in clubs and some sororities and fraternities. One would expect DA Reisig to have higher standards as the top law enforcement official in County of Yolo. Like these students, DA Reisig receives an F.
Some dude named Rusty: “There you have it, now let’s move on. “
There we have what?
Cosmo: “So, there you have it. When you do it, it’s stealing. When Jeff Reisig does it, it’s standard practice.”
I’ll go by Cosmo over Rusty.
[quote]”As I’m sure you are aware, sharing Op-Eds and word-for-word talking points is standard practice in such political campaigns,” Mr. Raven continued.”
[/quote]
Intelligent people understand the difference between reiterating “talking points” and plagiarism. Reisig plagiarized and got caught.
Keep trying to make a mountain out of a mole hill. You all are coming off looking quite foolish.
Rusty: It seems like you are trying to downplay it. Not sure why.
Because it isn’t an issue, not hard to understand unless you have an agenda.
“Because it isn’t an issue”
It isn’t an issue for you perhaps, but clearly a number of people think that it is an issue. Do they have an agenda? Perhaps, but then again, so do you.
it appears this issue will not die until Reisig’s head is mounted on the vanguard trophy wall.
Let’s not pretend that Reisig could say the sky is blue and David wouldn’t find some way to turn it into cash for convictions. Could Reisig done a better job of chaining the talking points around and rewording them, sure. Do the people here REALLY think Reisig didn’t know what he was doing when he issued the statement. I have a hard time believing that ANYONE who issued a statement like that didn’t know that they were essentially moving forward the talking points.
David even refers to it as boilerplate. Is it plagiarism or boilerplate? I am under no illusion that this is an issue anywhere but in liberal hubs.
MO:
I get that I’m easy to dismiss here, but how do you shrug off Cosmo Garvin and Van Zandt?
” Do the people here REALLY think Reisig didn’t know what he was doing when he issued the statement. I have a hard time believing that ANYONE who issued a statement like that didn’t know that they were essentially moving forward the talking points. “
That’s what concerns me. (A) It’s one thing to take talking point and address them, it’s another thing to lift points from another op-ed verbatim. People keep saying there are talking points out there for DA’s, but so far it’s an N of 2 and the two are three months apart.
(B) Just because he takes talking points doesn’t relieve him of the obligation to fact check them.
Finally, I like how this issue has been cast into liberal-conservative terms. Neither the criticism of Reisig nor the DP falls under traditional lines. I know quite a few conservatives who dislike Reisig and some liberals who don’t. Don Heller is not a liberal. Neither is Ron Briggs. Frankly I don’t know Jeanne Woodford’s politics at all.
I know that several of the people on our steering committee that planned the death penalty event were actually conservative Republicans.
It’s easy to go after the ACLU, it’s harder to go after Don Heller.
[quote]David even refers to it as boilerplate. Is it plagiarism or boilerplate? I am under no illusion that this is an issue anywhere but in liberal hubs.[/quote]
The point for me is not whether it is an issue “anywhere but in liberal hubs”, but whether or not it should be.
Because something is common practice “boilerplate” does not make it the best, most honest, or ethical manner in which to procede. I think that Don had this just about right when he said this represents the slippery slope. I don’t see plagiarism or boilerplate as absolutes, but rather on a continuum. True, I don’t think what Reisig did broke any laws. And if that is what you are using as your standard, then this becomes a non issue. If you believe that public officials should be holding themselves to a higher standard, and leading by example, then perhaps it is an issue.
My question to those who see this as a non issue is “Would you feel the same, and be defending an author on the left with whom you disagree so rigorously ? ” And if not, why not ?
[quote]My question to those who see this as a non issue is “Would you feel the same, and be defending an author on the left with whom you disagree so rigorously ? ” And if not, why not ?[/quote]
Talking points is a basic of the political system. Look at our national politicians not he left and the right, they ALL do it. To avoid being one sided we can look at Obama and Mitt. THey are BOTH pushing talking points. THey both have speech writers and give the IDENTICAL speech over and over. Those speeches are not their own original thoughts. Is that’s plagiarism?
David admits that he is easy to dismiss. If there wasn’t such a clear vendetta against Reisig and anything that comes from the DA’s office David would be harder to dismiss.
Are Scully and Reisig working on their campaign against SAFE on their own time, using their own resources?
[quote]My question to those who see this as a non issue is “Would you feel the same, and be defending an author on the left with whom you disagree so rigorously ? [/quote]
Yes. For me this is a non-issue period.
David, keep the updates coming on this issue. Just because a couple of commenters are defending the DA for whatever odd reasons they have, this is a big issue for most people. CNN just suspended Fareed Zakaria over it. We do want to know when our DA or any other official does wrong.
[quote]Talking points is a basic of the political system. Look at our national politicians not he left and the right, they ALL do it. To avoid being one sided we can look at Obama and Mitt. THey are BOTH pushing talking points. THey both have speech writers and give the IDENTICAL speech over and over. Those speeches are not their own original thoughts. Is that’s plagiarism?
[/quote]
Having a paid speech writer that everyone is aware that you have is a far cry from cribbing an article virtually in its entirety from another person in your same position. I doubt that Reisig has paid for the services of Scully as a speech writer. On a related note, this was not a standard stump speech, it was being passed off as an opinion piece by Mr. Reisig. I do not have enough knowledge of Mr. Reisig to have a preset position of animosity towards him, but this remains an issue for me.