Special to the Vanguard
Oakland, CA – The county DA’s office messed up “due to the failures of the prosecution team.” Alameda County Superior Court Judge Delia Trevino dismissed a sexual assault case because of, in her words, “overwhelming and outrageous” failures by the prosecution team. Judge Trevino is a former prosecutor in the Alameda DA’s Office for 17 years, and she felt compelled to dismiss the case to “protect the integrity of the justice system.”
In finding that the Brady violation was so egregious as to require the dismissal of the case, Judge Trevino wrote: “The evidence pointed to carelessness on the part of the prosecution team with mishandling of evidence, lack of effort at obtaining relevant discovery, poor response to defense discovery 
requests, and insufficient follow through.”
This seems to be a trend under the current leadership team of DA Nancy O’Malley and Chief Deputy DA Terry Wiley, who is running to replace his boss in this November 8 election.
Just last year, the Public Defenders Office filed a motion to dismiss a case because of a decade-long “troubling and extensive pattern of misconduct.”
The motion highlighted numerous prosecutors who handled cases with such reckless abandon that cases were dismissed or reversed. When asked about the prosecutors and their misconduct in a KPFA radio interview (Player | KPFA) Chief Assistant DA, Wiley stated that misconduct “would not happen” on his watch. When pressed further by the host of “Law and Disorder” about one prosecutor who illegally recorded a defendant and lawyers’ conversation, Mr. Wiley back-peddled and said, “She learned her lesson” and he would be keeping her on the job.
Currently, the DA’s office has no transparency around how it reprimands prosecutors who operate outside the rules of the court.
It is also important to note that the prosecutors and their families in the case dismissed by Judge Trevino have donated more than $10,000 to Mr. Wiley’s campaign to gain the ultimate job promotion to district attorney.
“Public safety requires public trust,” said Civil Rights Attorney Pamela Price, who is running against Wiley in the Nov. 8 election. Price finished 16 points ahead of Wiley in the June 2022 primary.
“We have seen too many examples of failures in our criminal justice system in Alameda County—just look at those 47 deputies who failed their psych evaluation and should have never been on the job in the first place. The status quo must go.”
Price is referring to another revelation that recently-replaced Alameda County Sheriff Greg Ahern allowed 47 deputies to continue on the job after receiving a “failing” psychological exam. One of those deputies, Devin Williams, Jr., killed Benison Tran, 57, and his wife Maria Tran, 42 in their Dublin home.,
All but 3 of the 47 deputies have since “passed” their exams and are still serving in the County Sheriff’s office. Price adds, “I can’t say this enough—public safety requires public trust. As DA, our transition team will vet how these particular deputies affected any pending or past cases, and whether they were implicated in any injuries or deaths that took place at Santa Rita Jail. We will work with the new Sheriff to ensure those who are supposed to protect public safety are fit for the task. My position is that not only is it a violation of state law to hire someone as a peace officer who fails a psychological exam, it is a threat to public safety that cannot be tolerated in our criminal justice system. We need to clean up our DA’s office; otherwise, it will just be more of the status quo, which is not working.”
