By David M. Greenwald
Executive Editor
If the Vanguard calls out the Yolo DA, it’s standard. But when the criticism comes from someone like Rich Rifkin, a moderate, sometimes even leaning conservative on law and order matters, you know the DA has stepped in it.
“Yolo County District Attorney Jeff Reisig needs to be reprimanded for his reckless and wasteful decision to force the recently held and then abandoned jury trial to decide the competency of Carlos Reales Dominguez,” Rifkin said in his lede.
While Rifkin points out that the pursuit by the DA’s office was legal, he actually went a bit further than I would have, arguing that they were attempting “to prove their machismo by not accepting medical findings.”
Rifkin argues, “That was neither wise nor just.”
I do agree that the “intense” and “widespread” nature of this horrific crime was at the core of these decisions.
The reality is this is the modus of DA Reisig. Last week, a long time reader, and by no means a Reisig hater, reminded me that Reisig has done this before. For example, he cut his teeth on the Halloween Homicide case.
And while he won that one, it came at a high cost, as the case exposed potential prosecutorial misconduct. And even worse, in my view, it ended in the conviction of three people who were either completely innocent or only peripherally involved.
In another high-profile case, the Andy Stevens murder, he got the conviction of the actual shooter, Brendt Volarvich but also caught up Greg Zielesch, who had nothing to do with the tragic killing.
Similarly, in the 2016 Casa del Sol killing, the DA personally helped prosecute that case, which has now come back to Yolo County for a retrial. Last week, this same Judge McAdam expressed skepticism about the sufficiency of the evidence, but finally allowed the matter to go forward for a jury to decide.
This is a clear pattern of this DA—take advantage of the high-profile case, and sometimes overreach. Although usually the backfire has been on the backs of innocent co-defendants rather than the DA’s office itself.
This led our reader to speculate that Matt De Moura, who some believe has ambitions of his own, to attempt to raise his profile to run for DA when Reisig retires. The problem in this case, is that Dominguez’s clear mental illness makes him look less like a predator and more like a victim of an inept mental health system.
As Rifkin points, “He wasn’t just an angry man. He wasn’t simply someone who got pleasure from causing harm. His brain — for biochemical reasons — had gone haywire.:
Instead of acknowledging the obvious—Jeff Reisig and Matt De Moura, Rifkin argues, “exploited the state law which allows competency to be determined by a jury of ordinary, untrained citizens. “
That’s the part that never made a ton of sense to me. It is one thing to challenge the findings of the psychiatric evaluation—that happens all the time—but demanding a jury trial? They were clearly calculating that the horrific nature of the crime would outweigh the medical diagnosis.
While it seemed fairly obvious that this guy was suffering serious psychological problems before, they probably underestimated the weight of three evaluators and the severity of his condition, which seems to continue to descend.
Rifkin, however, points out the absurdity of using a jury to make such a determination.
He writes, “Imagine your oncologist diagnoses you with cancer, and rather than accept that or look for a second opinion from a highly skilled MD, you let 12 random people who have no medical education decide your diagnosis. That’s effectively what Reisig and De Moura did in pushing for this ill-advised competency trial.”
Rifkin also cites Robert Canning’s guest piece in the Vanguard, who argued that “delaying for over one month Dominguez’s admittance to a psychiatric hospital — where he would have received better medical care than is available at the Yolo County jail — comes at a price.”
Canning, Rifkin notes, argues that “it’s likely it will now take longer to restore (or at least improve) Dominguez’s mental health than if he had been treated by psychiatrists and psychologists in a hospital as soon as he was diagnosed.”
This incident is really an indictment of the entire mental health system. After all, we heard testimony that Dominguez’s descent started last fall and yet the system was not able to intervene in time to prevent horrific tragedy.
We have a woefully underfunded mental health system, where in many counties the largest provider of mental health services is the county jail. And as we saw even in a relatively affluent and well-resourced county like Yolo, that’s just not sufficient and a jail is not equipped to provide the care and treatment needed.
That is not to let the DA off the hook here, because they played their part in making this problem worse than it needed to be. I still think that Judge McAdam, who largely had his hands tied by state law, made an important by pushing for the Riese hearing that ultimately led not only to Dominguez receiving medication, but the DA’s office being forced to reconsider.
Rifkin considers whether there are any ramifications for the misconduct performed by Reisig. But that’s the exact problem.
Rifkin argues, “The question now is what punishment Reisig deserves for this extraordinary folly. If it were his own money, he’d never have wasted it trying to prove that Carlos Dominguez was competent.”
But ultimately, Rifkin is right, saying “it’s unlikely anyone will hold Reisig to account. Although the DA is elected to his position by the voters of Yolo County, the vast majority of people have no idea what he’s done in office.”
But, for a moment at least, the veil has been pulled back and the DA has made a very clear and public blunder. Unfortunately it is par for the course from this DA, Usually he has been able to land on his feet and allow others to pay for his mistakes.
Reisig has a history of punishing others for his mistakes, and it will be interesting to see if De Moura ends up keeping his job. A lot of others in a similar position have not.
