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I cannot sit silently by when it comes to a discussion of whether Brizzi should be reelected. I consider him the worst prosecutor I have dealt with in 21 years of practice.
On April 17, 2004, my client, Donald Turner, was shot by his neighbor, Julian Munoz. The bullet passed through his right lung and exited near his spine. He spent the next three weeks in intensive care with a collapsed lung.
Before he contacted me, police arrested Munoz, and Brizzi’s office charged him with Battery, as a Class C felony (based on the use of a deadly weapon). Once I got involved, I quietly asked Deputy Prosecutor Judy Johnson-Shock why they had not charged Munoz with something like Aggravated Battery or Attempted Murder, and she did not give me any meaningful answer.
I approached the criminal prosecution by offering to help and expressing my willingness to cooperate in any way they thought would be helpful. I had done background research on Munoz, and tried to share information about his criminal history in Texas that they would not have known about.
My client and I attended eleven pretrial conferences over the next eleven months. There were no discovery disputes or suppression issues. In each hearing, Brizzi’s office continued to offer Munoz more generous plea offers, and each time he refused, they threatened him on the record with amending the charges to include a more serious charge of Aggravated Battery, which would include a mandatory minimum six-year sentence. Even though I kept encouraging the stronger charge, it never materialized.
The case would have kept going on like this, except the judge finally forced the State to get a plea or be ready for trial. The State then agreed to a plea with the minimum two-year mandatory minimum (mandatory under Ind. Code § 35-50-2-2(b)(4)), with no probation. The lack of probation really surprised me, because I had repeatedly told Johnson-Shock about the $30,000 in medical bills I was attempting to recover. Worse yet, Johnson-Shock had her inexperienced intern contact my client without my knowledge or permission to get his agreement on the plea, and he had no clue about the opportunity for restitution, and how that would be much easier and quicker to enforce than waiting for our civil case to mature.
This was one of four cases I where I had a victim of a crime for a client, and I was hoping for cooperation from Brizzi’s office. In each time, getting help and cooperation was next to impossible, in spite of the idea that we could be seen as seeking the same goal: to help the victim.
This brings me to Brizzi’s motto: “Criminals have a choice; victims don’t.” I got to learn first-hand what he really means. He means that he will give the defendant all the choices and will not be concerned in the least what the victim’s wishes are about how to proceed with the case.
One might wonder whether this is a common occurrence. It might just be that he does not like me, and is taking that out on my clients. In either case, I am worried. Brizzi is either completely unconcerned about the needs of victims of crime, or he politically spiteful enough to let victims take the heat for their lawyer’s views. In neither case is Brizzi a good prosecutor.
Let’s talk about prosecution when my client is not a victim (at least from the prosecutor’s point of view). I represented Carl Rising-Moore who was accused of fleeing and striking a police officer when he protested the President’s visit in March of 2003.
Attorney Mark Inman was coincidentally a witness to this event, and quickly told me my client had done nothing wrong, and suggested I have someone from the prosecutor’s office call him about it. After talking with Mark, they continued to prosecute. I had 7 other witnesses who backed up what Mark said.
Although charged with Battery, the police officer in his deposition said, “From my vantage point, Carl took a swing. I don't know whether -- I don't know where it came from, I don't know whether or not it was intentional, but I got hit on the left side of my face as he pulled and tried to turn away from me.” After the deposition, I asked the deputy prosecutor if he would dismiss, because intent is a required element. He said they have won worse cases.
We took the case to a jury trial, and after a short deliberation, the jury came back with a not guilty, then asked the participants why we had wasted their time. I could not answer.
What gets me about this case is how Brizzi’s office dug in its heels, giving my client the extra publicity he really wanted. If they had just done the right thing by dismissing, we would not have wasted the jury’s time, and my client’s 15 minutes of fame would have been cut much shorter.
Now let’s talk about Brizzi’s budget arguments. He has claimed that the City-County Council, of which I am a member, has cut his budget by $1.57 million. Having voted on his budget, I know that we cut his budget once, by $300,000, to support better public defense of juveniles, only to restore that back to his budget within four months. During Brizzi’s term, his non-child support budget increased from $10,783,889 to $14,140,104, a 31% increase. Child support went up over 22%. It appears Brizzi thinks it’s okay to lie to help him get back in office.
Brizzi continues to blame inadequate funding of the criminal justice system for the increase in crime and jail crowding. He does this in spite of his opposition to the increase in the County Option Income Tax that the Council voted on in early 2004, and which the Council dedicated solely to public safety. In the third year of the increase, this adds about $45 million in revenue to public safety. When it came time to hand out the first $12 million, and when the Criminal Justice Planning Council was asking Brizzi and Dave Cook how much they would need to pay deputy prosecutors and deputy public defenders enough to eliminate turnover, Brizzi had to be forced to come up with numbers, because he preferred to have the money go to police officers. The decision to pay deputy prosecutors an additional $12,000 a year came from outside the prosecutor’s office.
For those complaining that Melina Kennedy should not be saying she will be tough on crime, keep in mind that Carl Brizzi says the same thing. When Brizzi says it, it is a sound bite with no thought or depth. When Melina Kennedy says it, she knows that tough means smart. She knows that charging an impossible-to-prove charge and imposing a plead-the-lead plea policy is neither tough nor smart.
For more information about Melina Kennedy's campaign, please visit MelinaKennedy.com. For Melina Kennedy's plan to attack crime in our community, please go to Melina's Notes from Your Neighbors.
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