These Lawyers Enjoy the Chance to Do the Right Thing

Rick King had just about anything a new lawyer could want: great job with a reputable civil firm, great pay, nice bosses, and a spectacular view of the Saddleback Valley from his nice office.

It took him four days of employment to decide he wanted out.

“I’d done too many jobs I didn’t want while working my way through college and law school,” King told me this week. “I knew I had to find something I really enjoyed.”

So he applied for positions with both the Orange County public defender’s and district attorney’s offices. Then-Dist. Atty. Cecil Hicks said yes first. King took a $10,000 pay cut to become a prosecutor. Fifteen years later, King is still there, a supervisor for the homicide panel.

It was seeing Robert Molko’s name in the newspaper the other day that got me thinking about both him and King. And Debbie Lloyd, and Chris Evans, and Lew Rosenblum. These people were prosecuting some of the county’s most gruesome cases when I covered courtrooms as a reporter six years ago. They’re all still going strong.

Lloyd can smile about it now, but when she left the D.A.’s sexual assault team a few years ago to join the homicide panel, she had a full caseload of murders to greet her arrival.

“There was no letup in the stress,” she said. “But you get used to stress; you learn to deal with it.”

Molko is prosecuting Jonathon Daniel D’Arcy, the 34-year-old Buena Park janitor who doused his victim with gasoline and set her on fire. (The jury convicted him, but members told the judge Wednesday that they were deadlocked on the death penalty issue. The jury was ordered to return today.)

Molko, who has the lean frame of a runner (which he is), was always one of my favorite prosecutors. Highly intelligent, well-prepared, he would become so intense in the courtroom you could see his jaws tighten on cross-examination. You had the feeling that what Molko really wanted to do with most defendants was get them alone in a small room and engage them in one-on-one combat.

I was usually apprehensive running into Molko on a courthouse elevator because he never hesitated to bring up my need to lose weight. Not a subject I wanted to touch on in crowded space. He also had little tolerance for questions from anyone who had not done proper homework first. And I always felt unprepared in his presence.

Because I’ve just returned from vacation and his schedule has been hectic, we didn’t get a chance to talk this week. It’s just as well; I haven’t lost any weight.

But I was delighted to see Molko is still in the courtroom, still in a verbal slugfest with defense attorneys. D’Arcy is his last case for now; he was promoted during the past year to supervisor of the fraud unit. But when an experienced prosecutor is needed to take on a complicated case, you can expect to see him leave his desk duties to return to trial.

Another rising star in my courtroom days was Chris Evans, who is now a homicide supervisor along with King. Evans soon will prosecute John Famalaro, accused of carrying around his victim’s body in a freezer in his truck.

This time Evans is up against public defender lawyers. But I’ve wondered if it bothered Evans to know private defense attorneys like John Barnett (his opponent in the Aissa Wayne beating trial) made five times the money of a deputy D.A. Like a lot of prosecutors, Evans has had lucrative chances to go into private practice.

“But I just love my job too much,” he said. “It can be frustrating. Sometimes it takes years to get the payoff on a case. But the rewards far outweigh anything else.”

The rewards he talks about are echoed by King: “It sounds like a cliche, but this is about the only job in the system where a lawyer gets a chance to do the right thing. It’s a tremendous responsibility. But I never go after somebody unless I’m convinced he’s good for the crime.”

The job is also appealing, King said, because others before him and his colleagues made it that way.

“The Bryan Browns, the Robert Chattertons, the Tom Goethals’s, the Paul Myers’s, these are the people who really made the homicide panel what it is,” King said. “It makes you want to carry on that tradition.”

Double Duty: Long before she became known as a consultant for the O.J. Simpson criminal defense team, Lenore Walker was one of the most celebrated authorities in the field of domestic violence. She’s making two appearances in Orange County on Friday.

Walker will speak to attorneys, judicial officers and law enforcement personnel at a brown bag luncheon in Department One at the Orange County Courthouse in Santa Ana (second floor). The sponsors are the Orange County Psychological Assn. and the county’s Family Violence Council. Next up, Walker will appear at an afternoon workshop at UC Irvine for clinicians working in the field of domestic violence.

Simpson testified at his civil trial that he learned a lot about himself by listening to Walker. Let’s hope so.

Warrior Weekend: Saturday night is my night to read and relax at home. That’s because my teen-age son is in his room listening to his music, and my wife and 4-year-old daughter are glued to two hours of back-to-back TV warriors. It’s “Hercules: The Legendary Journeys” at 8 and “Xena: Warrior Princess” at 9 (Channel 5).

So when I heard that both Kevin Sorbo (Hercules) and Lucy Lawless (Xena) would be appearing at the Burbank Airport Hilton this weekend, I knew there would be no holding back my wife and daughter.

It’s the first official convention for fans of the two warriors from long ago. If you’re among those fans but Burbank is a stretch for a weekend outing, don’t worry. Mary Anderson-Harris, a spokeswoman for show sponsor Creation Entertainment, says it’s now trying to put together an Orange County show.

Wrap-Up: All of the prosecutors I had a chance to talk with this week agreed that bringing some degree of justice for the victim’s family was part of the reward of the job. But Deputy Dist. Atty. Debbie Lloyd was quick to point out that these families’ best friend in a homicide case is usually Carol Waxman. She’s the Victim/Witness Program’s liaison for the prosecution’s homicide panel.

Waxman has a tough job. She’s got to make these family members understand why the trial, by nature, is about the defendant more than it is about the victim. “But at the same time,” she says, “we want the families to know that we recognize how important this is to them, and we know how much pain they are suffering.”

She also tries to make the families understand that the prosecutors must concentrate on the legal aspects of the case, not the emotional. Waxman has worked numerous cases with all the attorneys I mentioned above.

“They’re all wonderful,” she said. “We’re very fortunate in this county to have them.”

Jerry Hicks’ column appears Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday. Readers may reach Hicks by call-ing the Times Orange County Edition at (714) 966-7823 or by fax to (714) 966-7711, or e-mail to [email protected]