Former longtime Santa Clara County sheriff Laurie Smith was formally removed from office Tuesday as a result of guilty verdicts in her civil corruption trial from earlier this month, marking an ignominious end to a nearly half-century career with the agency, which had been marred by scandal in the last decade.
The effect of San Mateo County Superior Court Judge Nancy Fineman’s sentencing is largely symbolic, since Smith resigned Oct. 31 while a jury was in deliberations for the hybrid civil-criminal trial. The verdict carried no punishment beyond removal from office.
Smith’s resignation had been an apparent attempt to render the trial moot and avoid the stain of being found guilty of corruption, but Fineman rejected the ex-sheriff’s argument, and jurors were allowed to finish their work. The judge voiced wariness of allowing defendants, already accused of abusing their power, to engineer their own resolutions and avoid court judgments.
A last-ditch effort to nullify the verdicts — through a motion for a new trial based on the the same mootness argument that Fineman rejected earlier this month — was again denied by the judge during a court hearing held on Zoom on Tuesday.
“I don’t find it moot even though Sheriff Smith resigned,” Fineman reiterated Tuesday. “I find it’s not the same as removal.”
Fineman also denied a motion by Smith’s attorney Allen Ruby to dismiss the case on the argument that the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark Bruen ruling, which outlawed “good cause” tests for issuing concealed-carry weapons permits, warranted dismissing most of the corruption counts related to Smith’s CCW practices. It echoed a pretrial motion that Fineman also denied.
After denying the defense motions Tuesday, Fineman entered her final judgment.
“It is hereby adjudged and ordered that the defendant, Laurie Smith, is forthwith removed from the office of sheriff of the county of Santa Clara,” she said, reading aloud her formal order.
During the Zoom hearing, Smith did not turn on her video camera, even though Fineman asked her to, and briefly spoke only to affirm her presence.
After the hearing, Ruby declined to answer questions about the judgment or whether he planned to appeal the verdict. Gabriel Markoff, a San Francisco assistant district attorney prosecuting the case because of declared conflicts in Santa Clara County — the same reason for why Fineman was presiding — also declined comment.
The guilty verdicts reached Nov. 3 have no effect on Smith’s pension — she retired with a salary topping $300,000 — because state law requires a felony corruption conviction to trigger penalties to a public official’s pension benefits. The corruption trial, a seldom-held proceeding spurred by a county Civil Grand Jury investigation, followed the structure of a criminal trial but was held in civil court and had no felony implications.
Smith, who was originally elected in 1998 as the state’s first female sheriff, was on trial for accusations of corruption and willful misconduct filed by the county Civil Grand Jury last year. The grand jury alleged that she illicitly steered concealed-carry weapons permits to donors and supporters, committed perjury while undermining state gift-reporting laws, and stifled a civilian auditor’s probe into a high-profile jail-injury case.
Much of the trial retraced separate criminal bribery indictments against two of Smith’s trusted advisers — former undersheriff Rick Sung, who quietly retired in October, and Capt. James Jensen — regarding the sheriff’s office CCW issuing practices. Smith avoided criminal prosecution after she invoked her Fifth Amendment rights in refusing to testify to a criminal grand jury panel. But District Attorney Jeff Rosen said after the verdict that it is still possible for Smith to face criminal charges; the indictments are expected to go to trial next year.
Ever since Smith stepped down via a one-sentence letter to the clerk of the Board of Supervisors, Undersheriff Ken Binder has been serving as acting sheriff. Former Palo Alto police chief Robert “Bob” Jonsen is in line to be Smith’s successor; election returns show him with a 1.6-point lead over retired sheriff’s captain Kevin Jensen with 98% of the expected vote counted, according to the registrar’s office.
Because of the unique timing of Smith’s resignation in relation to the election, the Board of Supervisors is considering bypassing the typical process of taking applications and appointing an interim officeholder and may instead immediately appoint the sheriff-elect ahead of the scheduled Jan. 2 swearing-in. The board will consider the matter at its Dec. 6 meeting, two days before the county’s certification deadline for election results.
The only other instance in which a Santa Clara County public official was tried based on a civil corruption accusation was in 2002, when then-Mountain View councilmember Mario Ambra was ousted after he was convicted of one count of misconduct, based on accusations he ordered city employees to do favors for him in violation of the city charter.
Source: www.mercurynews.com