Stirling Motives Debated in Pursuing Case That Caused Defender’s Fall

SACRAMENTO — With friends like Assemblyman Larry Stirling, lawyer Alex Landon figures, who needs enemies?

Stirling, a San Diego Republican, says he was only trying to help Landon as he pursued his case for more than a year, exposing and publicizing Landon’s alleged ties to a 1972 state prison break.

“I was going to be everybody’s fair guy who got the allegations, looked them over and cleared them up with the bureaucracy,” Stirling said in a recent interview. “That’s where I was headed.”

Instead, Stirling’s efforts forced Landon from his job as director of Community Defenders Inc., a nonprofit group that provides legal defense for San Diego County’s poor. Then, last week, the county Board of Supervisors dropped plans for a proposed $40-million contract with Community Defenders.

Motives Questioned

Landon and his supporters say they find it hard to believe that Stirling’s motives were so pure.

They have accused Stirling of “McCarthyism” and described his efforts as a “crusade.” They say his conduct raises questions about the propriety of a public official using his office to wreck the reputation of a private citizen. If Stirling was sincerely interested in clearing Landon’s name, his critics ask, why did he publicize the very allegations he was trying to resolve?

“He put the cloud there,” said Charles Sevilla, a San Diego defense attorney who believes Stirling intended all along to use the Landon issue to torpedo the idea of a privately contracted legal defense system. “He and others who rallied to his waving of the bloody flag put the cloud there.”

E. Miles Harvey, chairman of the board of Community Defenders and a senior partner in one of San Diego’s top law firms, said Stirling was never interested in Landon’s version of the story.

“He’s been very accusatory throughout the whole thing toward Landon, and he’s been unwilling to listen to the fact that there might be another side of it,” Harvey said. “He kept the pot boiling.”

Currying Political Favor?

Harvey speculates that Stirling was currying political favor with the County Employees Assn., which opposed the idea of hiring private attorneys to perform public service. Harvey also suggested that Stirling might have been prompted to act by private lawyers who now work for the county on a case-by-case basis and would lose out if the contract were given to Community Defenders.

Stirling was once an associate with the law firm of C. Logan McKechnie, a defense attorney who does extensive work for the county under the current setup. County records show that the county has paid McKechnie $642,005 since 1986.

Stirling indignantly denies any suggestion that his intentions were less than honorable.

“I took an oath of office to uphold the laws of California and defend the constitutions of the United States and California from all enemies, foreign and domestic,” Stirling said. “Anything Alex Landon or E. Miles Harvey or any of their board members have to say notwithstanding, that was my sole motivation in this thing.”

Stirling acknowledged that his first contact with the issue came when the County Employees Assn. asked him, as chairman of the Assembly Public Safety Committee, to look into the way the county was handling the indigent defense matter. He said he referred the inquiry to a staff member for study, but the aide left his staff without completing the report. By then, he said, it was too late to reassign the task.

“It became irrelevant,” he said. “An analytic, objective view of it would not have achieved anything, would not have contributed anything, would not have had any effect, and I didn’t have the staff to do the work.”

Stirling also acknowledged that he had consulted McKechnie on the issue, but he downplayed the significance of that relationship. He said McKechnie, who would have benefited from the status quo but will probably lose business now that the county has decided to go with an in-house public defender, did not ask him to intervene.

“I have talked to many people about this, including Mr. McKechnie,” Stirling said. “I’ve talked to E. Miles Harvey more than I talked to Logan McKechnie.”

Phone Calls to Landon

At the heart of Stirling’s case against Landon has been the fact that those involved in the escape placed 39 telephone calls to Landon’s home and office in the weeks leading up to the escape. The fleeing felons also called Landon’s home on the night of the escape. The inmate, Ronald W. Beaty, who changed his story several times during the investigation and two trials that followed, at one time testified that Landon had smuggled jeweler’s blades into the prison and carried escape plans with him out of the institution.

Landon denied any role in the plot. He said he never smuggled blades into the prison. And he said the phone calls he received from the people who helped Beaty escape were because of his involvement in prison rights issues and his efforts to help ex-convicts get settled after they left prison. Landon also notes that he was working with Beaty on a civil rights matter at the time.

Although all the evidence Stirling has raised so far was known at the time of the trials, authorities concluded then that there was insufficient evidence to prosecute Landon.

“We did consider whether there was sufficient evidence to prosecute other people, including Landon,” said Joseph Canty, a former San Bernardino County deputy district attorney who was the prosecutor in one of the trials stemming from the escape. “The police asked us to make a decision about whether he could be prosecuted. We said no.

“We were open to prosecuting Landon. If we believed beyond a reasonable doubt that we could prove a case, we would have brought it.”

The State Bar also investigated Landon and chose not to discipline him.

No Personal Confrontation

Landon said he wonders why Stirling never confronted him personally with the allegations.

“He could have called me and said, ‘What is this, can you explain this?’ I would have been happy to talk to him about it,” Landon said. “He never did that.”

What Stirling did was send the Board of Supervisors a copy of a 1975 State Court of Appeal ruling that appeared to implicate Landon in the escape. When the board’s response did not satisfy Stirling, he quickly went public with the charges.

He dug up copies of testimony from the 1973 and 1974 trials and distributed them to newspapers, and he gave reporters copies of a confidential law enforcement report from 1974 purporting to tie Landon to prison unrest.

Stirling later circulated a copy of a Corrections Department memorandum banning Landon from visiting state prisons, and he mailed out a videotape on prison gangs quoting a state corrections official as saying that an attorney, whom he did not identify, had smuggled hacksaw blades into a prison.

Although publicly keeping his distance from the issue, Stirling privately badgered reporters whose enthusiasm for the story did not match his own.

“I’m disappointed every time I see a serious, significant wrong not righted,” Stirling said.

When the State Bar and the attorney general’s office showed little interest in reopening the issue, Stirling used his position as vice chairman of a legislative prison committee to subpoena records on the case from the state Corrections Department.

After examining the file and further investigating the issue, the committee concluded that there were “lingering questions” about Landon that needed to be resolved. The panel officially asked the attorney general’s office to reopen the investigation, and that office referred the matter to the San Bernardino County district attorney, which is now investigating.

Final Straw

Although Stirling at first insisted that he had no interest in deposing Landon, he made it clear as the case unfolded that he believed the evidence against Landon was damning. The final straw for Stirling came when it was revealed that the board of Community Defenders had excised two passages about Landon from an independent investigator’s report it had commissioned and then forwarded to the Board of Supervisors.

The deleted language involved the investigator’s impression that Landon was not telling the truth about the disputed telephone calls.

The uproar prompted County Supervisor George Bailey to say that he would not vote to approve a contract with Community Defenders if Landon remained as executive director. Then, even after Landon quit, the board rejected the contract when Supervisor Brian Bilbray, who had supported the contract in concept, switched his vote and opposed it.

Bilbray said his vote was based not on the Landon issue but on his fears about the cost of a private contract for legal defense. The board voted instead to establish an in-house department of lawyers to handle representation for the poor.

But Supervisor Susan Golding called Bilbray’s explanation “baloney.” She said the contract was lost when the issue became a “battle of personalities.”

“Larry seems to have been on a crusade on this issue,” Golding said. “It’s been very difficult for me to understand where he is coming from. I’m not comfortable with what happened at all. It was right to have raised the question. But raising the question is one thing, a crusade is an entirely different matter.”

Golding said Stirling’s behavior was reminiscent of the assemblyman’s 1985 attempts to force the county to fire two top administrators because of problems at the county’s mental health and geriatric hospitals. Stirling in that instance leaked confidential patient records and other documents to the press in an effort to discredit the county’s explanation that conditions at the hospitals were improving.

About eight months after Stirling involved himself in the issue, the Health Department director was reassigned and the county’s chief administrative officer quit.

‘Tenacious Person’

“Larry is a very tenacious person,” said Supervisor Bailey. “If I were in his place, I would have handled it (the Landon matter) differently, but that’s Larry. That’s his style.”

Supervisor Bilbray suggested that the county would be better served if Stirling used his aggressiveness to obtain more state money for the region’s health and social-service programs.

“If he can be as mean and lean on the Legislature in getting us our fair share, I think he can create miracles,” Bilbray said.

But Stirling portrays himself more as the victim than the villain in the episode. He said the last thing he wanted to do was pick a fight with Community Defenders’ chairman Harvey, whom Stirling described as a supporter and campaign contributor and “distinguished San Diegan.” Harvey has accused Stirling of “McCarthyism,” a reference to the anti-Communist mud-slinging in the 1950s by U.S. Sen. Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin.

“McCarthyism was a series of acts by a U.S. senator in which he alleged he had information and drew conclusions from it,” Stirling said. “This is exactly the opposite. I do have the information, but I drew no conclusions from it. I just passed it along to the appropriate officials.”

Stirling indicated that he decided not to loosen his grip on the issue once Harvey tried to pressure him off of Landon’s trail.

“He called me on several occasions and chewed me out and admonished me and pressured me at every opportunity,” Stirling said. “He’s a very capable guy and he decided to unleash his political power on me. And I won’t be deterred.”

But Stirling said that, as far as he is concerned, the Landon matter will end when the San Bernardino County district attorney completes his new investigation.

“The district attorney is the one man who can decide whether or not to prosecute Alex Landon,” Stirling said. “Whatever his decision, I will abide by it.”