By Andy Furillo
District Attorney Jan Scully told reporters Wednesday that her office will slice $6.9 million from its budget next fiscal year by laying off 50 employees, releasing eight legal research assistants and leaving 14 more vacant positions unfunded.
Scully said the 50 layoffs will include 11 deputy district attorneys who prosecute misdemeanors and other lower-level crimes. She said she has asked for pro bono help from local law firms as well as state agencies such as the Attorney General's Office and the Department of Social Services to take up the slack in prosecuting misdemeanors.
The other layoffs will come out of the DA's investigative unit, victims' services, the crime lab and legal process servers, Scully said. They will leave the office with 343 employees, down from 401 last year.
Scully said the cutbacks figure to result in more plea bargains on less-serious crimes, with possible implications for public safety.
"What you might see is in the more minor cases, you might see us early on giving better deals to get that case out of the system," Scully said. "Because what we're going to need to do is focus mostly on the serious and violent felonies. Obviously those have a greater impact. But when you're not strongly enforcing your lower-level crime, and the consequences aren't enough to get people's attention..., people kind of graduate to crime instead of (not) doing crime, so that's an issue."
The cutback in DA's investigators also raises the chance of some cases getting thrown out of court, according to Scully.
"We will no longer be able to do investigation on cases with the exception of murder cases, gang cases and sexual assault cases," she said, "which means that if a case comes into our office and it needs more work, we return it to the agency and say, 'You do the additional work.' And it has to get done. Otherwise we're not going to be able to proceed with the case and the case will get dismissed."
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