Fresno D.A. deflects blame after killing of police officer in Selma
Fresno County’s district attorney says Gov. Gavin Newsom is to blame for the early release from jail of a man now accused of fatally shooting a police officer. But the facts and the law don’t appear to support her accusation — and instead indicate that the district attorney’s office made a decision that helped to free the suspected killer.
Nathaniel Dixon is charged with murdering Officer Gonzalo Carrasco Jr., who was killed last Tuesday after stopping to question Dixon in the town of Selma. Dixon had been granted probation last year under a California law, AB109, that sought to reduce the state’s prison population by moving lower-level felons from state prison to county jail, making them eligible for early release. And District Attorney Lisa Smittcamp promptly pointed the finger at Newsom.
“Gov. Gavin Newsom, and every legislator in the state of California who supports this over-reaching phenomenon they try to disguise as legitimate criminal justice reform, has the blood of this officer on their hands,” Smittcamp said in a statement Wednesday. “The governor and his political allies who continue the quest to close state prisons are increasing the incidents of violence to everyone who lives in, or visits, the state of California. No city or county is safe from the wrath of this misguided thinking, and this mismanaged prison system.”
But AB109 was enacted in 2011, more than seven years before Newsom became governor, in response to a U.S. Supreme Court order to lower the population of California’s overcrowded prisons by 30,000 and bring the prisons’ shoddy health care system up to constitutional standards.
And while the new law, known as “realignment,” was supported only by Democrats in the Legislature, it allowed transfers and early releases only to inmates who had not been convicted of violent or serious felonies. Dixon, 23, who had a past conviction for robbery, pleaded no contest last March to charges of possession of a controlled substance while armed and possession of a firearm by a felon — neither of them considered serious or violent felonies under California law — under a plea agreement negotiated by prosecutors in Smittcamp’s office. He was sentenced to five years and four months in custody but, after credit for time already served, was freed on probation in September.
Newsom said the district attorney was trying to blame him for her own malfeasance.
“After initially charging the suspect with 10 offenses, the Fresno D.A. agreed to a plea agreement with only two charges that carried a sentence of five years and four months,” the governor said in a statement. “He was not convicted for his violent conduct at the time of his arrest, during which he had two illegal loaded guns in his car, he lunged at an officer and tried to grab the officer’s firearm, and forcefully resisted arrest. At the time of his crimes he was also under a domestic violence restraining order and had recently failed on probation for a prior strike conviction — an armed robbery with a deadly weapon the year before.
“I’m sick and tired of being lectured by her on public safety,” Newsom said. “With all due respect to her statement, she should be ashamed of herself and should look in the mirror.” Smittcamp lashed back. “Gov. Newsom continues to demonstrate his ignorance and lack of understanding of how the criminal justice system works,” the district attorney said later Wednesday. “His arrogant and defensive response is proof positive that he is attempting to deflect responsibility for his failed policies.”
But Smittcamp did not mention the role of her office in the plea agreement that led to Dixon’s release. She has not yet responded to an email query from The Chronicle.
But at a news conference in Fresno on Friday, she continued to blame Newsom, saying that “people are being pushed out” of prison because of laws the governor supported, according to the online publication GV Wire. Smittcamp acknowledged, however, that the plea agreement had spared Dixon from a prison sentence that could have exceeded six years, which would have kept him behind bars during this week’s events.
Her argument is consistent with a strategy by fellow Republicans, and conservative prosecutors, who backed California’s three-strikes law and other measures that increased sentences and filled the prisons, and now seek to preserve them by blaming violent crimes on liberal Democrats. Supporters of realignment, however, cite studies that concluded the state’s rates of violent crimes and overall crime declined to their lowest levels in decades during the first few years after passage of the 2011 law. The rates have leveled off since then.
“She could have charged (Dixon) with more crimes and gotten tougher,” said David Mugridge, a longtime criminal defense lawyer and legal commentator in Fresno. But he said Smittcamp and her staff, like other prosecutors, had to “take the best guess about who we can release who would be the least dangerous” and made such a decision in this case.
Other legal observers, such as law professor Franklin Zimring of UC Berkeley, agreed that it was Smittcamp, not Newsom, whose decision led to Dixon’s release.
Smittcamp was first elected district attorney in 2014, defeating a two-term incumbent, and was reelected to her third term without opposition last June.
She is “very conservative” and also “one of most well respected D.A.’s that Fresno County has had back to the mid-’70s,” Mugridge said. “Not somebody that just flies off the handle.”
On Thursday, Smittcamp told KMJ in Fresno that “I would love to have the governor come down here. So maybe if he would start listening to some of my lectures, he wouldn’t make so many mistakes.”
Mugridge said the governor should accept the invitation, despite its tone.
“He’s not the one that created AB109,” but “I think she views him as the one who could do something about it,” the defense lawyer said. “Both sides need to stop throwing mud at each other.”