Carmony Judge Blocks Testimony on Funding by GOP in Recall Effort

SANTA ANA — It was one of the more compelling details to emerge from the election fraud trial of GOP aide Rhonda Carmony, yet the jury got to hear none of it.

Prosecutors alleged in court Tuesday that 92% of all the money raised to recall maverick Republican Doris Allen came from Republican power brokers and legislators. With hundreds of thousands of dollars on the line, it would be the GOP’s “worst nightmare” to allow four “Republicans to split the vote and a liberal Democrat to win the election,” Assistant Dist. Atty. Brent Romney said.

Presenting the information to the jury would provide motive, prosecutors argued, going a long way toward explaining why some top Republicans pressured Carmony and others to put a second, decoy Democrat--Laurie Campbell--on the ballot in the crucial 1995 election.

But Superior Court Judge Francisco P. Briseno would have none of it.

It was the latest example of how the veteran jurist is keeping a tight rein on the trial, concerned that jurors may be inflamed by testimony about the hardball Republican political strategy and may not stay focused on the crimes alleged in the case.

“There is a danger that the trial will become embroiled” in other issues and “I don’t want someone to say the defendant was denied a fair trial,” Briseno told the lawyers Tuesday while barring some testimony about the GOP scheme to dilute the Democratic vote.

Lawyers on both sides say Briseno is juggling difficult legal issues with fairness and intelligence.

“The judge has a legitimate concern that the jurors may vote guilty not because Carmony is guilty, but because they are sick of politics and the type of unethical behavior involved,” Romney said after Tuesday’s court session.

Carmony, 27, is charged with filing and conspiring to file false nominating petitions. Under state law, the circulator of a petition must sign it, attesting to the signatures on it.

Prosecutors allege that Carmony persuaded other Republican aides to gather Democratic voters’ signatures on the spoiler’s petitions, knowing they wouldn’t sign them. The defense contends others ran the scheme, and Carmony had at most a peripheral role.

It is illegal to falsify nominating petitions, but everything else about the GOP ploy was legal. There is nothing illegal about putting a spoiler candidate on the ballot. In fact, if the Republican aides had just signed the petitions they circulated, no law would have been broken.

But to do that would have been political suicide, several have testified, because it would have linked the GOP with efforts to recruit a Democrat.

To safeguard the jury from errant testimony, Briseno has begun to stop the trial after each witness. He wants to review the points the prosecution and defense plan to raise with each person who is to testify.

On Tuesday, Briseno refused to allow prosecution testimony about more than $350,000 in campaign contributions to unseat Allen from what Romney has called “the Republican machine.”

The jury never got to see the prosecution pie chart showing that all but 8% of the contributions in the Allen recall came from GOP legislators, PACs and power brokers. Only 2% came from average “citizens” within the Assembly district Allen represented, Romney said.

Briseno has let both sides present evidence about the critical nature of the election. At stake was control of the Assembly and whether Republicans would elect their own speaker. He has also allowed extensive testimony about the decoy strategy to dilute the Democratic vote.

In drawing the line Tuesday, Briseno expressed his concern about evidence that “might cause the jurors to be confused or misled” or result in a verdict “dictated by passion or public interest.”

“I will tell the jury they have to be careful,” he said, adding that finding Carmony “participated in getting a second Democrat to split the vote” isn’t enough to find Carmony guilty of the alleged crimes.

The trial resumes at 9:30 a.m.; Campbell is expected to testify.