Traditionally, new lawyers would file and prosecute such cases for a year or two before graduating to a senior section, such as narcotics, fraud or public corruption, O'Brien said. But because of a hiring freeze between September 2005 and June of last year, the office had essentially run out of rookie lawyers.
As a result, O'Brien and Cardona encouraged all lawyers to go after cases both big and small.
Numeric goals were set out of concern that some prosecutors might tend to ignore more-routine criminal cases. O'Brien said goals were set for each section of the office based on the average number of defendants charged in previous years. He declined through a spokesman to specify what the goals were then or what they are now.
O'Brien's critics question his motives in pushing for increased productivity. They say he wants higher stats to help his chances of remaining in the politically connected post of U.S. attorney regardless of who wins the presidential election in November. O'Brien denied that accusation.
"What I'm trying to do is make this community safer by putting more defendants who commit federal crimes in federal prison," he said.
O'Brien also has his backers. They say most of the people complaining about the new goals are "slugs" who need to be held accountable. O'Brien's hard-charging style has "sort of fired up a lot of us," one lawyer said.
"Even if there is a quota, so what?" said Greg Staples, a veteran prosecutor in the Santa Ana office who has worked on a string of high-profile cases in recent years. "Doing small cases and big cases at the same time is possible. All we're being told is to produce on a regular basis."
Timothy J. Searight, who supervises the narcotics section in the L.A. office, said that he recalls "some grumbling" when the goals were introduced but that most his 18 attorneys "didn't really have much to say about it one way or the other."
Searight says he records his prosecutors' individual stats on a board in his office for everyone to see.
"But we're not focused on getting the highest stats possible just to get the highest stats," he said.
"We're focused on getting the most crime possible off the streets."
The board, he said, helps keep some attorneys focused on that objective.
Whether it was through quotas or goals, the message delivered last March had immediate results: Case filings in the months after the meeting shot up dramatically.
