"This is a very troubling decision because you have a prosecutor becoming a consultant, helping develop a screenplay, getting himself on film, obtaining a movie credit and at the same time being allowed to remain on the case," Blatt said.
The state high court also sided with Santa Barbara County Deputy Dist. Atty. Joyce Dudley, who wrote a novel, "Intoxicating Agent," about "a heroine prosecutor's decision whether to try a rape case involving an intoxicated victim," the court said. The book was released months before Dudley was scheduled to try a case with similar allegations.
Massley Harushi Haraguchi, the defendant, won an appeals court ruling that removed Dudley from his prosecution. Haraguchi charged that Dudley's book gave her an incentive to refuse to agree to a plea bargain because a trial would promote her book.
The appeals court ruled for the accused rapist, contending that Dudley's prosecution of a case would be "unseemly."
But the California Supreme Court said that "only an actual likelihood of unfair treatment, not a subjective perception of impropriety" can warrant removal of a prosecutor or a prosecutor's office.
The court cited a trial judge's finding that the timing of Dudley's book publication a few months before Haraguchi's trial was coincidental and that the fictional rape case was unrelated to Haraguchi's case.
Werdegar called these findings significant.
"Whatever financial incentives her novel created for Dudley, those incentives were not likely to alter how she handled the Haraguchi case," Werdegar wrote.
Still, the court said it did "not condone actions that place a prosecutor's literary career ahead of, or at odds with, her fealty to the fair and evenhanded pursuit of justice."
"Writers are often encouraged to 'write what they know,' but the prosecutor who follows that advice in ways that touch on pending matters may compromise her ability to carry out her duties to represent the People and to seek justice impartially," Werdegar wrote.
Santa Barbara County Senior Deputy Dist. Atty. Gerald McC. Franklin, who represented the prosecutors, said another prosecutor had already been assigned to Hollywood's case. Zonen prosecuted several co-defendants of Hollywood.
Franklin said the files Zonen gave the filmmaker could have been obtained elsewhere, but "looking back on it, it was probably not a good idea" that Zonen turned them over unscreened. Franklin was unsure whether Dudley would now prosecute the rape case.
