Ex-senior prosecutor airs Stanislaus County DA’s Office dirty laundry

A prosecutor was promoted to chief deputy district attorney while still serving probation for drunken driving, according to a lawsuit brought by a former employee claiming that Stanislaus County District Attorney Birgit Fladager played favorites within the office.

Douglas Maner, who supported Fladager’s opponent before she was elected in 2006, says he faced discipline and eventually was forced out mostly for being rude, while Fladager overlooked Douglas Raynaud’s DUI conviction when promoting him.

Maner says Fladager ignored or gave hand-slaps to others, including:

▪ Another attorney convicted of drunken and hit-and-run driving

▪ Clerks who did not type up paperwork in time, leading to the dismissal of 40 criminal cases

▪ An employee who lied while threatening someone in an attempt to recover property lost in a burglary of the employee’s home

▪ A prosecutor who, when taken off a criminal case with multiple defendants, failed to tell his successor about a plea deal worked out with one of the defendants

▪ An employee who proposed to someone that they “shut the door and take more clothes off”

▪ A former chief deputy, now a judge, who ridiculed jurors and defense attorneys in emails

Raynaud did not return a phone call Friday. In an email, Fladager said, “I cannot comment on pending litigation, much as I might really want to.” She’s hoping to hear soon from a federal judge weighing her request to throw out Maner’s lawsuit, which her attorneys have called frivolous.

“The judge asked Maner’s lawyer at least three times to tell him what evidence he had to support his claims,” Fladager said, referring to a hearing held Tuesday in Fresno’s federal court.

Maner left the office in 2013 and, as a private defense attorney, regularly opposes Fladager’s prosecutors. His lawsuit alleges violations of constitutional rights protecting political association and speech.

“The deputy DAs’ productivity, efficiency and morale have never been at a lower point,” said Maner, who worked two decades for the office. “There never has been a better time to be a criminal defense attorney in Stanislaus County, unless, of course, your name is Frank Carson.”

He referred to the prominent Modesto attorney now charged with murder and in the middle of a months-long preliminary hearing. Carson ran against Fladager in 2014, and his supporters say he is a victim of selective prosecution to remove one of the most successful thorns in Fladager’s side.

Maner was a former senior prosecutor who enjoyed prestigious assignments such as high-profile murder trials and arguing against parole for inmates with life terms. He publicly supported former Judge Michael Cummins in the hard-fought 2006 campaign and was relieved of courtroom duty when Fladager won the election, his lawsuit says, while others received preferential treatment.

“Maner was held to arbitrary standards that were not applied to other employees. ... A jury could conclude that politics was the reason for this double standard,” a brief reads.

Superiors who previously gave Maner “exceptional” performance ratings downgraded them once Fladager took over. They wrote him up multiple times, leading to a string of disciplinary steps before he left, according to the lawsuit.

In contrast, Fladager reduced Raynaud’s 45-day job suspension after his 2011 misdemeanor DUI conviction to 10 days, court papers say. He initially didn’t apply for the promotion to chief deputy in 2013, while serving three years of court-ordered informal probation, but Fladager reopened the application window for a short time and chose Raynaud when he applied.

In a deposition for Maner’s case, Fladager indicated she worried about public perception before promoting Raynaud because his DUI conviction was not “a good thing.” She said people would not find out about discipline resulting from her prosecutors breaking the law because personnel matters are confidential.

Like Raynaud, prosecutor Sandra Bishop – convicted of drunken driving and hit-and-run in 2007 – also had her job suspension reduced, from 45 to 20 days. Those were the only suspensions in Fladager’s tenure, she said in a deposition, and Maner has been the only employee targeted at one point for termination, though he eventually resigned. She fired one employee for drug use, she said in the deposition.

Prosecutors with the state attorney general’s office – not Fladager’s – handled Raynaud’s and Bishop’s DUI cases.

The three other, unnamed employees figuring in Maner’s lawsuit all received letters of reprimand and continued working.

The employee whose home was burglarized in 2012 found stolen items in a Craigslist ad, dialed the number and used obscenities while stating that the District Attorney’s Office was actively investigating the crime, court papers say. But that was untrue, and the worker got in trouble when the advertiser called Turlock police.

Fladager did not address questionable emails, say papers in Maner’s case, from then-chief deputy Alan Cassidy, who now is a Stanislaus judge. For example, Cassidy in 2011 referred to a man tried in a robbery case as a “scum-sucking defendant.”

Cassidy declined to comment.

Fladager was an office administrator prior to her election. Before they ran against each other, Cummins complained to her that one of her prosecutors refused to compromise when confronted with strong evidence of a man’s innocence. That’s “prosecutorial whoredom, in my view,” Cummins said in a deposition, but Fladager did nothing, he said.

The office investigated Maner for “urinating only a few feet away from a female who was in the restroom painting the interior,” according to county attorneys. In a deposition, Maner said no sign had indicated the bathroom was closed, that he had urinated in a closed back stall, and that he found out later that the person painting a mural in the men’s room was a woman and that she was the wife of chief deputy John Goold. She accepted his apology, he said.

Goold had prosecuted a man accused of shooting a woman in her car at Modesto’s Vintage Faire Mall. The defendant initially faced a murder charge but Goold and another prosecutor eventually settled for a manslaughter plea. Goold, Cummins said in a deposition, was stung by criticism in Cummins’ campaign, including posters reading, “The Modesto mall killer is free because the DA’s office couldn’t get the job done.”

“I was told that Goold was pushing the incident because of vindictive payback or because he was out to get me,” a Maner declaration says.

Goold did not return a phone call seeking comment.

“Many (prosecutors) were fearful of not supporting Fladager because of possible future retaliation, and kept their political support secret out of fear of supporting the losing candidate,” Maner’s attorney wrote in court papers.

Prosecutors were encouraged to oppose requests for continuances, which usually favor the defense, but when Maner did, he was disciplined for being rude to a judge, court papers say.

“It was six years of mistreatment and harassment and just toxic and hostile work environment,” Maner said in a deposition.

Fladager’s attorneys said in court papers that Maner’s lawsuit is fraught with “spin and speculation” and should be thrown out. He was disciplined five times before she was elected, a document says, and another prosecutor who had supported Cummins has never been disciplined.

“Maner’s opposition papers inundate the court with inadmissible, immaterial ‘evidence’ with the apparent hope that the court will assume a triable issue of fact must exist buried in the morass of paperwork,” a county brief says, asking a judge to dismiss the case.

This story was originally published May 7, 2016 at 1:02 PM with the headline "Ex-senior prosecutor airs Stanislaus County DA’s Office dirty laundry."