Stanislaus DA Birgit Fladagar’s career marked by Peterson conviction, missteps | Opinion
When we finished the interview that led to this column, Birgit Fladager went to meet a cat rescue volunteer. Having nurtured an abandoned mama cat and four newborn kittens in her home for a few weeks, it was time to transfer them to a foster pet organization.
By day, Stanislaus County’s battle-hardened, sometimes inflexible district attorney directs the work that puts murderers, rapists and child abusers behind bars. She personally sent two people to death row. But after hours, Fladager is an animal-loving softy.
Perhaps you knew this. Former Modesto Bee columnist Jeff Jardine 12 years ago wrote about Olivia, the once-feral courthouse cat that Fladager befriended way back in 1999. For years, Fladager was the only one Olivia allowed to pet her. By 2020, Olivia was at least 21 and finally failing, so Fladager took her from the courthouse to her own home, where Olivia spent the last six months of her life.
“Sort of like a steel fist in a velvet glove,” Fladager’s father once called her. He knew what he was talking about.
“When someone finds out (what I do for work), sometimes they’re shocked,” the soft-spoken Fladager told me. “Then I get, `You’re too nice to be a prosecutor.’ Are prosecutors supposed to be mean?
“Everyone is multifaceted. Everyone has a passion in their personal lives, whether children or sports or travel. I just happen to like animals.”
At 61, Fladager will have more time for all her hobbies, now that she’s stepping aside. Her assistant DA and successor, Jeff Laugero, ran unopposed and will be sworn in Jan. 3. See The Bee Editorial Board’s recent recorded interview with him at modbee.com/opinion.
The daughter of a career naval officer, Fladager graduated from high school in Iceland and was a Navy JAG prosecutor before joining the Stanislaus District Attorney’s Office in 1990.
Hers is the first and only female name among 26 on a plaque in her office lobby noting terms of service for Stanislaus DAs, dating to 1854. In her 16 years at the helm, Fladager has forged a reputation as a media-shy, no-nonsense, tough-on-crime badass. Some will remember her as the DA presiding over the most embarrassing backlog of murder cases in California, others for a vindictive streak that blinded her from seeing Frank Carson’s murder prosecution as the loser it was, leading to the second-longest murder trial in California history and a humiliating loss for her office.
In our 90-minute talk, I wondered out loud whether Fladager might be remembered more for what she did before she became DA than for anything she did while DA. “That’s a good question,” she said, reflecting on the 2004 blockbuster trial of Scott Peterson, whose victorious team of prosecutors she led as chief deputy DA.
I covered that trial as a reporter for The Modesto Bee, the hometown newspaper of Laci Peterson. She was 27 and eight months pregnant when she disappeared Christmas Eve 2002, sparking international intrigue laced with infidelity, mystery and murder.
Victory: Scott Peterson found guilty
“The characters were interesting,” she said, reflecting on reasons for the crazy, widespread attention. “The timing — right around Christmas. A pregnant woman. And people like mysteries; that’s why we have all these mystery books and detective novels and TV shows. In this one, unlike some others, he never admitted it, and he never will, and there will always be people who are going to say he didn’t do it. So it was and remains, arguably, a mystery.”
I saw firsthand how Scott Peterson’s swaggering attorney, Mark Geragos, seemed to win over viewers — and yes, jurors — in the first few weeks of trial, whose sessions Fladager did not always attend. Realizing that her deputies were scrambling for traction, Fladager became a fixture in the courtroom, although she let them continue to question witnesses. Some observers, myself included, felt the tide turn when she made an exception and led a detective on the witness stand step by step through a mountain of evidence leading authorities to Scott Peterson, the one who had vowed to love and protect Laci, as her killer.
It was masterful. Back on track, the prosecution never looked back, and Scott Peterson landed on death row until the California Supreme Court two years ago took him off it because of a judge’s pretrial errors.
And two years after the big trial, in 2006, voters elevated her to district attorney. The woman who sought justice for Modesto’s most famous dead woman had reached the pinnacle of her profession. That’s something she never sought, Fladager said, until after the Peterson trial, when she realized she was better positioned than anyone to lead the office.
“I would be very wary of someone whose dream is, `I wanna be DA,’” Fladager said. “Why would you think that way?”
When she assumed control in 2006, Fladager was one of only six female DAs in California’s 58 counties. A few years ago, about half were women. It’s not such a male-dominated field anymore.
Returning a man to the top isn’t going backward, she said. Laugero, a former police officer and former Escalon mayor, is “very even tempered,” she said. “I think it’s helpful if the boss is calm and patient and takes time to gather all the information from all sources before making a decision. They don’t react emotionally and go off half-cocked.
“I have great confidence in Jeff. He has a good moral compass.”
Embarrassing missteps
Let’s hope he can do more to fix the chronic problem that Fladager never solved: turnover. Low pay here, compared to not-so-far-away Bay Area counties, is one reason for that turnover, she said. Her critics say office morale — which always starts at the top — sagged under her leadership. Budget and staffing cuts in the Great Recession certainly didn’t help. But that’s more than a decade in our rearview mirror, and the office is still limping along with about 20% vacancy.
An awful backlog of murder cases provided another black eye. In 2015 I gathered data from all over California and found that Stanislaus murder cases were twice as high as the statewide average, adjusted for population; a follow-up piece two years after found that not much had changed. Fladager blamed a rigid courthouse calendaring system, while some judges blamed Fladager’s stubborn, must-win approach to justice.
The Carson case may have brought more bad press than anything else.
One theory holds that the brash defense attorney, who was being investigated with others, ran against Fladager in 2014 partly in hopes of blunting the case her people were building against him. He knew his supporters could always claim he was a victim of political prosecution.
She felt the evidence against him as the mastermind behind a vast conspiracy was solid, and pushed ahead. Preliminary hearings in criminal cases typically take a few hours; the Carson prelim lasted an unbelievable 18 months, and the trial, 17 months — longer than O.J. Simpson’s, Charles Manson’s and everyone else except the Hillside Strangler (1981-83), a Los Angeles Times researcher found.
At some point, I said in our recent interview, you must have sensed that this case was a loser. You must have weighed the downside of lost faith in our leaders when they disregard common sense and pursue punishment with no regard to cost, real and intangible. You put your best prosecutor in a no-win case that took forever, and when all was said and done, every single juror said you were wrong.
Fladager shrugged it off.
“I have no regrets,” she said. “We did the right thing based on the evidence.”
Every prosecution is a roll of the dice, Fladager continued. You can’t always predict how jurors will view evidence because all bring their own life experiences into the deliberation room. “A different jury with slightly different lessons learned, I think, could have given a different result.”
Terry Withrow, Stanislaus’ Board of Supervisors chairman, said, “She truly believes she’s doing the right thing in spite of what it might do to her politically.”
Although we’ve criticized her leadership at times, I will say that Fladager has never avoided my questions, to her credit.
Fladager’s legacy
What will be Fladager’s legacy?
We both know it’s the Peterson case, which she might stay involved with in retirement as an advisor; his best chance at a new trial was rejected just last week, but his other appeals will take years.
Fladager would prefer being remembered for her care of victims and survivors. She helped create the Stanislaus Family Justice Center, and she appears at a candlelight vigil for homicide victims every December.
“The community has been well served because of what she did to build up victims services,” said Jody Hayes, county CEO.
Fladager said, “(Prosecutors) choose to be in the legal arena. Police officers choose that. Expert witnesses choose that. Victims don’t choose that. It’s so important that you take care of your victims.”
Like you might a stray mama cat and her kittens.
This story was originally published December 29, 2022 at 6:14 AM.
