Are you kidding me? I want to give you the facts of this case
slowly, as I find it hard to believe.
Calvin Parker is the defendant in this case, as he is accused of
murdering and dismembering his Brazilian housemate. Upon his arrest, the San Diego District Attorney’s Office sent
John Shale, one of their psychiatrists, to evaluate Mr. Parker. So far so good; nothing unusual yet. What takes this case into Rod Serling’s
Twilight Zone is the fact that Dr. Shale is also a lawyer; in fact, he is a
part-time Deputy District Attorney, and was assigned to be one of the trial
attorneys on this case. In other words,
first he evaluates the defendant in his role as Dr. Shale, and then he
prosecutes Mr. Parker as Deputy District Attorney Shale. Do you think there’s a conflict there? Maybe I ought to start doing that. In the criminal cases I defend, I could
perform psychiatric evaluations on my clients as Dr. Unger, Psychotherapist,
and then represent the people in court.
Do you think that I might be somewhat conflicted when evaluating the
individual about to become my law client?
The judge hearing this case
indicated that he had never heard of anything like this in his thirty years as
a judge; however, he did not find any law that would cause the DA’s office to
have to disqualify itself from the case.
To add insult to injury,
the Judge in this case, Michael Wellington, found that John Shale did not
engage in misconduct when he called the defense attorney’s expert psychiatrist
to attempt to get information from her about her opinions and conclusions
regarding the defendant and further attempted to get her to change her mind
away from her pro-defense view. The
Judge called Shale’s actions more in the line of stupidity than bad faith. That is absolutely ridiculous. The Judge also used the word “inattention”
to characterize John Shale’s behavior.
Mr. Shale’s career
developed in the opposite order of that which I pursued. Mr. Shale had been a psychiatrist for a
lengthy period of time, who then went to law school and passed the bar in
1999. I have been practicing criminal
defense law for twenty-one years, and in 1994, I went back to school at night
to become “Dr. Charlie” and to see patients as a psychotherapist.
When Parker was arrested,
Shale was contacted by a Deputy District Attorney named James Pippin, who was
the Division Chief, and he was told that he would be sitting second chair if
the case went to trial, and he should go to the police station to evaluate Mr.
Parker. What was Pippin thinking?
When he arrived at the
police station, Mr. Shale observed police investigators interrogating Mr.
Parker and then Shale went in alone. At
the time Mr. Shale interviewed Parker, attorneys from the Public Defender’s
Office had not yet been appointed to defend Parker; however, when they watched
the video tape of Shale’s questioning of Parker, they stated it was something
that had very little to do with psychiatry, and was “a fine dress rehearsal to
cross examination.” Nothing like
getting a free pass to get a practice round in of cross examining the
defendant.
Although the Judge did not
make the rulings I would have liked to have seen, the good news is that,
perhaps due to publicity, Dr. Shale is no longer assigned to prosecute this
case. There is a difference between
something that is legally wrong, and something ethically or morally wrong. If this situation does not fit the former,
it certainly fits the latter. While Dr.
Shale is no longer prosecuting Mr. Parker, Deputy District Attorney Pippin
indicates that they still may call Shale as an expert witness in Parker’s trial
when it commences.
Rest assured that if Parker
is convicted and Shale testifies, there will be an appeal in this case. This is clearly an opportunity for an
appellate court to step in and set some firm rules regarding prosecutorial
misconduct.
Dr. Charles J. Unger is a criminal defense attorney
in the Glendale law firm of Flanagan, Booth & Unger, and a therapist at the
Foothill Centre for Personal and Family Growth. Mr. Unger writes a bimonthly column on legal and psychological
issues. He can be reached at charlie@charlieunger.com