Prosecutor Jeff Rosen dethrones his boss Santa Clara County
District Attorney Dolores Carr after an updated tally of of votes
released at 2:30 p.m. today show Rosen has won the jobs of DA with
127,185 votes or 50.57 percent of the vote. Carr secured 124,331
votes or 49.43 percent.
Prosecutor Jeff Rosen dethrones his boss Santa Clara County District Attorney Dolores Carr after an updated tally of of votes released at 2:30 p.m. today show Rosen has won the jobs of DA with 127,185 votes or 50.57 percent of the vote. Carr secured 124,331 votes or 49.43 percent.
The latest update includes 99 percent of vote-by-mail ballots, according to the county Registrar of Voters; about 10,000 ballots remain to be counted and the bulk of those are provisional. Elma Rosas, a Registrar of Voters spokeswoman said about 7,000 of those will likely be validated. The deadline to count provisional ballots is not until early July.
But, the gap of 2,854 votes separating Rosen and Carr in the race for DA is likely too big a discrepancy for Carr to catch up; she would need two-thirds of those 7,000 votes – if all are validated – in order to win.
Carr said today after the news her time as DA was over, “I feel privileged to have served the community as the first female District Attorney in Santa Clara County,” she said.
Tuesday night, before all the votes were tallied, both candidates were waiting at their respective election celebrations – Carr at Britannia Arms Almaden, a San Jose pub, and Rosen’s at Agenda, a restaurant and lounge in San Jose.
Though Carr had not done any polling before the election, she said she late Tuesday that she wasn’t surprised with the way the race was playing out.
“We knew based on the kind of campaign that it would be close,” she said.
Rosen had said Tuesday night that he was confident he would maintain his lead.
“We’ve been ahead from the beginning and our lead continues to grow,” he said. Like Carr, Rosen did not conduct polling ahead of time, but “we knew that we were doing well and that we were gaining momentum as the days and weeks went by. I feel confident that we’re going to win.”
It was not clear Wednesday morning if Carr would request a recount.
The race between Carr and Rosen – a deputy district attorney and Carr’s employee – was a contentious battle with both contenders calling into question the ethics of their opponent. Rosen took a leave of absence from the DA’s Office during his campaign against his boss.
While Carr ran on her record as DA, citing accomplishments in crime prevention, an increase in the accessibility to and efficiency of her office, and greater emphasis on community outreach, Rosen pointed to “a series of unethical decisions and poor judgments” made by Carr as impetus for a change in leadership.
Rosen, 42, faulted Carr, 56, for eliminating the Office’s Cold Case Unit, getting caught up in a conflict of interest in a homicide case that involved her husband, and boycotting a Superior Court judge.
“I’m running to restore ethics and integrity to the Office of the District Attorney,” Rosen said in a April interview. “The problem is not the office. It’s the District Attorney.”
In a section titled “Setting the Record Straight” on her website, Carr addressed several of these issues.
The family of a man murdered in May 2008 in a bank parking lot hired Carr’s husband, a retired San Jose police lieutenant, as a consultant in a civil lawsuit against the bank for its failure to maintain safe premises, Carr said. When police arrested several suspects and brought the criminal case before the DA, Carr informed an assistant DA of her husband’s involvement and removed herself from the case, she said. Shortly after, her office handed the case over to the Attorney General’s Office. Her husband returned the money he had been paid as a consultant and Carr addressed the potential conflict and promised that it wouldn’t happen again in the future.
“I’m not perfect,” Carr said in April. “But if I make a mistake, I own up to it and I make it right.”
Additionally, Rosen said he didn’t agree with the “blackballing” of Superior Court Judge Andrea Bryan that’s taken place since the judge freed a convicted child molester in January. Carr defended her move to use a peremptory challenge against Bryan, saying her office lacked faith that the judge would consider cases fairly and that her challenge was preceded by the filing of similar challenges by several of her deputies.
Although he lacks Carr’s 30 years of experience, Rosen cited his successful prosecution of 50 child molesters and rapists, his success in almost all of the 65 jury trials he’s tried, and the partnerships he’s cultivated with police officers and the community as some of his greatest accomplishments.
A graduate of the Boalt Hall School of Law at the University of California, Berkeley, Rosen has been a prosecutor for 15 years. He is married with two daughters.
Like Rosen, Carr called her opponent’s ethics into question.
“I have a record and I’m proud of my record,” Carr said. “What my opponent has is the ability to sit on the sidelines and criticize when he’s never done the job or anything close to the job. It’s easy as a challenger to throw stones at an incumbent who has actually done something. His platform is attacking me.”
As DA, Carr manages an $85 million budget and more than 500 people and has worked to rid the office of the “win at all costs” culture that posed ethical dilemmas in the past, she said.
“Voting for my opponent is a return to the old days because he is a part of that culture,” she said.
According to Carr, Rosen was flagged for prosecutorial misconduct and still hasn’t apologized publicly. Rosen responded that his unintended violation of a judge’s order in a sexual assault case by asking a witness a question the judge had forbidden was “harmless” and that even the defense attorney involved in that case, Damon Silver, has endorsed his candidacy.
During her tenure as DA, Carr worked to reign in gang violence after the gang homicide rate spiked in San Jose in 2007, she said.
“We’ve been not only aggressive in terms of prosecution but in prevention,” she said. She credited her office’s Parent Project, which aids parents of young adults in keeping them out of gangs and away from other criminal behavior, as a successful tool in combating gang violence.
Bringing accountability back to the office by training supervisors, setting standards and reaching out to the community with the help of two public information officers are other accomplishments, she said.
Born and raised in San Francisco, Carr graduated from Southwestern University School of Law. After returning to the Bay Area in 1981, she clerked at a private practice before being hired as a deputy district attorney. In 2000, Carr was elected as a Superior Court Judge. Six years later, she began her term as Santa Clara County’s first female district attorney. Carr and her husband currently live in Almaden Valley.
