I'm quite surprised at this holding by the Court of Appeal.
At one level, I totally understand it. I'm absolutely confident -- as is the trial court and the Court of Appeal -- that the Solano County Public Defender's Office will not "pull punches" in its defense of Fred Cain on the charge that he murdered a six year old girl. The only really plausible defense for Mr. Cain is to pin the murder on someone else: Shawn Melton. And I'm positive that that's exactly what the P.D.'s office will do, and that it will do so diligently.
But here's the problem:
The very same public defender's office twice represented Mr. Melton on these exact same first degree murder charges. Successfully.
So the P.D.'s office is going to say that its current client did not kill the little girl, but that its former client was the actual killer.
I'm sorry. I just don't think that's okay. Maybe I'm approaching this too much from the civil side, but for me, I think that your duty of loyalty to your former client simply prevents you from saying that he's the one who killed the little girl. I would not expect my former attorney to rat me out like that. Even if they weren't using my confidential information to do so. I would expect them to be loyal to me. And that duty of loyalty would include, at a minimum, not accusing me of first degree murder. (Rightly or wrongly.)
Every member of the panel here agrees. And the justices explain why, at length; for 33 pages.
Disqualification of lawyers is viewed for abuse of discretion. To me, there's no abuse of discretion here. Indeed, I think the trial court got it affirmatively right. There are lots of lawyers in this world. There's no substantial reason why this office has to be appointed to be the one to defend Mr. Cain. And there are real reasons, both loyalty reasons as well as public perception reasons, why a different office should be the one to point the finger at Mr. Melton.
I understand that this case is largely a one-off, with unique factual circumstances: there are apparently no files remaining on this decades-old cold case, the relevant public defender is no longer there (having been appointed to the bench and now retired), there's virtually zero risk of confidential information being used, etc.
Still. I would have affirmed. And were I on the California Supreme Court, I would vote to grant review and reverse.
The downsides of this representation, to me, outweigh the upsides.
By a fair piece.
