Whipped Cream Difficulties

Good news, everyone!

Santa Clara County Sheriff Laurie Smith resigned Monday morning.

You may remember that former Sheriff Smith was indicted by a civil grand jury last December on corruption charges. You may also remember that those corruption charges (mostly) involved her issuing concealed carry permits to large campaign contributors.

What you may not know (and I missed it too) is that the corruption trial is going on right now, and the jury is actively deliberating whether she should be removed from office. Obviously, the fact that she’s resigned sort of takes the air out of the jury deliberations.

Which seemed to be part of her evil plan:

But in court Monday afternoon, her attorney, Allen Ruby, asked the judge in the corruption trial to dismiss the charges against Smith, arguing the primary penalty she faces — removal from office — is now meaningless since the jury cannot oust Smith from a job she no longer holds.

Except it didn’t work:

A judge has ruled that the civil corruption trial for Santa Clara County Sheriff Laurie Smith will continue even after Smith suddenly resigned Monday and asked the court to dismiss the case now that she can’t be kicked out of office.

…

Fineman’s response to the arguments highlighted the lack of precedent for removal-from-office trials spurred by a civil grand jury; the only other one in known memory in the South Bay was in 2002 when a Mountain View city councilmember was ousted. The trial is conducted in the same structure of a criminal trial and adheres to a reasonable doubt standard for guilt, but is held in civil court. Fineman is presiding because the local judiciary recused itself, and the county also recused itself, which is why the prosecution is headed by Markoff, a San Francisco assistant district attorney.

…

Markoff and Ruby also sparred over the collateral consequences of not allowing a verdict to be reached. Fineman and Markoff mentioned pension implications and eligibility to hold office in the future.
That touched on another ambiguity by the hybrid standing of the trial. A 2013 law penalizes a public official’s pension benefits if they are found guilty of a felony corruption crime, and bars them from holding public office again. Both Fineman and Markoff discussed how the law might apply because some of the current trial counts allege criminal elements.

…

A guilty verdict on any of the counts would prompt the court to expel Smith from office two months before her previously planned retirement, at the end of her sixth term in January. Her resignation undercut the trial, now in its final stages, by effectively removing its stakes and throwing into question whether the jury should be allowed to reach a verdict.
Both legal observers and Smith’s critics suspected that was a strategic move for her legacy, since an aborted trial means she can’t be formally cast in the public record as a corrupt public official thrown out of office for wrongdoing.

It isn’t clear to me: if she resigns and then is found not guilty, can she run again for the same office in the next election? If she is found guilty, is she barred from running for that office again? For any office in California?

As noted above, there’s not a lot of precedent for this. It does seem, based on the article quoted above, that it is very likely she will be found guilty of at least one charge:

Larsen and other experts nitoring the trial also believed the resignation was influenced at least in part by Smith and her attorney’s anticipation that jurors would come back with a guilty verdict on at least one of counts she was facing. Three of the counts were relatively cut-and-dry, asking jurors to decide if she accepted a San Jose Sharks luxury suite — which violates gift limits for public officials — and if she intentionally masked the suite use by buying cheaper tickets for the same game. Detailed and direct testimony from Smith’s staff seemingly confirmed those allegations.

(Hattip: Mike the Musicologist.)