Tiffany Revelle — Record-Bee staff
LAKEPORT — “Former” must now be used in conjunction with Lake County District Attorney Gary Luck”s title. His retirement became official as of 5 p.m. Friday, at the close of business.
To avoid a gap in service, former Chief Deputy District Attorney Jon Hopkins was sworn in as Lake County”s new DA in the old courthouse building on downtown Lakeport”s Main Street at the same time, on the same day.
Technically, Luck”s term expires on Jan. 9, but he chose to retire Dec. 29 so he would only have to wait two years for his first Cost of Living Allowance (COLA) to kick in for his retirement. If he had chosen to retire on the ninth, he would have to wait three years.
Luck served two full terms, totaling eight years as the elected office District Attorney, and has been a prosecuting Deputy DA since May of 1989. This makes a grand total of 17 and a half years of service. In a recent interview with the Record-Bee, Luck answered a few questions:
RB: What have been your greatest successes?
Luck: My greatest successes and joys came when I was a Deputy District Attorney when during a five-year period of time, I prosecuted child molest cases. Connecting with young people that have been terribly injured by grownups, had terrible things happen to them, and successfully sending those people away, and saving the lives of young people have been my greatest success and joy.
But I”ve enjoyed every day in the office as far as being a prosecutor. I absolutely love prosecution work.
RB: What will you do after your retirement?
Luck: I”m still going to be with the office as a part-time extra-help prosecutor prosecuting juvenile cases and also taking on any consumer fraud and consumer protection cases. I have a specialty in both of those areas. I”m going to continue on there helping out the office and Jon Hopkins.
I”m going to be employed, but as an extra-help non-benefited person. When you”re retired and you”re receiving PERS retirement, you can still work up to 960 hours a year for the agency, and that”s what I”m going to do. I still love the prosecution work.
RB: It sounds like you”re going to stay busy.
Luck: I”m going to be here in the office doing juvenile cases, I”ve got my private investigator”s license, and I”m going to be out doing private investigation work for the court. Most specifically, I”m going to be doing investigations on guardianships and conservatorships to make sure that people that need to have new guardians appointed or need to be conserved are put in a proper and safe environment so that they”re protected. If a guardian wants to take in a juvenile, we want to make sure that that guardian is able to adequately protect that juvenile and provide them with a good home and nurturing environment. And if it”s a person that needs to be conserved, we need to be sure that they go through the proper channels to make sure that their welfare is taken care of and their needs are adequately addressed. The court needs to have an investigation on that before they can go through the entire process, so I”m going to be doing that type of work for the courts. And then I also plan on doing civil mediation work.
RB: Describe the process in which a case is brought to the DA and goes through the court system.
Luck: The crime is committed, police go out and do an investigation, and they complete a report. They submit that report to us, and then we make a determination whether or not we have sufficient evidence to go forward and we file a complaint if we do have sufficient evidence to go forward.
Sometimes that happens in a very small window of time. For instance, when a person is arrested right after the commission of a crime, the police department is under a lot of pressure to complete the report and get it to us, because we have to arraign that person within 48 hours. Many times we get a report and the courts want to do the arraignments at 1:15 on that second day or within that 48 hour window of the arrest, and we get that report around 10 or 11 o”clock, have somebody sit down and review it, and we may only have a 10- or 15-minute window to make a real snap decision: do we keep this person in custody, or do we release him now and then have further investigation?
RB: And if it”s a violent crime?
Luck: Then, we”ll err on the side of the protection of the public, and we will file charges based on the information that we have, if it appears that we have good, competent evidence. We don”t rubber-stamp police work. We always make sure that we have a feeling that we can prove our case beyond a reasonable doubt in order for us to file charges. If we have doubt that we have sufficient evidence, even if it”s a violent crime, we”ll go ahead and ask for that person to be released.
RB: It sounds like if you have a 10- or 15-minute window, there”s some digital determination that”s made. What are you looking for?
Luck: Sufficient evidence that A) the person committed the crime, and B) that we can prove that he committed the crime through independent witnesses and other evidence that was gathered at the scene of the crime. Every case is reviewed the same way, on an independent basis.
Most of the time, we”re not under the pressure to make snap decisions. Normally, when a big crime like a shooting or a homicide, something big, goes down, law enforcement notifies us early enough that we start gathering information through them and we kind of know ahead of time what”s coming so that we can prepare ourselves for filing a report. Because the bigger the crime ? a murder, a shooting, a robbery ? the longer it takes to process the crime scene and get the reports to us.
RB: What”s your favorite part of the job?
Luck: My favorite part of the job is helping the victims and getting the bad guys. It”s all about the victims of crime, and going out there and making the community a little bit better and a little safer.
In the adult cases, it”s about punishing adults that commit crimes, hopefully dissuading them from committing new crimes through teaching them that if you do something bad you”re going to get punished.
I”ve also been prosecuting juvenile cases now, and I have a real affinity for doing that. For the past six years, I”ve been doing just about all of the filings of juvenile cases, and I appear in juvenile court virtually every Monday because I have a strong interest in juvenile justice. In juvenile justice, the emphasis is different. It”s about rehabilitation with a little bit of punishment. We hope to understand in juvenile cases what … is causing them to get into abhorrent behavior … and then correcting that, sometimes with a little bit of punishment and a little stay in juvenile hall. And we”ve had some real nice success stories there in being able to take young people and straighten out their lives before they become adult offenders and get caught up in the vicious cycle of going to jail over and over and over again.
RB: Any regrets?
Luck: None. None whatsoever. I”ve loved it.
RB: Is there anything you wish you could”ve made more progress with?
Luck: No, not really. I”m happy, looking back on it. I”m satisfied with the career I”ve had as a prosecutor, and I know that I have the ability and the opportunity to continue on in the small portion of it as I go into, not really retirement, but just a different phase of my life.
Editor”s note: See next week”s Record-Bee for an interview with new DA Jon Hopkins.
Contact Tiffany Revelle at trevelle@record-bee.com.
