Ed Jagels

Career

Jagels was first elected to the Kern County prosecutor's office in 1983, at a time when the United States public attention was focused on rumors of child molestation and Satanism, all of which proved to be false. Soon after his election he created a task force to investigate sex crimes against children. The cases eventually brought between 1983 and 1987 involved false claims of satanic ritual abuse performed by eight supposed pedophile groups. The cases, brought without physical evidence, were based solely on the testimony of alleged child victims who had been coached and sometimes tricked into testifying against their parents and other adults. Long prison sentences were obtained against many adults, but the cases began to unravel in the late 1980s as the children recanted their testimony.

Of the 26 convictions, 25 were reversed. One defendant was in prison for 19 years before his conviction was reversed. The county paid out nearly $10 million to settle claims made by the former prisoners and the alleged victims. Actor Sean Penn, who met a man accused of child sex crimes, narrated and served as executive producer for the documentary film, Witch Hunt, concerning the event.

As a "get tough on crime" prosecutor, Jagels was very popular in his conservative town of Bakersfield, California even after his earlier cases unraveled. In the 2000s he prosecuted a man under the three strikes law, which carried a mandatory 25-year prison sentence, for stealing a pack of doughnuts worth less than $1, because the man had been convicted of two felonies in the 1970s. He was unapologetic about the false convictions in the 1980s sex abuse cases, and was re-elected six times as district attorney, before announcing his retirement in 2009. He led a voter campaign to defeat three liberal justices from California's supreme court, and was influential in promoting victims' rights, the death penalty, and California's three strikes law. In 1986, a grand jury released a blistering report on the sex abuse prosecutions, accusing Kern County officials of fostering a "presumption of guilt", concealing exculpatory evidence and bringing charges based on guesswork. California Attorney General John Van de Kamp, a Democrat, released a report that year reaching the same conclusions. By his second term, Jagels had tripled the number of prosecutorial complaints lodged against the District Attorney's office. By 2009, Kern County paid out more than $9 million in wrongful conviction settlements.

Personal

Jagels wife, Bryanna Michal Jagels, whom he later divorced, had arrests in 2003 and 2004, for attempting to fill forged narcotics prescriptions. On May 17, 2003, Jagels was pulled over by a California Highway Patrol officer for speeding in a 1969 Porsche that had not been registered in three years. The officer did not give him a citation.