How America Holds Court: The Seedy Dealings Underpinning Our Legal System

Again and again, lawyers and court offcials claimed that Bauer had gotten "a raw deal." Ken Bruno, who was district attorney during Bauer's tenure, had watched him in court several times and never saw anything wrong. "I thought he bent over backwards to be fair to defendants, protecting their rights." In fact, he added, "the only complaint to the DA's office was that he would allow defendants too much lenience." Before a preliminary hearing "he would allow access to our whole file—all the victims' statements, stuff [the defense] normally wouldn't have access to at the beginning of a case." Everyone was surprised when the charges came out. Most thought he'd been faulted for technicalities. "I didn't think that his sentences were by any means harsh," said local attorney Alexander Perry. "He gave all kinds of people breaks," he said, recalling instances where Bauer arranged for treatment for defendants with drug problems, or when he spared Perry's client jail time because he was a single parent and Bauer didn't want the children put in foster care; and even once acknowledged that the police were harassing a client. "There were so many of these that it's hard to pick one." If anything, he and his fellow prosecutors had been convinced that Bauer was too lenient. "He actually pressed the DAs to make reasonable deals." Defense lawyers echoed this endorsement, saying that in spite of what the commission found, Bauer was very much a defendant's judge. "He was fair, consistent, and pretty reasonable," said assistant public defender John Turi.