Attorneys for Ross Mirkarimi, who now include local attorney David Waggoner and Shepard Kopp from L.A., filed a petition today to get City Attorney Dennis Herrera disqualified from Mirkarimi's upcoming hearing regarding his official misconduct charges. Mirkarimi and his lawyers are going to be arguing before a judge on April 20 that his suspension by Mayor Lee should be overturned, but the day before, April 19, a judge will now be hearing arguments about whether Herrera has a conflict of interest in the case.
Waggoner argues in his filing that the city attorney's office has a conflict of interest because it is representing Mayor Lee in the hearing while also advising the Ethics Commission in their upcoming hearing on Mirkarimi's domestic abuse charges and guilty plea to false imprisonment. He writes, "The city attorney cannot ethically serve as both the prosecutor of this attempt to remove Sheriff Mirkarimi and the lawyer for one of the supposedly neutral fact-finding and decision-making bodies, the Ethics Commission."
A spokesman for the city attorney's office, however, says this is bogus because they have "lawyers assigned to every commission in city government" and they have ethical screens in place to address "about two dozen quasi-judicial functions citywide."
Is Herrera Mirkarimi's number-one enemy in city government? And so the drama goes on...
