By Count Friedrich von Olsen

The matter of the People vs. Charles Merritt is back in the public consciousness with a vengeance once again, pointing up, as I have pointed out previously, a real problem with the secretiveness of the district attorney’s office. At issue is the incomplete information available to an alarmed and very curious public, information that cuts right to the heart of this case and will establish whether Mr. Merritt is the demon prosecutors allege him to be or whether an innocent man is being unfairly maligned. At stake is the credibility of the prosecutor’s office, whether its attorneys can be trusted. This carries over to cases beyond that one being prosecuted against Mr. Merritt. There are a frightful number of eggs in this basket. This is as high of a profile case as there is likely to be in San Bernardino County for some time to come. The reputation and careers of some very powerful people are staked on the outcome of this trial. Whether other prosecutors in the office like it or not or whether they consider it to be fair or not, they and the quality of their work, their truthfulness, their credibility is at issue here. If it turns out that those prosecuting Mr. Merritt have made misrepresentations or stretched the truth (which appears to be the case), it will come back to reflect on them. If these prosecutors are perceived as lying so they can mount Mr. Merritt’s head in their personal professional prosecutorial trophy case, the district attorney’s office may never recover from this…
At risk are other cases. If a juror who is asked to render a verdict in a case involving someone accused of, say, stealing hubcaps, will he be constantly reminded that the prosecution in the Merritt case loaded the dice to make Mr. Merrit look guilty when he was truly innocent? And will that juror extend the recognition that prosecutors try to shove round pegs into square holes to the case relating to the theft of hubcaps, concluding that reasonable doubt attends every utterance by prosecutors? In our system of justice, merely one juror needs to dissent from the finding of eleven others that there is guilt and the jury hangs and a mistrial is declared. A prosecutor hiding facts is a most serious sin, only slightly less egregious than outright falsification of evidence or outright lying…
Unfortunately in the Merritt case, prosecutors have indisputably hidden facts. It further appears that they have misrepresented facts, i.e., lied to the court and to the public. If in fact they have not lied or made misrepresentations, they have courted the perception of such through statements that are at the very least contradictory, vague and misleading. Is this the behavior of someone you want to lead jurors to a conclusion of moral certainty beyond a reasonable doubt?
The current issue is this: Where was the McStay family killed? In a motion for demurrer that I will here predict will be rejected by the magistrate hearing the case, Judge Michael Smith, Mr. Merritt’s legal team points out that the criminal complaint strongly implies the murders took place in San Bernardino County. Indeed, it is on that basis that the San Bernardino County District Attorney’s Office, as opposed to the San Diego District Attorney’s Office, is prosecuting Mr. Merritt. But at the preliminary hearing held in June, prosecutors presented a case suggesting Merritt murdered all four members of the McStay family at their home in Fallbrook in San Diego County.
According to the demurrer motion, these inconsistencies in the prosecution’s story are “glaring,” entailing “blatant contradictions that cannot be overlooked…”
I anticipate that what the district attorney’s office will say in its defense is that the crimes in San Bernardino County it referenced were not the murders themselves, but the disposal of the bodies. But that will only show that they were, once again misleading us, saying something that suggested one thing when what they were really saying was something else. There’s a word for that and you don’t need a juris doctor degree to know what it is. It’s called lying…
The district attorney’s office’s conduct throughout this ordeal has been enraging. I have no sympathy for lawbreakers. It is possible that Mr. Merritt is indeed the murderer of the entire McStay Family and that he is as coldblooded of a character as you would ever want to encounter, one who used a hammer to bludgeon a three year-old child and then used the money he had stolen from his father, whom he had also killed in addition to that child’s mother and brother, and then spent long days at the gaming tables wagering his ill-gotten lucre away. If, indeed that is the monster that Mr. Merritt is, then establish it for us to know, conclusively. Do not dangle a fact here and a fact there that seems to suggest he is guilty but upon closer examination when other information comes available has no probative value. Do not talk in mysterious tongues of circumstantially incriminating factoids, when a similarly selective showing of so-called “evidence” would implicate anyone, or just about anyone, you, me, the guy down the street, the garbage man, the local drug dealer or maybe even the prosecutor himself.
The district attorney’s office is hiding something. I don’t quite know what it is hiding, but it is hiding something or several somethings. What it is hiding just might be that the case against Mr. Merritt is nothing like what its prosecutors are suggesting. Maybe it is hiding the ball from the defense, which by the way, isn’t kosher. If that is the case, that could get Mr. Merritt sprung. And if he is guilty, that is unconscionable…
Call the district attorney’s office and tell whoever answers that prosecutors need to comport themselves professionally. Tell the person that members of the district attorney’s office should stop lying. Tell them to quit hiding their incompetence behind a facade of elliptical misrepresentation. Tell them to put on their case and their evidence and be done with it…