Attorneys: Prosecutor made mistakes in past Haro case

Murder defendant Jake Haro was not placed in prison for his past child abuse conviction due to prosecutorial mistakes, a group of attorneys write after reviewing the case.

The Riverside District Attorney’s Office filed charges against Haro two years late, did not allege great bodily injury and did not object to multiple requests by Haro’s counsel to delay hearings on whether to send him to serve his sentence, the group says.

The San Bernardino/Riverside Chapter of the American Board of Trial Advocates wrote the letter in defense of Judge Dwight Moore. Both Riverside District Attorney Jason Anderson and Sheriff Chad Bianco criticized his handling of the case in an Aug. 27 press conference. 

“Other public officials should not have attacked the judge when the District Attorney had acted passively in the handling of this matter. Comments by public officials claiming that this was an ‘outrageous error in judgment,’ ‘had the judge done his job this would never have occurred,’ and ‘San Bernardino Judges favor defendants over the victims’ appear to be made for political reasons and clearly place the role of the judiciary in a false light in the public eye,” they write.

Note: the letter as originally published suffered from a formatting error, leaving some pages accidentally blank. It has been corrected.