San Diego City Wire

More than 250 domestic violence cases referred to the San Diego City Attorney's office last year for prosecution remain under review, a spokeswoman said following a local newspaper's allegations that the office is prosecuting "fewer and fewer" such cases.

Domestic violence cases are difficult to prosecute, Hilary Nemchik, spokeswoman for San Diego City Attorney Mara Elliott, and a victims rights attorney told the Voice of San Diego.

"Increasingly, juries require video evidence of crimes to return a guilty verdict, based on our office's post-trial interviews of trial jurors," Nemchick said in a Voice of San Diego news story published Jan. 7. "DV [domestic violence] cases frequently involve conflicting accounts of critical incidents and recanting parties/victims. When a DV report lacks video evidence of the incident, it raises the degree of difficulty in securing a conviction, a factor that we must consider when deciding whether to prosecute in the first place."

Nemchik told the Voice of San Diego that Elliott's office is still reviewing 257 domestic violence cases referred for prosecution in 2020 and that the office has one to five years to file charges. Nemchick also told the newspaper that some domestic violence cases rejected by Elliott's office ultimately were taken up by the county's district attorney's office.

COVID-19 also disrupted the flow of cases in 2020, “which impacted our ability to review cases and closed the court to case filings for several months,” Nemchik said in the newspaper's story.

Nemchik's comments were part of the newspaper's report that "Elliott has prosecuted fewer and fewer domestic violence cases since the start of her tenure, and 2020 marked a new low, city data shows."

"The domestic violence unit at the San Diego City Attorney’s Office prosecuted its highest case count of Elliott's tenure in 2017, her first full year in office, according to city data released to Voice of San Diego in response to a public records request," the newspaper reported. "But since then, such prosecutions have fallen, and cases stumbled further in 2020."

Matt Murphy, a Los Angeles-based victim rights attorney and former Orange County senior deputy district attorney, agreed in the news story that domestic violence cases provide a challenge.

"Domestic violence cases are difficult," Murphy said. "By their very nature they are difficult to prosecute. Hopefully, no one is requiring a video before they file, because I believe that would be a mistake."

Rejecting cases for lack of video would be "a bit of a slippery slope," Murphy said, adding, "The crime itself is virtually never on video. Liquor store robberies are almost always on video. Domestic violence is not."

San Diego trial attorney Dan Gilleon, who represents victims of sex assault and gender violence, said in the same news story that he wasn't "buying it."

"Sounds like an excuse for not pursuing enough cases," Gilleon said. "They should be taking every case that's provable. They are not. They are cherry-picking the ones that are easiest."