You can’t fire me! I quit!
Leave it to Laurie Smith to make a mockery of the judicial system in her final act as Santa Clara County sheriff.
Smith submitted her resignation Monday in the midst of jury deliberations on whether she should be shown the door. It came just two months before her term would have expired anyhow.
It’s a sad indictment of the judicial system that she can avoid avoid any meaningful punishment because it took so long to bring this case to trial.
Smith should have resigned two years ago, when the extent of her failings first came to light. At the very least, she should have quit last December, when a Santa Clara County civil grand jury called for her removal from office and accused her of six counts of corruption and willful misconduct.
Instead, she stalled and ran out the clock. Now, almost a year later, San Mateo County Superior Court Judge Nancy Fineman will rule Wednesday on a request by Smith’s attorney, Allen Ruby, to dismiss the accusation. He argued Monday that the penalty she faces — removal from office — is now meaningless.
That argument will likely carry the day, from a legal perspective, however unfortunate it would be. Allowing Smith to quit at this stage of the trial enables her to avoid accountability and robs the public of the closure it needs.
We first called for the sheriff to resign in September 2020 after she invoked her Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination when appearing before a county criminal grand jury as part of a pay-to-play concealed weapons investigation. Law enforcement officials must be held to the highest legal and ethical standards and must be fully cooperative in any criminal investigation. Her refusal to answer questions under oath about whether she, the county’s top cop, knew about corruption in her office, or worse, was involved in it, made her unfit to hold office.
Then, in August 2021, the Board of Supervisors unanimously approved a vote of no confidence in Smith and called for a civil grand jury investigation. The supervisors cited the excessive abuse at the county jail that cost taxpayers tens of millions of dollars; an alleged criminal informant who was beaten by more than 30 other jail inmates last November with no deputy intervention; and a San Jose Sharks playoff ticket scandal case in which Smith allegedly evaded gift-reporting laws.
The subsequent civil grand jury accusation alleged Smith engaged in political favoritism by leveraging her control over issuing concealed-carry weapons permits. The sheriff was also accused of failing to cooperate with the county law-enforcement auditor in an investigation into negligence allegations stemming from a 2018 jail inmate’s injury that led to a $10 million county settlement.
To this day, there has been no penalty for Smith. And now, with her resignation just two months before the end of her term, Smith will again avoid accountability. That’s not justice.
The system has failed Santa Clara County residents. They deserved a sheriff who was trustworthy and adhered to the highest law enforcement standards. Laurie Smith failed to meet that standard.
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