Mike Aguirre for San Diego County District Attorney

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San Diego Union-Tribune
12/15/2001

Challenger pledges to reform office

By J. HARRY JONES
Staff Writer

Attorney Michael Aguirre yesterday became the fourth and final person to enter the race for district attorney – promising to reform the office and turn it into the "best law firm in California."
Aguirre, 52, will challenge incumbent Paul Pfingst in the March 5 primary. Other challengers are Superior Court Judge Bonnie Dumanis and veteran prosecutor Mark Pettine.
If no candidate receives a majority of the votes in the primary, the top two vote-getters will face off in the November general election.
In a news conference at the Westgate Hotel a few blocks from the San Diego courthouse, Aguirre said at no time in San Diego history has a strong district attorney been needed more.
"Each and every day, countless criminals are looking for new ways to prey on society. Whether it's the drug dealer on the corner of Euclid, the rapist in Hillcrest, or the car thief or murderer turning our dreams into nightmares, we are all victims to one crime or another," Aguirre said.
"We may not be directly affected, but we are still victims because when one of us is hurt we all are hurt."
Since 1980, Aguirre has been a San Diego lawyer specializing in securities and investment fraud. Yesterday, he listed big cases he has won for "victims who needed protection by a system which failed them."
He said the county faces a different kind of corruption today.
"It may not always be visible and people will call it by other names, but the crisis in confidence and ethical lapses that currently have engulfed the District Attorney's Office is corruption no less," he said.
He was referring to a recent vote by members of the union that represents deputy district attorneys. Sixty-eight percent of the prosecutors who voted lacked confidence in Pfingst as district attorney.

Aguirre was also referring to several major cases in which judges found prosecutorial misconduct and the guilty plea by one of Pfingst's division chiefs to a felony for running his real estate business out of his county office.
"We cannot have deputy DA's engaging in 'orchestrated attempts' to mislead a court," he said.
"We cannot have the head of the District Attorney's Fraud Unit convicted for theft of public funds. We cannot have a district attorney who had full knowledge of these actions."
Aguirre said that if he is elected, he will:

Lead the fight against drugs.
Strictly enforce food safety laws.
Fight cybercrime and identity theft.
Ensure that schools and workplaces are drug free, tobacco free and gun free.
Prosecute every company that pollutes or rips off consumers.

"My vision for the District Attorney's Office is that it be the best law firm in California, doing the work of the people, independent of any special interest, fighting for all of us," he said.
Aguirre, a Hillcrest resident, has been a lawyer since 1974 after getting his law degree from the University of California Berkeley. He worked for two years as an assistant U.S. Attorney.
In 1976, he was appointed assistant counsel to the U.S. Senate's Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. He went into private practice in Los Angeles the next year and opened a firm in San Diego in 1980.
Aguirre initially was a leading supporter of the San Diego Padres downtown ballpark project but now opposes the project.

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