BY BRADEN CARTWRIGHT
Daily Post Staff Writer
Longtime Santa Clara County Sheriff Laurie Smith resigned today (Oct. 31) before a jury decides whether to remove her from office for corruption.
A 12-member jury can decide any day now whether Smith is guilty of giving out gun permits to campaign donors and friends, while ignoring applications from others.
But the trial comes with just one punishment: removal from office. By moving her retirement up by two months, Smith makes the outcome symbolic only.
Undersheriff Ken Binder, who is the brother of Palo Alto police Chief Andrew Binder, will take over until a new sheriff is elected or appointed by the Board of Supervisors, the sheriff’s office said on Twitter.
Retired Palo Alto police Chief Bob Jonsen and retired Capt. Kevin Jensen are running to replace Smith in the new year.
Smith, 70, started working for the sheriff’s office in 1973. She was first elected in 1998 and has won five elections since then.
But in 2011, a gun rights group sued Laurie Smith for arbitrarily denying a security guard’s application to carry a concealed weapon. Since then, her political opponents have raised the issue in campaigns.
The allegations escalated in August 2019 when District Attorney Jeff Rosen’s investigators raided the fourth floor of the sheriff’s headquarters and seized cell phones and computers.
Two of Smith’s top deputies, Undersheriff Rick Sung and Capt. James Jensen, were charged with felony bribery for allegedly carrying out the gun permit scheme, but a trial hasn’t been scheduled. Rosen said there wasn’t enough evidence to charge Smith with a crime.
The Board of Supervisors started pressing Smith last year at the request of Supervisor Joe Simitian. Simitian said he was upset over her handling of an incident in the jail in 2018, when mentally ill inmate Andrew Hogan bashed his head into the side of a jail van over 50 times and deputies left him without medical care.
Hogan suffered permanent brain damage, and the county paid his family $10 million to settle a lawsuit.
An internal affairs investigation into the incident was ended prematurely without explanation, and Mike Gennaco, who supervisors hired to oversee the sheriff, couldn’t get information about it from Smith.
The Board of Supervisors formally asked the Civil Grand Jury to look into Smith in August last year.
The Civil Grand Jury, made up of 19 volunteer residents, files accusations only when they believe a public official has engaged in willful or corrupt misconduct.
The Civil Grand jury filed their accusation against Smith on Dec. 13. One of the charges accuses Smith of withholding information from Gennaco. Two of the charges are about her handling of gun permits, and the final three charges are related to a San Jose Sharks game on Feb. 14, 2019, which Smith attended but didn’t report as a gift. The man who gave her the tickets received his gun permit that same morning.
Ahead of the March 11 deadline this year to run for re-election, Smith announced she wouldn’t run again. Four opponents had already begun their campaigns, including two jail sergeants and Jensen, who she defeated in 2014.
“I have always served the people of Santa Clara County and have never engaged in any behavior that would warrant the media animus, false legal narrative, or political attacks currently in the public domain,” Smith said in a statement in March. “I have always dismissed these attacks for what they are – specious attempts by unsavory political opponents in retribution for serving the public with honor.”