Tom Rubinson has spent his entire 17-year career as a Deputy District Attorney, seeking to promote public safety and protect our communities from dangerous criminals who prey on innocent, hardworking citizens and who can destroy our neighborhoods and families. Mr. Rubinson has done so in a highly ethical manner, recognizing that the role of a prosecutor is not to "win at all costs" but rather to prosecute cases aggressively but fairly, and above all to seek justice.

In his career, Mr. Rubinson has handled cases throughout Los Angels County, including downtown, East Los Angeles, Compton, and the San Fernando Valley.

The bulk of Mr. Rubinson's trial career has been spent in the elite Hardcore Gang Division, where over 6 1/2 years he prosecuted gang murder cases exclusively. In his career, Mr. Rubinson has tried 88 felony jury trials, 45 of which were murder cases, with an extremely high success rate. When added to the additional 117 juvenile cases Mr. Rubinson has prosecuted through trial, his trial experience extends to over 200 cases.

• Hardcore Gang Division

Mr. Rubinson made his real reputation as a top-flight prosecutor in the Hardcore Gang Division, where he tried over 40 murder cases. Gang-related homicides are among the most difficult and complex cases to try in criminal law. Success requires not only a thorough knowledge of criminal law, criminal procedure, and evidence, as well as stamina, flexibility and adaptability, but also a deep understanding of how gangs work, their histories, motivations, and methods.

In order to succeed, it is also crucial to understand people, and be able to communicate effectively with people from all different walks of life, from law-abiding citizens to law enforcement officers to some of the most hardened gang members imaginable. Mr. Rubinson developed that unique combination of attributes: unquestioned legal and courtroom skills and the ability to communicate with people.

For a description of a sampling of Mr. Rubinson's most interesting and important cases, please visit the "Significant Cases" tab.

• Management and Leadership Positions

Subsequent to his extremely successful tenure in the Hardcore Gang Division, Mr. Rubinson has been appointed to several management and supervisory roles in the District Attorney's Office. He was Deputy-in-Charge of the extremely busy downtown Preliminary Hearing Unit, where he was solely responsible for managing a staff of eighteen attorneys and seven support staff as they handled the calendars of all preliminary hearing courts in the building, as well as the critically important Early Disposition Program and Drug Courts. He not only guided the attorneys as they presented the preliminary hearings, but was responsible for making appropriate settlement offers on all cases. He was also the District Attorney's liaison to the bench officers hearing these cases, so as to ensure the smooth administration of these courts. As many of the prosecutors in this unit were relatively inexperienced, Mr. Rubinson served not only as manager, but as mentor to these young attorneys.

In 2005 Mr. Rubinson was asked to join the District Attorney's Office Special Circumstances Committee. This small committee, which consists of the highest-level managers in the entire office, shoulders the grave responsibility of determining, in each case in which special circumstances are alleged, whether the death penalty will be sought.

• Compton

Prior to working in the Hardcore Gang Division, Mr. Rubinson spent almost three years as a prosecutor in the Compton office of the Los Angeles County District Attorney's Office. While at Compton, he completed 33 felony trials to jury verdict, encompassing a tremendous diversity of cases. For example, while at Compton he tried to a jury a case alleging welfare fraud. He tried a case to a jury in which the sole question was whether or not the defendant was mentally competent to stand trial. He tried an attempted murder case in which the defendant was a man who had previously lost his eyesight completely, raising issues of intent and the reasonableness of self-defense at the time he fired his weapon.

In addition to the technical legal skills and knowledge he gained while working at Compton, Mr. Rubinson also developed a sense of how to communicate effectively with people in the courtroom, especially with people who might come from backgrounds significantly different from his own. He learned how to break complicated legal concepts down into ideas that are comprehensible and accessible to laypersons without insulting anyone's intelligence in the meantime. He learned how to get otherwise alienated jurors and witnesses actually to care about what was happening in our judicial system and in that particular courtroom, not only the result but also the process of reaching that result. These were invaluable lessons, ones which have informed Mr. Rubinson's outlook on our community and the judicial system in which we all must maintain confidence.

• Juvenile Court

Prior to his assignment to Compton, Mr. Rubinson worked in the Juvenile Division of the District Attorney's Office, at the Sylmar courthouse. His responsibilities there primarily involved handling the daily calendar of cases in one courtroom, including arraignments, pre-adjudication hearings, motions, adjudications, and dispositions.

The time spent in Juvenile Court provided Mr. Rubinson with his first intimate look at violent crime and its impact on victims. He handled many different types of crimes, ranging from sex crimes and child abuse to gang-related shootings to street robberies, as well as vehicle thefts, drugs, vandalism and other common juvenile crimes. While it can be shocking at the outset to see the youthful appearance of some of the minors in the courtroom, once Mr. Rubinson concentrated on their deeds, he was able to focus on the need to protect the community from the danger many of the minors presented.

• Summary