TRACKRS

The author was born in New York City, grew up on Long Island, N.Y., and has been a resident of California since 1967. He attended Occidental College and Loyola University School of Law in Los Angeles. He was admitted to practice law in California in December, 1974. His first employment after graduation was as an associate attorney with a Los Angeles general civil litigation firm. In late 1975, he was hired as a deputy district attorney with the Orange County District Attorney's office. During his career with the District Attorney's Office, he was assigned to nearly all vertical prosecution teams and worked for thirteen years in the Homicide Unit which he supervised for three years. Highlights of his career as a prosecutor included being the trial attorney for seven capital cases and being chosen Prosecutor of the Year in 1996. He also successfully prosecuted the first case in Orange County utilizing DNA evidence, the second case under the new death penalty laws, the first case under the Three Strikes legislation, and the first case in which a defendant driving a motor vehicle was convicted of second degree murder. In 1996 his efforts led to the creation of Orange County's first unsolved homicide project "TRACKRS." This project's initial investigation solved six homicides from the 1970s and also resulted in the exoneration and freedom from prison of a man wrongly convicted of one of them. A few years later, he helped to create the Orange County Innocence Project. This was a program by which prisoners sentenced to state prison from Orange County, without the assistance of counsel, could petition the District Attorney's Office for an evidentiary review of either DNA or newly discovered physical evidence that could prove their innocence. Mr. Jacobs retired from the District Attorney's Office in 2006. While he is presently engaged in a private civil practice in Orange County, California he is also working on a second book about our criminal justice system.