right’

But suddenly, Trom went into private practice.

“And I’m the next guy in line, so I got involved in politics, which I thought I would never do,” Bradbury says. “You know, horses, horseback people have some really great connections.”

Those connections became key to Bradbury’s campaigns over the years. Bradbury was good friends with Bill Clark, former Oxnard police chief. The Clark family was close with Bradbury’s wife’s family through horses. Clark’s son, William P. Clark, served as secretary of the Interior under President Reagan from 1983-1985. “He was Reagan’s right-hand man,” Bradbury says, and had been with Reagan since his campaigns for governor.

“Bill Sr. chaired my campaign when I first ran. He asked me to come to Washington when Reagan was elected. I had known Reagan, campaigned with him, flew around with him to help.” Reagan was also an avid horseman. “But I had just been elected DA. I just can’t leave. He put me on a crime commission. I was back there once a month. It was the best of both worlds. I could stay in the county I love.”

He was on point to be named U.S. Attorney by President George W. Bush, but was notified he wouldn’t get the post due to a local controversy.

“The Los Angeles County Sheri ’s Department opposed my appointment because I had investigated them for a shooting here in Ventura County,” Bradbury says. Los Angeles sheri ’s deputies had shot and killed a rancher in Ventura County claiming he had been growing marijuana. “They didn’t find a seed in the place. That’s in the next book.”

‘Do what’s right’

When elected, Bradbury took the reins and brought a new approach to prosecutions: reduce pleas and take cases to trial.

“I started insisting cases go to trial,” he says. “The first year I was district attorney, trials increased 100%.”

Bradbury says he’d tell the attorneys in his o ce: “I don’t care how good your negotiating skills are. I want good trial lawyers. The important thing was to fairly charge. Don’t overcharge. We charged only what we could prove and then we expected you to prove it. Plead to the top charge or go to trial.”

But no prosecutor is ever perfect.

“It’s heartbreaking,” Bradbury says. “It’s every good district attorney’s nightmare that you prosecute an innocent person.”

To endeavor to prevent that, he says, a prosecutor has to “do what’s right. It’s the beginning and the end. It may mean you don’t get re-elected. I wouldn’t make any changes. I’m not saying I’m perfect.”

He found out last year that a man prosecuted under his term was wrongly convicted and spent 30 years in prison. “And DNA corrected that,” he says. “We didn’t have DNA.

“Even though a lot of them are involved in other criminal activity, if they didn’t do this murder, they shouldn’t be sitting there for 30 or 40 years. There’s nothing that bothers me more than that. Thank God it hasn’t happened very often. It’s interesting, too, because he sued everybody except me.”

Even though the elected district attorney is not physically in the courtroom for every case the o ce argues, for the cases that were tried on his watch, Bradbury takes responsibility.

“I am always the prosecutor in the room. It’s in your name. You’re the one making the decisions. You set the policies.”

When it came to homicides, he says, often, “we would indict.” That means a grand jury would be convened to test whether there was adequate evidence to take it to trial. This can take some pressure o the district attorney in making the ultimate decision to file.

Bradbury says he had a process when there was an indictment. On Friday afternoon, “every top-notch lawyer would examine the facts of the case. So we were really careful about what we filed, and especially homicides. We would invite the defense attorneys in to make sure we weren’t missing something. But that one slipped by. But thank God for DNA. It is now developed to the point that it’s so refined, almost like 1 in a trillion that if that DNA is not right, you’ve got the wrong person.”

There are times, though, when the district attorney declines to file, but the police think they’ve got the culprit.

Recently, he says, current Ventura County District Attorney Erik Nasarenko let him know he had been correct in refusing to file charges in a case. “That’s the other side of it, refusing to file a case that I didn’t believe in, and you take a lot of heat. I was pretty well-liked by law enforcement because of my police background and my family. But they were really unhappy with me over a couple of murder cases where I just declined to file. They thought they had the right guy, and now with DNA, they’re finding who the real killers are. So it cuts both ways.”

Cowboy poet

Today, Bradbury spends most of his time at his Hang ’em High Ranch in the Ojai Valley with his wife, Heidi, and family that includes a raucous troupe of nine dogs, a couple of pigs, chickens, donkeys, a mule, and horses. He no longer rides, however, because of a rare muscle disease that prevents him from climbing into the saddle.

Awards, acknowledgments, and accolades from his storied legal career are displayed alongside photographs of beloved horses, treasured saddles, bridles, and lariats.

The home of a horseman and true cowboy, Hang ’em High Ranch puts his love of horses front and center.

The silver buckles he and Heidi have won riding horses over the years in teampenning and cutting competitions are displayed in rows. Cutting is a timed event in which a rider works to separate a particular cow from a herd and prevent it from returning to the group. One horse in particular has a special place: “Montana, a Doc baby — one of the greats,” Bradbury says. “We were lucky to have him for a long time.” A Doc baby refers to a famous cutting American Quarter Horse named Doc Bar who sired numerous top-winning cutting horses.

Bradbury holds up a framed photograph leaning against a window in his o ce. The photograph shows an Indigenous woman walking along a highway in a barren landscape. She has deep-set dark eyes and a square jaw. “I’ve been a photographer all my life. This was in New Mexico, I saw her walking, we were driving down the highway. I thought I’ve got to capture that. Look at the face. The look. Just extraordinary.”

When asked what recognitions, awards, or accolades he treasures most today, standing in his o ce surrounded by signatures and photographs of presidents and prime ministers, he answers, “To tell you the truth, I think it’s the trophy buckles that I’ve won that mean more to me than anything,”

Law & Disorder: Confessions of a District Attorney by Michael Bradbury is available for sale through www.mikebradburybook.com