Ed Jagels

Edward R. Jagels (born March 26, 1949) is a former American prosecutor and was Kern County, California’s longest-sitting District Attorney, holding the office from 1983 to 2010. During this time, he prosecuted some notorious cases of wrongful convictions, and engaged in what is now acknowledged widely to have been a pattern of prosecutorial misconduct, in which he convicted innocent people of abusing children. Kern County has since paid out $10 million in settlements to the people wrongly convicted by Ed Jagels.

Early life and education Edward R. Jagels was born on March 26, 1949, in Los Angeles California to George and Margret Jagels. His father, George Daniel Jagels was an attorney. He attended middle school at the Mayfield Junior School in Pasadena, CA. He began high school at the Woodside Priory School in Portola Valley, CA before moving on to the Robert Louis Stevenson high school in Pebble Beach, CA where he graduated in 1967.

He attended Stanford University where he majored in history and joined the Reserve Officers' Training Corps before graduating in 1971. Influenced in part by his father, an attorney, Jagels chose to pursue a career in law at the University of California, Hastings College of Law where he graduated in 1974.

In the early 1980s Jagels was the head of what was then the District Attorneys Association (now the Kern County Prosecutors Association). The association, which operates independently from the District Attorney’s Office itself, is made up of non-managerial deputy district attorneys within the office. As president of that association Jagels organized an office wide effort to collect signatures in support of the Victim’s Bill of Rights initiative which ultimately passed in 1982 adding article I, § 28 to the California Constitution.

Career Jagels was elected District Attorney of the Kern County District Attorney's Office in 1983.

Of the 26 convictions, 25 were reversed. One defendant was in prison for 19 years before his conviction was reversed. The county paid out nearly $10 million to settle claims made by the former prisoners and the alleged victims. Actor Sean Penn, who met a man accused of child sex crimes, narrated and served as executive producer for the documentary film, Witch Hunt, concerning the event. He was unapologetic about the false convictions in the 1980s sex abuse cases, and was re-elected six times as district attorney, before announcing his retirement in 2009.

On June 1, 2026, Jagels was arrested in Bakersfield, CA on suspicion of driving under the influence of alcohol.