Despite having been charged by the Los Angeles County district attorney with three felony crimes — including misappropriation of public funds — former Inglewood Mayor Roosevelt Dorn accepted a prosecution deal and pleaded guilty Monday to one misdemeanor charge of conflict of interest and was fined $1,000.

As part of the deal, Dorn resigned as Inglewood’s mayor Sunday, was given two years probation and the 75-year-old minister and retired judge was barred from ever seeking public office again.

In an interview Sunday before he accepted District Attorney Steve Cooley’s deal, Dorn said he was going to accept the deal, resign from office and plead to a misdemeanor because Cooley and Judge George G. Lomeli were forcing him to do so, as he had been put in a situation that accepting the D.A.’s offer was the only thing he could do. Dorn said Cooley had no intentions of having those three felonies with which he charged Dorn in June 2008 go to trial, and Lomeli actively worked from his judicial bench to strip Dorn of all of the means he had to defend himself at a trial, should one ever materialize.

The charges against Dorn were serious, and for the past 18 months the former mayor faced four years in prison if convicted of them and he had been paying two lawyers lots of money to prepare for his trial, defend him in court and keep him out of prison. So, what happened Monday?

The prospect of a trial went away, the specter of prison vanished, those serious charges against him disappeared, he was fined $1,000 (which is less than that for a lone driver caught in a carpool lane), and he resigned from office. That’s what this whole elaborate and expensive farce was all about — forcing Dorn out of a rather rinky-dink office. (We’re not talking about the mayor of say, Los Angeles, New York or Chicago, here.)

If Cooley had proof that Dorn had misappropriated public funds by unlawfully being compensated for taking out a home improvement loan from the city of Inglewood, it was his job to convict him and put him in prison. That’s what we pay Cooley to do, to punish people who hurt us or steal our money. The people of the city of Inglewood and we taxpayers of the County of Los Angeles deserve to have Dorn tried and convicted. But, if a trial was held, then Dorn would have had the opportunity to defend himself, which is something neither Cooley nor Lomeli would allow.

During a pretrial hearing last month, Lomeli ruled that Dorn could not call two independent experts on government codes as witnesses for his defense. The judge ruled then that Dorn could only call experts from Inglewood to testify in his defense. That same day, Lomeli ruled that Dorn, who had been a Superior Court judge for 18 years, could not serve as co-counsel in his own defense. Those rulings were unprecedented, mean-spirited and designed to significantly diminish Dorn’s ability to mount a strong defense.

Last week, Dorn’s attorneys went before Lomeli with the names of two Inglewood government code experts whom they wanted to testify in his defense: Timothy Wanamaker, the city administrator, and Wanda Brown, the city treasurer. Lomeli ruled they would not be allowed to testify either, after ruling last month that they were the only kind of people he would allow on the stand! How dastardly and calculating was that?! Out goes Dorn’s defense, en toto, and in comes the D.A.’s weak misdemeanor offer and, evidently, a tacit acknowledgment that he really didn’t do anything wrong — at least, nothing worth 18 months of hell, thousands of dollars in personal legal fees, and thousands of public dollars in court and prosecution costs.

Dorn and his attorneys had fashioned what they deemed a fine defense against the state’s flimsy and over-reaching case against the mayor, but when Lomeli got through last week, Dorn had nothing. The only way he was left to defend himself was to stand before the jury and scream: “I am innocent! I am innocent! I am innocent!” Cooley and Lomeli had no intentions of having Dorn deal with those charges against him in a court of law, as is supposed to be every American’s constitutional right.

This whole stressful, life-shortening mess served no one well except Cooley. The people deserved the conviction of a person proved guilty of misappropriating their funds. Dorn deserved a fair shot at getting an acquittal of such a charge. But all Cooley wanted was to get him out of office by any means necessary. And that’s what he got.