Dana Berg is an attorney and prosecutor for the L.A. District Attorney's Office. In November 2019, she was assigned to prosecute the case of California versus Haller for the murder of Sam Scales. From the start she not only assumed Haller's guilt, she displayed a very negative personal attitude toward him, going beyond the normal sparring between lawyers. This may have been in part because he is a defense attorney and generally disliked by prosecutors. Haller referred to her as Ice Berg.
Much of her prosecutorial strategy was pro forma, but in several instances she committed errors that seriously jeopardized the case against Haller. Her errors primarily dealt with violations of the evidence discovery process. She also violated (perhaps unknowingly) Haller's attorney/client privilege by using information obtained from illegal eavesdropping on jail phone calls. This violation was so egregious that Judge Warwick's remedy was to reduce Haller's bail from $5 million to $500,000. In apparent retaliation, Berg sought new evidence to show that Haller had killed for financial gain. She found records indicating that Scales owed money to Haller, triggering a Special Circumstances finding and sending Haller back to jail.
Berg's case also suffered from incomplete investigative work by LAPD Detective Kent Drucker. She was unaware that the FBI was watching Scales and the company he worked for, BioGreen Industries. They did not question the disappearance of Scales' wallet and thus did not uncover the alias that Scales was using at the time of his death. Thus, Berg was deprived of significant information that would have shifted suspicion from Haller to Louis Opparizio.
On February 27, 2020, Berg was summoned by her boss, John Kelly, to attend a morning meeting with himself, Judge Warfield, Haller, Maggie McPherson, Matthew Scallan, Wilson Corbett, Dawn Ruth, Rick Aiello, and a couple of others. The outcome of the meeting was agreement that all the charges against Haller would be dropped and he would be given full exoneration. Berg was both humiliated and incensed at the agreement, but there was nothing she could do about it. A question that remains is whether Berg would be disciplined for her failures in this case.