OAKLAND — Whenever a police officer kills a civilian, the Alameda County District Attorney performs an in-depth investigation to determine if the shooting was justified, and if not, whether criminal charges should be filed. But one investigation of a fatal shooting on an unarmed man on New Year’s Eve 2007 has languished for more than a decade. And another report, of a fatal shooting by the same rookie officer just months later, took six years to complete.

The lapses raise serious questions about the DA’s conduct in these cases, legal experts say, especially since a review shows that most of these reports are completed within two years. It took a public records request by this news organization for the DA’s office to admit it hadn’t finalized the report on the 10-year-old shooting. Spurred by the news organization’s inquiry, the report finally was delivered to Oakland police Tuesday. It will be available to the public this week, a spokeswoman said.

No law requires a district attorney to investigate killings by police, according to legal analyst and former Santa Clara prosecutor Steven Clark. But published reports of these investigations, as conducted by each of the Bay Area’s DAs, provide the public a critical, independent glimpse of what occurred during the shootings.

Defense attorneys in the two Alameda County cases, as well as a retired judge, said the delays were appalling and called into question how seriously Alameda County prosecutors take police shootings. In each case, the men were unarmed — one was shot in the back while running away from officers.

The Oakland Police Department didn’t wait for the DA’s report. After the second shooting, Oakland officer Hector Jimenez was fired. But Jimenez won his job back through arbitration, and is still on the force today.

“I have never seen anything like it,” said LaDoris Cordell, a retired Santa Clara judge and former San Jose police auditor. “There’s no words they can come up with to excuse this behavior. If the Board of Supervisors are not outraged by this, the community and the attorneys will be.”

In Alameda County, the investigation is not considered complete until the elected district attorney, currently Nancy O’Malley, sends a final report of its findings to the police chief.

In the case of 20-year-old Andrew Moppin-Buckskin, who died Dec. 31, 2007, Alameda County DA spokeswoman Teresa Drenick said investigators handling the case finished the report in 2013, more than five years after the shooting, but the office did not realize it had failed to forward the report to Oakland police until the request by this news agency sent them looking for it.

“We believe that the delay in completing a report was due, in part, to the fact that the federal government was reviewing the matter,” Drenick wrote in an email. “In addition, between the time that the investigation began and was completed, there was a change in the DA Administration as well as in our policy regarding the release of OIS reports.”

In 2009, O’Malley took over for retiring DA Tom Orloff, who did not release officer-involved shooting reports to the public, as O’Malley does, Drenick said.

Moppin-Buckskin was shot and killed by Jimenez and officer Jessica Borello at 47th Avenue and International Boulevard. He earlier ran from a car after a traffic stop and hid underneath a parked Ford Explorer, according to court records contained in his family’s federal lawsuit. After he refused to emerge with his hands raised, Jimenez threatened to shoot him if he didn’t walk toward the officers, court records show. Moppin-Buckskin replied, “I don’t give a f— if you shoot me, I’ve been shot before.”

Police shot him multiple times after he reached toward his back waistband, records state. The internal affairs review by Oakland police found the officers did not violate any policies. Six months later on July 25, 2008, Jimenez was involved in another fatal shooting, of Mack “Jody” Woodfox along Fruitvale Avenue. Woodfox was unarmed and shot in the back as he ran away from a traffic stop.

A DA investigation completed nearly six years later, on May 28, 2014, and released under the same records request, determined the shooting was justified and that Jimenez feared for the safety of his partner, Joel Aylworth. In an interview with investigators, Jimenez said a police spotlight obscured his vision so he could not see if Woodfox was armed as he ran with his right hand near his waistband, according to the DA report.

However, OPD fired Jimenez in 2009 for his conduct in the Woodfox incident, though the department has not specifically said why. The officer won his job back through arbitration two years later. A federal judge dismissed a lawsuit by the family of Moppin-Buckskin but the city settled a lawsuit Woodfox’s family had filed for $650,000. Civil rights attorney Jim Chanin, who along with John Burris represented the families in the separate lawsuits, said both police shootings were questionable and also criticized the delay in the reports.

“Let’s say they found criminal culpability,” Chanin said. “That meant someone would have been able to walk around for nine, 10, 11 years before they were charged. Justice delayed is justice denied.”

The district attorney’s investigations, which run parallel to the police department’s probe, can take time, but a review of several cases in the past 10 years shows many were completed within two years. “Each incident is unique and complex,” said Drenick. The Alameda DA does not set a specific time limit on investigations.

But its delay in completing the two cases involving Jimenez raised questions of transparency. David Snyder, executive director of the First Amendment Coalition, said the reports are one of the few avenues the public has to obtain facts about a police shooting. California law shields the public from internal affairs investigations conducted by within individual police departments.

“An officer involved shooting is by definition an event the public has heightened interest in. It is an instance where the police have exercised the extraordinary power they’ve been given by the people to injure or potentially end someone’s life,” Snyder said. “It requires extraordinary oversight and transparency. You can’t have oversight without transparency.”

“Delays can be a kind of a denial of public access,” he added.