A California judge’s inside look at criminal justice in America

The human aspects of judging are a mystery to most members of the public, and even to lawyers. As a fan of "insider stories," I decided to use my two decades as a Los Angeles County Superior Court judge to shine a spotlight into the hidden folds of the judging world. The result is: "Inside the Robe, A Judge's Candid Tale of Criminal Justice in America." It describes one year on the bench, using anecdotes from my courtroom as well as my life. Two excerpts follow:

January 11

Today I taught an all-day class to twelve new judges to orient them in criminal law. I was delighted to see so many women and minorities. Eight of the twelve new judges were female. When I began practicing law in 1973, there were ten women in my law school class of 140 students. Most women were channeled into family or probate law. Only rarely did a woman practice criminal law. Most of the new female judges in my orientation class today had a criminal law background.

The diversity of our new bench officers is a strong reflection of the philosophy of Governor Jerry Brown. Prior governors in a "tough on crime" era almost always appointed prosecutors. The public gravitated toward judges whose background was locking people up. Things have changed.

When I passed the bar, my dream was to become a public defender. It was the early 1970s, and I felt close to the underdog. I could never see myself representing "The Man." I had long, braided hair and wore small round gold wire-framed hippie glasses. Yet, when I applied in 1973 to be a Sacramento County assistant public defender, the front desk wouldn't accept my application. The woman at the counter said that they didn't hire women. "We tried one once and she didn't work out."

I was hired after locating the two head public defenders at their regular steak and drinking tavern. I barged into their space, introduced myself, and volunteered to work for free. The surprise of my presence and request must have startled them into accepting my offer. It took several months of volunteering, but I was finally hired. Older male public defenders delighted in suggesting, "Kathy, I've got this guy coming to court charged with ten counts of oral copulation on an eight-year-old. Could you please visit him in the lockup, and tell him you'll be appearing for him today?" They thought that assigning me to represent defendants accused of forcible sex acts was hilarious and would make me quit. They didn't appreciate my affinity for criminal law and likely didn't envision that forty years later I'd still be in the mix.

Public Defender supervisors never said that women had no place in their office. They gave lip service to equality between the sexes. Supervisors had been heard to advocate that women should be allowed to lunch at the Drake Club, an all-male establishment. Each had stories to tell about a successful woman lawyer they knew. But they would entertain others by reporting, "She just turned those baby-blue eyes on the judge and it was all over -- old Joe doesn't have her kind of ammunition," or "That jury couldn't resist when she cried wet tears for the creep she defended."

Even after doing my time for several years as a public defender in the early seventies, I was not assigned a murder trial. Perhaps the supervisors didn't believe that a woman in her twenties could handle a murder trial as well as a man. "Client control" was a phrase that supervisors liked to throw around. It was rumored that in-custody defendants wanted a female attorney in the beginning to look at her, but when it came time for trial, they insisted on a man. Numerous stories went around about male defense attorneys who screwed up. Those stories were told once and forgotten. Tales about women attorneys never got stale.

I never understood why women lawyers were excluded from anything. I was always one of the boys. My Viennese dad and German mother were adamant that their only child have a profession. "We are not complaining you are getting married at nineteen. But you never know if your marriage will fail. And then you'll need a career to fall back on. Get a teaching credential. Become a lawyer. Just make sure you're financially able to care of yourself." At the time, I saw it as one more bit of Jewish doomsday advice -- life as you know it can fall apart at any moment. Prepare for the worst. Always have one skill you can fall back on -- it can save your life.

At the time, I argued furiously with them. "Norman and I will be together forever. Don't be so negative." Norman and I both wanted to become journalists. "Journalism is not a reliable profession like the law. And you don't want to be traveling around the country writing articles while Norman is left alone at home, do you?" Predictions about the future of journalism at that time were rosy. Ultimately, Norman and I went to law school at University of California at Davis together. We are still married.

I've always thought that I veered toward criminal defense because I could please my parents and at the same time stick a finger in their eye. They would have to explain to their social friends that their daughter represented criminals and their friends would be horrified. My interest in criminal law, however, predates annoying my parents. I wanted to become Nancy Drew, my female heroine of mystery novels. For my junior high school journalism class interview project, when others were interviewing their grandparents, I interviewed the gangster Mickey Cohen, whose sister owned the Carousel Ice Cream Parlor in my neighborhood. My journalism teacher, Mrs. Jordan, called my parents in a frenzy. "Do you know who your daughter is associating with? Mickey Cohen, the gangster!"

When I returned to Los Angeles from Sacramento with Norman in 1980, it was unusual to be a female attorney with six years of criminal defense experience. That's how I ended up as the token female on the defense team representing Angelo Buono, one of the two accused "Hillside Stranglers." I sat next to him, smiled at him, and touched his bony arm when we talked. I also handled motions and investigations and cross-examination in court. But the public and the press kept fixating on the same question: "How can a young woman have any relationship with a monster charged with raping and strangling ten women?"

Although the field of law gradually added more women (today, more than half of law school students are women), there's a gap between my experiences and those of today's women. For example, one day I learned that Betty Friedan died. While I wouldn't call her my hero, she did raise my consciousness and that of thousands of other women about inequalities in the manner women were treated in society. She is widely credited with sparking the women's revolution, along with Gloria Steinem.

The day she died, my entire courtroom was female: the attorneys, bailiff, clerk, and court reporter. I told them that Betty Friedan died. "Do you know who she is?" I asked. "I think I had to read an article she wrote once when I was in college," said the female public defender. The others in court had "heard the name" but couldn't place her.

Returning home that night, I was annoyed that an icon of the women's movement, without whom many of the women might not even have their jobs, would be so irrelevant to the women in my court. My teenage son put it into perspective for me: "Isn't this what you wanted, Ma? It's good that they don't ascribe their success to any one person. It sounds like you want these women to thank you. They take it for granted that they can do anything and be anyone they want. Isn't that what you wanted anyway?"

January 15

Today's Los Angeles Times lead story quotes LAPD Chief of Police Charlie Beck as asking the District Attorney's Office to file murder charges against a police officer who shot and killed a homeless man in Venice while on duty. The article detailed how hard it is to convict a police officer for an on-duty shooting. It brought me back to the prosecution I conducted of an LAPD officer who shot and killed a tow-truck driver in the early 1990s. At that time, I was in a special division of the DA's Office that prosecuted police officers.

This was a controversial DA unit because most prosecutors consider themselves closely aligned with law enforcement and do not want to prosecute police officers for excessive on-duty force. The prosecutors in the unit are even sometimes hassled by other prosecutors. I used to hear: "Why would you want to be in that unit? You need to work with police officers. Officers will know that you helped convict one of their brother or sister officers."

That argument never registered with me. Having a renegade spirit, and feeling I could either defend or prosecute, made such concerns irrelevant. If I was ostracized as a prosecutor, I could always return to practicing criminal defense. Luckily, several other prosecutors in the same unit had attitudes similar to my own.

Police officers' unions can put out the word that a prosecutor who files a criminal case against a police officer for an on-duty force incident cannot be trusted. This could cause future problems for a prosecutor who might want to become a judge someday. Attorneys need police union support to get appointed to the bench. I have a friend who spent several years as a commissioner (junior judge) and wanted to be appointed as a superior court judge. The governor wouldn't appoint him to a judgeship unless police unions wrote letters of support. That was unlikely because my friend prosecuted two police officers for separate on-duty use of force incidents. After many efforts and "make nice" meetings, my friend finally got two union recommendations and has been a judge for over a decade.

The most difficult part in prosecuting a police officer for an on-duty incident is finding a judge who would impartially try the case. As a judge, I can understand why judges don't want to preside over the criminal trial of a police officer. They may think, "If the prosecution convicts a police officer for an on-duty force incident, I must sentence the officer. What if the officer is convicted of a form of homicide? I'll be under public pressure to send the officer to prison. If I do that, prosecutors and police officers will be forever suspicious of me. And what if the union supports a candidate against me in the next judicial election? I could go bankrupt trying to hold onto my seat."

In our trial, the first jury deadlocked between two degrees of homicide: hung between second-degree murder and manslaughter, a stunning verdict. All twelve jurors voted that the act of shooting the tow truck driver was a criminal act. After the hung jury, our office decided to try the case again.

The second trial was held before the same judge. He changed several key rulings, all helping the officer's defense. He even allowed before the jury a prior incident in which the tow truck driver set afire a Humane Society truck and burned a dozen dogs alive. The dead victim was not an appealing man, but we didn't anticipate that the dog incident from years earlier would come before the jury. We didn't even screen the jury for dog lovers.

We ended up again with a hung jury, and the judge dismissed the charges. The police officer was fired, an unsatisfactory result for shooting a slow-moving tow-truck driver, when the driver resisted having his truck impounded. The judge retired without having to sentence a police officer to custody. 