600 Felony Trials and Counting for Prosecutor

No one really knows for certain whether Ken Lamb holds the record for trying people accused of crimes.

But everyone agrees that his current tally -- 600 completed felony trials in the 20 years he has worked for the Los Angeles County district attorney’s office -- puts him well beyond any current challengers.

“A hundred felonies is a big deal,” said Dave LaBahn, executive director of the California District Attorneys Assn. “I’ve heard of people who have done 350, maybe 400. But 600 felonies -- that’s incredible.”

The total includes 150 sexual assaults, 99 homicides, 15 special-circumstances cases, six insanity pleas and two death penalty cases. Of the total, 530 have ended in convictions.

Steve Cooley, Los Angeles County’s district attorney, said his office doesn’t keep track of such things.

“But no one in this office has any sense that anyone’s ever approached that,” Cooley said. “He’s the Babe Ruth of trial lawyers.”

A litany of human sadness is written into Lamb’s case list, which includes the rape of a 68-year-old woman, a murderous shooting spree committed by a man who claimed he had been attacked by Terminator-style cyborgs, and the unprovoked shooting of an affluent South Bay man who went on a “Bonfire of the Vanities”-style expedition to buy crack cocaine.

“I don’t cherry-pick,” said Lamb, a lean 50-year-old who looks strikingly like actor Roy Scheider. “I’ll try anything, because whether it’s a drug case or a murder case, you have to put the same level of effort into it.”

He chalked up his prodigiousness to his systematic case preparation. Lamb prepares for multiple trials as cases come in, rather than deal with them one at a time after court dates are set.

That fastidious approach allowed Lamb to prosecute 63 back-to-back cases, more than one a week, in 1992, the most he’s done in a single year.

He keeps his arguments fresh, he said, by rehearsing them in his head during the 5-mile runs he takes with his dogs through his Long Beach neighborhood, where he lives with his wife, Debra, a prosecutor in the Compton branch office.

Ed George, a defense attorney who said he has an even record against Lamb in the handful of cases they have tried against each other, described Lamb’s commitment to his trials as habitual.

“He really is compelled to do it,” said George, who added that Lamb had used a six-day Easter recess imposed by the judge in one of the “Ace of Spades” gang homicide trials to try another case. Lamb, who speaks in the calm, patient manner of a high school calculus teacher, said he avoids obscure legal moves. He will, however, indulge his taste for dramatics if he thinks a visual aid will clarify his argument.

In one case, he resorted to a courtroom experiment to disprove a man’s claim that he had accidentally set his wife on fire after he dropped a cigarette into a puddle of gasoline during an argument.

“Cigarettes aren’t hot enough to light gas on fire, but you always see it in the movies, so I knew no one would believe it if I just had an expert saying that,” Lamb said.

He arranged for a pot of gasoline to be placed in the courtroom, and asked the man to ignite it with a cigarette.

“And of course he couldn’t,” Lamb said. “The judge even ordered that fire hoses be brought in, which made it even better.”

Larry Thaxton, a former public defender in Long Beach who now works for Los Angeles County’s alternate public defender’s office, said Lamb was known among Long Beach defenders as “the unbeatable D.A.”

“He’s a master of the final argument,” said Thaxton, who has argued a number of murder and sexual assault cases against Lamb. “Defenders come out of there and say, ‘Gosh, that just killed me.’ ”

Lamb has spent 17 of his 20 years in the D.A.’s office working in a trial capacity, far more than most of his colleagues, and he has served those 17 years in the three branches with the highest volume of felony trials: downtown, Norwalk and Long Beach.

The Long Beach branch, where Lamb works, is the busiest in the county, processing about 5,000 felony cases a year.

Allen Field, the head prosecutor in Long Beach, said he depends on Lamb to get through that caseload.

“When we’re short on deputies as we are, I can say, ‘Ken, you’re the pinch hitter; go take this car theft,’ ” he said. “And the next thing you know, he’s back in the office asking for the next one. He thrives in the courtroom.”

Field met Lamb in the early 1980s when Lamb, a rookie prosecutor, was assigned to the Whittier branch office where Field was in charge.

“Ken was my filing deputy, and he was an eager beaver,” Field said. “I’d wind him up and watch him go, and that hasn’t changed.”

Lamb came to the district attorney’s office from a 10-year career with the Los Angeles Police Department, which he joined in 1974 after graduating from Cal State Los Angeles with a bachelor’s degree in criminal justice.

“I expected I’d be there my whole life,” Lamb said, noting that he had prepared himself for active duty by working as a security guard in the campus bookstore, where he arrested 23 shoplifters.

In 1979, he was promoted to sergeant in the Southwest Division, and he decided to start taking evening classes at Cal State Los Angeles toward a master’s degree in public administration.

About the same time, he started taking night law classes at Whittier Law School. “I was working 80-hour weeks between duty time and classes,” Lamb said. “But I wanted to do it so I’d have a second career in case I got injured, or for after I retired.”

But by 1982, when he finished both the master’s and his law degree, Lamb said, he had decided to get a jump on his second career.

“Leaving the Police Department was one of the hardest things I’ve done in my life, but it just got harder to be a police officer,” Lamb said. “You’d see little kids pointing their fingers at you like a gun and shouting, ‘I wish you were dead!’ ”

Lamb applied for a job with the district attorney’s office, rejecting out of hand the idea of going into private practice or working as a public defender because, he said, he wasn’t comfortable with the idea of representing people he thought were guilty.

“In the D.A.’s office, you’re still preventing crime and working for society,” said Lamb, who was hired in October 1983.

In the course of his tour through various offices, Lamb has prosecuted several high-profile cases, including the 29-year-old man who assaulted or raped four women between July and September 1990, hacking off their hair and carving inverted crosses into their backs as he told them he was a “messenger of the Lord.”

Lamb said he has received a number of personal threats from people he has put away, and one from the wife of a man who died while serving his prison sentence. The most striking threat came indirectly, after prison guards found that a man Lamb had successfully prosecuted for child molestation had written a to-do list that read, “Number one: Kill Ken Lamb.”

“I don’t take it as seriously as some people would, because as a police officer I was threatened every single day,” Lamb said.

He did admit that the threats, like many of the cases he has tried, start to run together in his memory.