Panel faults judge’s job performance

A three-judge panel investigating Riverside County Superior Court Judge Robert Spitzer said Monday that he repeatedly failed to perform his judicial duties and was guilty of “willful misconduct” for improperly intervening in a murder case.

The judges’ report will be sent to the state’s Commission on Judicial Performance, whose members will decide whether to punish the 58-year-old Spitzer. The penalty could range from no action to removal from the bench. It was not known when the commission will hear the case.

The most publicized complaint about Spitzer was his handling of the Vondetrick Carr case. Carr was tried for murder after he crashed while driving drunk, killing a 13-year-old passenger, Kyle Reiber.

During Carr’s first trial in 2004, Spitzer angered the Riverside County district attorney’s office by repeatedly asking why the prosecutor was pursuing murder charges instead of manslaughter.

After the jury deadlocked, Spitzer had a private conversation with the dead boy’s mother, a potential witness in the retrial, telling her the defendant had not meant to kill her son and that the accident should result in manslaughter charges.

Kyle’s mother and the district attorney considered Spitzer’s comments improper and an attempt to enlist her help in persuading the prosecutor to charge Carr with manslaughter instead of murder.

The district attorney successfully blocked Spitzer from hearing Carr’s second trial, in which he was convicted of murder.

For more than a year afterward, the district attorney’s office filed papers asking that Spitzer be disqualified from hearing felony cases.

In its report, the three-judge panel said Spitzer “acted in bad faith” when he met with the victim’s mother. “Judge Spitzer abandoned his role as a neutral arbiter and became embroiled in the case,” the panel’s report said.

In two other cases, the panel found that Spitzer also sought ex parte conversations, or conversations held outside the courtroom, without seeking permission from the attorneys.

Spitzer, who worked for more than a decade as a Riverside County deputy district attorney before becoming a Municipal Court judge in 1990 and a Superior Court judge in 1998, has faced intense scrutiny over the last few years.

In 2003, Douglas Miller, the presiding judge of the Riverside County Superior Court, alerted the judicial commission to problems in Spitzer’s court after receiving complaints that he was failing to issue orders in a timely manner.

During a public hearing before the three-judge panel this year, Spitzer’s staff and colleagues testified that his courtroom and chambers were so disorganized and messy that some staffers gave up trying to retrieve missing orders.

Some members of the courthouse staff were concerned that Spitzer was backdating orders.

In its report Monday, the panel said it did not find evidence that Spitzer had backdated orders or that he had knowingly signed false affidavits stating that no matters before him had been awaiting decisions for more than 90 days, which is the legal limit.

But in more than half a dozen civil cases, the panel said, Spitzer failed to promptly dispose of judicial matters which amounted to a “dereliction of duty” and a “persistent failure to perform judicial duties.” In one case Spitzer did not enter a decision for almost six years.

The panel said the judge wasn’t properly tracking cases and wasn’t aware the matters had been under submission for more than 90 days or that he hadn’t made his clerks aware he had made a decision.

One of Spitzer’s attorneys, Reginald Vitek, said he had not had a chance to read the full report but was pleased the panel found his client had not knowingly signed false affidavits or backdated orders, “which were the most serious charges.”

The judicial panel, composed of Justice Fred K. Morrison of the 3rd District Court of Appeals, Santa Clara County Superior Court Judge Mary Jo Levinger and Sonoma County Superior Court Judge Mark H. Tansil, said the judicial commission should consider Spitzer’s reputation for honesty, his legal acumen and that he frequently took on criminal cases as a civil judge to ease the backlog in Riverside County.

The panel also praised Spitzer for voluntarily entering therapy “to deal with the bad organizational habits that were jeopardizing some aspects of his job performance.”

maeve.reston@latimes.com