Bobb Holding Her Own Despite Some Criticism : McMartin Case: New Ground for Law--and Judge

The tiny figure perched on the bench sometimes appears engulfed by her oversized black robe and the enormity of the proceedings before her. Municipal Judge Aviva K. Bobb gazes into space, scratches her head, scribbles notes, shuffles through her papers, and often postpones making decisions for days while she seeks advice from colleagues.

The 39-year-old former Legal Aid Foundation administrator had been a judge for only three years and was unfamiliar with child abuse law when she was assigned last year to handle what has become the most closely watched preliminary hearing in the country--that of the McMartin Pre-School molestation case.

The seven defendants, all former teachers at the Manhattan Beach nursery school, are charged with 208 counts of molestation and conspiracy involving 41 children in their care since 1978.

Bobb was working in Van Nuys, handling mostly misdemeanor trials on matters like drunk driving, petty theft or drug possession--she had never heard a child molestation case--when Morton Rochman, then presiding judge of the Municipal Court, called. He needed a judge downtown to handle the McMartin case. It shouldn’t take more than about two months, four at most, he said.

That was nearly a year ago. The McMartin case has turned out to be one of the longest, costliest and most complex legal proceedings in Los Angeles County’s history, conducted in an emotionally charged atmosphere and reported in minute detail by the news media.

As 10 prosecution and defense lawyers vie for attention, Bobb often resembles a frazzled mother at home with the kids on a rainy day:

She threatens--”That is contemptible!” She yells--”Counsel, this is not a free-for-all!” She sometimes insists, to little avail, that the lawyers crowded around the table in front of her raise their hands, stand up or wait for her to recognize them by name before speaking. She rolls her eyes in exasperation. She pleads--”It’s clear that tensions are very high in this courtroom . . . If you would set an example for a month of lowered acerbicity (sic) . . . And might I dare to hope it might extend (even) to when the children are not in the room?”

While some observers say she has failed to exercise enough control over attorneys and has confused the proceedings with contradictory rulings, other colleagues say she is holding her own in a case that is breaking new legal ground and is colored with emotion.

Bobb herself appears to take it all in stride, maintaining her perspective and sense of humor.

“It’s not life-changing,” she insisted last week, relaxing in her chambers for the first interview she has granted since the hearing began. A short, chunky woman with cropped gray hair, diamond earrings and classic clothes, Bobb decided to skip lunch altogether.

“The excitement of the case is that there are so many issues that you get to think through and decide. I appreciate that there is a lot of emotionality about the nature of the charges between counsel; you try to put that aside and make the best decisions that you can.”

As the proceedings become increasingly chaotic and drawn out, prosecutors and defense lawyers, as well as parents of child witnesses in the case and other observers, are looking to Bobb to control the proceedings.

Hearing Runs Long

The current hearing, held to determine whether there is enough evidence to warrant a trial, has already lasted six months, and only two of the 41 children expected to testify have taken the witness stand. The Evidence Code authorizes judges to exercise “reasonable control over the mode of interrogation” of witnesses to speed up proceedings while protecting witnesses from harassment or embarrassment. Another section allows judges to cut off lines of questioning that promise to take up more time than whatever they could possibly turn up is worth.

Court visitors viewing the proceedings in a room adjacent to the courtroom on two 25-inch television monitors usually leave shaking their heads in disbelief.

“It’s like a three-ring circus in there,” said one outside attorney who has appeared before her during the McMartin hearing, pointing to Bobb’s unwillingness or inability to rein in the 10 lawyers involved in the case by limiting argument and cross-examination. “But she has improved measurably since the beginning,” he added. She has begun disallowing questions that she finds irrelevant or repetitive, and she has cited several attorneys for contempt.

A veteran Superior Court judge familiar with the case said Bobb has shown “an abdication of judicial control” in handling lawyers who behave “like a bunch of rambunctious school kids.”

Decisions Questioned

Although few of her colleagues say she has made any serious mistakes, many disagree with some of her rulings, such as her decisions to hold a combined preliminary hearing for all seven defendants two months after beginning the hearing for the first, to disallow child testimony by closed-circuit television, and to close portions of the hearing to the public.

“She’s doing very well in a ticklish situation; she’s got a real bear by the tail,” said another senior Superior Court judge. Bobb has successfully resisted several efforts by defense lawyers to have her disqualified on grounds that she is biased, and she ignored a suggestion last week that she consider “an assistant judge or referee . . . because we all need help.”

A prosecutor in a child murder case before Bobb in the Van Nuys Court describes her as a liberal judge who is both “pro-child and pro-defendants’ rights,” and trying to balance both. He said she often finds herself in a quandary because she is extremely conscientious but inexperienced, and thus easily taken advantage of by lawyers who insist on arguing over every issue.

Bobb herself appears unfazed by the glare of publicity, the uncharted legal waters the case has plunged her into, or the strong feelings that participants and observers voice about her handling of the McMartin case.

‘How Does It Look?’

In the hour-long interview, she declined to discuss details of the case before her, although she couldn’t resist asking, “How does it look from out there?” Except for one daily newspaper, she says she doesn’t follow reports on the proceedings.

These days she takes home a heftier-than-usual stack of materials to read at night--the transcripts alone so far fill more than 263 volumes--but she says she has not let McMartin usurp her personal life.

“I’ve always been able to separate working and my family life,” she said. Husband Merrick Bobb, a lawyer with the downtown law firm of Tuttle and Taylor whom she met at the University of California’s Boalt School of Law in Berkeley, says his wife’s basic strength is that ability “to balance and juggle various things. Given all the pressures and the relentlessness of it, she’s held up remarkably well.”

Bobb says her friends understand that she can’t talk about McMartin, and strangers don’t yet recognize her name. She discusses her rulings, once made, with her husband, she said.

Escape for Weekends

But she has little time for outside activities--”although I used to be a good violinist”--and spends most weekends with Merrick and their two sons, ages 3 and 9, hiking, visiting museums, and participating in various sports. The Bobbs recently moved from the San Fernando Valley to the Los Feliz area of Los Angeles and escape for weekends to a cabin at Lake Arrowhead.

Bobb declined to discuss her children, given the nature of the case before her, but friends say the older son attends a private school and the younger is enrolled in a preschool, and that Bobb--”a terrific mother”--sees to their tennis lessons and gym classes like any other middle-class parent.

New-York-born Aviva (Hebrew for “spring”) Koenigsberg Bobb grew up in New Haven, Conn., the only daughter of an electronics manufacturer and his wife, a homemaker and Hebrew and Bible teacher. She still calls home once a week. Her two older brothers went into law and medicine.

Bobb majored in political science at Wellesley, where friends remember her primarily as “an underachiever” who helped found a film society and enjoyed speaking before audiences. People who knew her then say she always asked tough questions that got to the heart of an issue, thought in an analytical and logical fashion, and appeared grounded by a deep concern for others, particularly the poor or victimized.

After working for a year at a Cambridge, Mass., think tank, she came West to law school at Berkeley where she was an average student. She does not remember why a law career appealed, and coming to California itself was “a whim,” one of the few impulsive acts in a life that has been governed by carefully considered choices.

Working for the Poor

Summer Legal Aid jobs in New York and Cambridge confirmed her interest in working with the poor and disadvantaged, and her first full-time job was that of staff attorney for San Fernando Valley Neighborhood Legal Services in Pacoima. She represented the poor in a variety of consumer cases, including one in which she established that tenants in federally subsidized housing cannot be evicted without certain legal steps.

In 1974 she became executive director of the legal services group, and two years later the executive director of the Legal Aid Foundation of Los Angeles, where she supervised 60 lawyers, an additional staff of 150, and an annual budget of $4 million.

Five years ago, however, she found herself wanting something more. “I enjoy advocacy tremendously,” she recalled. “But I had done it for a long time and I wanted to see whether--when you actually had responsibility for decisions as opposed to just arguing--you could implement the things that I think ought to take place. I mean, one of the attractions of being a judge is that you have responsibility for deciding what in the past you were free to argue about with relative abandon because you weren’t responsible for the outcome of your advocacy.”

So, she says, she mailed in a judicial application, underwent an evaluation by what was then the Commission on Judicial Appointments, and nine months later was appointed to the bench by former Gov. Edmund G. Brown Jr., hearing her first cases in 1981. She is not active in politics, she added.

Not Planning Ahead

Bobb won her first election last year, and won’t have to face voters again until 1990. “I’m not motivated by thoughts about reelection,” she said. “I don’t plan very much ahead in terms of career goals and I’ve never taken a job to go on to another job.”

Judge Rochman, the man who assigned Bobb to the McMartin case, says he is proud of Bobb’s handling of it. But he admits that his choice had more to do with the fact that he had no other judge available than Bobb’s special judicial qualities. “But she was not brand new and I was confident she could handle it,” he said.

Other colleagues describe her as serious, intelligent, fair, and cautious, with sound judgment. Those close to her say her brusque manner is a protective professional device for a woman “who also goes shopping and diets and reads poetry and takes her kids on nature walks.”

And even her critics point out that her indecisiveness is understandable because she is dealing with unresolved legal issues involving media access, efforts to introduce creative mechanisms such as closed-circuit television for testimony by child victims, and questions of competency in a new field of child abuse professionals.

Product of Reflection

“She’s not given to quick decisions and she’s afraid of being reversed by a higher court,” said one friend, a Superior Court judge. “Sometimes an apparent inconsistency is the product of further reflection. She’s intent on doing the right thing even if she suffers some embarrassment for changing her mind.”

Bobb has been criticized most heavily for changing her mind about the prosecution’s proposal to have children testify by closed-circuit television so that they would not have to face the defendants they reportedly fear. The judge had approved the plan soon after the start of the preliminary hearing for defendant Raymond Buckey last summer.

However, after she joined the other six defendants in Buckey’s hearing in August, arguments began anew over whether the young witnesses would suffer severe psychological harm if they had to testify in open court. After weeks of testimony by parents and expert witnesses, Bobb ruled that she now felt bound by an appellate court decision made after her first ruling that found no authority for such a procedure in trials.

A disappointed prosecutor not involved in the McMartin case accused her of being wishy-washy and said she misinterpreted the appeals court opinion. It applied to a specific set of circumstances and to a jury trial, not a preliminary hearing, the attorney said, so Bobb could have ordered closed-circuit testimony and given the defense time to seek a writ if they wanted to challenge her decision.

Television an Issue

She chose instead to exclude the public, maintaining the semblance of an open hearing by allowing spectators to watch the televised proceedings in an adjacent room.

The constitutionality of closed-circuit television testimony has not yet been argued in the higher courts, and legislation specifically permitting the procedure is before the state Legislature.

Now that child witnesses are on the stand, Bobb is faced with defense attempts to challenge the youngsters’ credibility as they recount confusing events. She must attempt to minimize the painfulness of having to testify--the present 10-year-old witness has been on the stand since Jan. 30--and still be fair to the defendants who, if convicted, face life behind bars.

“It’s the most demanding court case in recent memory,” said one experienced Superior Court judge. He paused, then added, “And I’m glad somebody else is handling it.”