Father Fights System He Feels Aids Guilty

Don Floyd, a man who speaks softly but talks tough, says he was thrust into a life-consuming battle for judicial reform five years ago when his 17-year-old son was killed in an automobile accident caused by a drunken driver.

The driver was given a year’s probation after pleading no contest to manslaughter charges, and Floyd has been crusading ever since.

A hay merchant from Imperial County who now lives in San Diego, Floyd for the past two weeks has moved quietly behind the scenes of a controversy surrounding Sheriff John F. Duffy’s decision to let his on-duty deputies distribute post cards calling for the resignation of California Supreme Court Chief Justice Rose Elizabeth Bird.

Floyd is a founder and the chairman of Crime Victims for Court Reform, a statewide group pledged to remove from office Bird and Justices Cruz Reynoso and Joseph Grodin--all appointees of former Gov. Edmund G. Brown Jr. He is also the one who gave Duffy the 18,000 post cards the Sheriff’s Department distributed until Duffy agreed to halt the practice Tuesday in the face of a lawsuit filed against him by the American Civil Liberties Union.

Floyd spoke about his efforts Wednesday in an interview at a coffee shop across the street from the County Courthouse, where he had been monitoring the progress of a jury deliberating the fate of convicted killer Kevin Cooper. Cooper was found guilty last week of the 1983 murders of four people who were hacked and stabbed to death in a Chino Hills home. On Friday, the jury voted to sentence him to death.

“I really thought I knew what the system was all about,” Floyd said of the time before his son’s death in 1979. “I thought it was to maintain order in society, to protect the innocent, the young, the weak, the elderly. But it’s none of that. It’s there to protect the guy who commits the crime, to make sure his rights are protected.”

Wherever he goes, Floyd carries with him lists of convicted murderers whose sentences were reversed by the court he has grown to despise. And as easily as he recites the names of his five children, Floyd can rattle off names of crime victims and their relatives.

He talks about 2-year-old Amy Sue Seitz, who was tortured and killed after disappearing from her aunt’s Ventura County home in 1978. He speaks of Mark Ulrich, a young Stanislaus County man who was murdered in 1967. And he recounts the story of Dominique Dunne, a Hollywood actress who was strangled to death by her former boyfriend in 1982.

Seitz’s and Ulrich’s murderers each were sentenced to die but have since gained reprieves from the state Supreme Court. William Archie Fain, the man who murdered Ulrich, was released from prison on parole after the Bird court refused to review an appellate court decision ordering his release. Dunne’s killer was sentenced to six years in prison after being convicted of manslaughter.

But mostly, Floyd talks about the loss of his son, Mark, and the way it changed his own life.

“When he (Mark) was killed, my 13-year-old son, who had never had a bad thought in his life, picked up a gun and wanted to kill the guy,” Floyd said. “He said the courts weren’t going to do anything. I told him no, we’ve got to let the system work. Well, he was 100% right.”

A native of Oklahoma who moved with his parents to the Imperial County town of Brawley on the eve of World War II, Floyd was so angered by the handling of the case against the man responsible for his son’s death that he launched a recall campaign against then-Imperial County Dist. Atty. Fielding Kimball. Kimball resigned a few months later, citing personal reasons.

Not satisfied, Floyd next took on Sacramento, flying to the capital regularly to lobby for tougher laws against drunk drivers. Soon, however, Floyd became frustrated by what he saw as the Legislature’s preoccupation with petty political squabbles, and he gave up that cause.

Although he had been collecting names of other crime victims since his son’s 1979 death and had worked on two unsuccessful campaigns to recall the chief justice, it was a $35 speeding ticket Floyd received two years ago that finally prompted him to organize the victims’ group.

“It didn’t really click until then,” Floyd said, recalling that the drunk driver who killed his son went free. “It’s not easy to take when they tell you that one of your kids is worth less than a traffic ticket.”

With the help of an Orange County prosecutor and a Los Angeles accountant he met during earlier efforts to unseat Bird, Floyd founded Crime Victims for Court Reform in 1983 to oust the chief justice and the other Brown appointees. The group’s members believe the court has too aggressively defended the rights of the accused.

“Nobody wants to convict someone who’s innocent,” Floyd said. “I just don’t understand a system that will defend a guy when there is absolutely no question at all that he is guilty. That’s just incredible.”

Floyd said he sees Bird as a symbol of what ails the judicial system, problems that he believes trickle down to affect the treatment of every case of rape, robbery and drunk driving in the state. “But it’s like a football team that’s not winning,” he said. “You change the coach, not a player at a time. Leadership is everything.”

Although Floyd portrays Crime Victims for Court Reform as a nonpartisan group of laymen--not politicians--the organization is run on a day-to-day basis by veteran conservative political consultant Bill Roberts, who managed Gov. George Deukmejian’s campaign for governor for several months in 1982.

So far, Floyd said, the group has signed up more than 5,000 members and raised $100,000. Floyd said he hopes the group can build a $1-million war chest by the time Bird’s name is on the ballot in 1986.

In some respects, however, the campaign has already begun. Crime Victims for Court Reform printed 50,000 post cards calling on Bird to resign rather than face election, and the group began distributing the cards statewide Jan. 15. Floyd gave 3,000 to Duffy, who left them in his office for two weeks while he pondered how best to distribute them.

“That was all we thought he’d need,” Floyd said, “until the ACLU got into it.” Once the ACLU’s protests were publicized, Duffy said the demand for cards was so strong that he requested, and received, another batch of 15,000 cards from Floyd.

Floyd’s crusade has taken him away from his wife and five children, consuming four or five hours of his time each day. But he said he will not rest until Bird is removed from the court.

“If they can take half my income in taxes to protect these creeps, then I can take the rest of my money and fight them,” he said, his steel blue eyes glaring bitterness. “I’m not going to wait around until they kill another one of my kids.”