‘Demonstrator’s Magistrate’ : Van Nuys Judge Gets Call to Berkeley Protest Trial

Van Nuys Municipal Court Judge Ken Chotiner has become the demonstrator’s magistrate.

Chotiner, who leaves Monday to oversee a trial in Berkeley of 10 defendants arrested during anti-apartheid protests there last month, said he has been called on at least six times in the last four years to handle trials of demonstrators throughout the state.

“I handled trials of anti-nuclear demonstrators at Diablo Canyon in 1981, at Diablo Canyon again in 1982, at the Livermore National Laboratories in 1982, in Diablo yet again in 1983, and, come to think of it, I was up there last year,” Chotiner said, adding that he also was called to help as a judge after anti-nuclear demonstrations at Vandenberg Air Force Base north of Santa Barbara in 1983.

Chotiner was asked to serve at the Berkeley trial, which is expected to last two to four weeks, after three of Berkeley’s four Municipal Court judges disqualified themselves from hearing the cases, saying in a signed statement that they believed the arrests were “an unsound exercise of prosecutorial discretion.”

According to Ralph Gampell, administrative director of the California court system, Chotiner was asked to conduct the Berkeley trial because of his experience handling multi-defendant trials.

“There is a kind of cadre of fewer than half a dozen judges with experience in this area,” Gampell said. “They are assigned because of their expertise and their ability, therefore, to move cases which might otherwise become impacted with judges who do not have that familiarity with mass-arrest cases.”

Chotiner said he will be hearing the case against 10 defendants charged with resisting arrest, trespassing, and blocking a street or sidewalk. The trial, which will include 10 defense attorneys, is to be held in a courtroom the size of a small auditorium, he said.

“These kinds of trials involve people who generally have sought to be arrested in order to make a political statement,” Chotiner said. “The legal issues that are presented are often novel, and they can have constitutional magnitude. It’s quite a challenge.”