Supervising Judge New to Job, Not to Tough Cases

San Fernando Superior Court’s incoming Supervising Judge Robert D. Fratianne says he knew he was going out on a limb last January when he formally declared a dead man guilty of murdering his wife and son to collect the insurance money.

Fratianne could have chosen not to make any further rulings after Clifford Lee Morgan, who was convicted by a jury of hiring two men to commit the murders, died of bone cancer. But Fratianne said in a recent interview that common sense dictated that Morgan’s heirs should not be allowed to inherit the almost $920,000 in insurance money.

“Sometimes you have to follow your own common sense and fit that common sense within the statutes,” Fratianne said of his decision to make a formal declaration of the Van Nuys man’s guilt. “Somewhere you have to take the bull by the horns.”

A former criminal defense attorney who had a private practice in Van Nuys for 18 years, Fratianne, 56, was appointed to the Los Angeles Municipal Court bench by Gov. Edmund G. Brown Jr. in 1978. He was elevated to the Superior Court in 1981.

Daughter Is Skater

“When I first was appointed to the bench, people would introduce me as Linda’s father,” Fratianne said of his ice-skating daughter, who won the world championship in 1977 and a Silver Medal in the 1980 Olympics.

“Three months ago, a clerk who was looking at my credit card at a department store asked me if I was related to the famous judge,” Fratianne said with a laugh. “At last! I came first!”

Fratianne, who lives with his wife, Peggy, in Woodland Hills, has four other children by a previous marriage and has two stepdaughters. Three of his children have followed their father into law.

A defense attorney who works frequently in Fratianne’s court said the judge tries to meld law and what he believes to be inherently fair.

“He’s a very nice person,” Deputy Public Defender Linda Schwartz said. “He tries to make decisions based on what a nice person would do.”

Example of Philosophy

Attorneys who appear before Fratianne, who will take on the court’s supervisory role Jan. 2, pointed to the Morgan case when asked to describe Fratianne’s judicial philosophy.

“He’s not afraid to make a decision,” said Deputy Dist. Atty. Ken Barshop, who handles the calendar cases in Fratianne’s court. “And he doesn’t avoid a decision when he sees that one has to be made.”

Although Fratianne’s ruling in the Morgan case created a storm of controversy, he has been upheld twice by the state Court of Appeal. The state Supreme Court still may choose to hear the case.

Fratianne said he was an avid golfer before a debilitating traffic accident critically injured him 25 years ago.

That accident, caused by a drunk driver traveling the wrong way on the San Diego Freeway, mangled Fratianne’s left leg and has forced him to endure five operations, including one eight months ago. His left shoe is elevated to compensate for his shortened leg and he occasionally uses a cane to get around.

Fratianne said the accident occurred during his final year at Southwestern University School of Law, just as he began studying for the bar examination. During the ensuing months, he fainted from pain as he tried to take the exam sitting in a wheelchair, finally passing the test on his third try.

He still keeps black-and-white photographs of the accident in his desk drawer.

“You try to forget things like that, but they leave a scar on you, emotionally and legally,” Fratianne said. “You try to be fair, but, if you’ve been shot or beat on, those personal experiences stay with you.”

During the sentencing in June of a woman who had killed five people while driving drunk near Newhall, Fratianne lambasted the defendant and told her why he now must use a cane to walk.

“You and I have had second chances,” Fratianne told the woman. The victims in the accident “don’t have a second chance. You know why? Because you killed them.”

Maximum Sentence

“That case was so extreme that I just had to make a comment,” Fratianne said this week. He gave the woman five years and eight months in state prison, the maximum allowed.

As supervising judge, Fratianne will be responsible for making sure that cases that come to the San Fernando courthouse move smoothly through the system. As part of that, Fratianne plans to implement a test program for civil cases that, if successful, could be applied to all of the county’s Superior Court branches.

Under the current system, pretrial arguments in civil cases are heard by a different judge from the one that will handle the actual trial, Fratianne said. The new program will parallel the federal court system, which assigns civil cases directly to a judge who stays on the case from beginning to end, he said.

Fratianne also hopes to win approval of a plan to knock out a dividing wall to make a full-size courtroom out of two small hearing rooms on the courthouse’s fourth floor and to convert the building’s library into two hearing rooms.