Patient Judge Holds Course in Tempest of ‘Twilight’ Case

The trouble with Judge Roger W. Boren, says “Twilight Zone” defense attorney Harland Braun, is that he’s a gentleman.

If Boren weren’t the type who “would open a door for a woman or stand up in a bus,” Braun said recently in court, he’d surely admonish Deputy Dist. Atty. Lea Purwin D’Agostino more frequently for making allegedly inappropriate remarks during the long-running involuntary manslaughter case.

For her part, D’Agostino says that “there are times when I believe (Boren) is almost too intellectual to be on a daily scrappy, war-like courtroom trial.” Instead, she swiftly added in a recent interview, Boren belongs “on our state Supreme Court or Court of Appeal.” In the seven months since jury selection began, these are probably the sharpest barbs to have been tossed at the Los Angeles Superior Court judge by D’Agostino, Braun or his six fellow defense attorneys. Indeed, such traits as patience, earnestness and flexibility are among those most frequently used to describe Boren by his colleagues.

Although a relative newcomer to the bench, the 45-year-old Utah native who served as a California deputy attorney general for 11 years, is widely considered among the most hard-working and fair-minded jurists in the downtown Criminal Courts Building.

These attributes have turned out to be particularly pertinent in the trial of film director John Landis and four associates, which has featured more than its share of bizarre twists while moving at a snail’s pace amid unabated mudslinging between lawyers.

“Roger is able to assimilate material as well or better than anybody and his monumental patience is suitable to dealing with the six or seven lawyers who are at each others’ throats all the time,” declared one admirer, Municipal Judge Michael Nash.

Nash should know. He served as co-prosecutor with Boren in Boren’s previous spotlight case, the successful prosecution of “Hillside Strangler” Angelo Buono Jr., apparently the longest criminal trial in U.S. history.

In that case, Boren and Nash had a mere two months to prepare for trial after Superior Court Judge Ronald M. George rejected a motion by the district attorney’s office for dismissal because prosecutors thought the case was unwinnable. Working seven days a week, 14 hours a day, the two deputy attorney generals slogged through hundreds of thousands of documents and finally succeeded in winning Buono’s conviction in nine murders after a two-year trial.

“Very few people could have carried that off; it was a tribute to his own meticulous, thorough and untiring abilities,” George recalled.

Buono’s defense attorneys agree with the sentiment.

“Roger is a very straightforward, honest, hard-working guy,” says Gerald L. Chaleff. “And as a judge I think he’s fair. No judge comes to a bench a virgin; they all have their own moral and political beliefs which affect their rulings. . . . (But) Roger is consistent within Roger’s principles, which is all you can ask.”

Not that the large, round-faced, mustachioed jurist, who in his swirling robe looks something like a cross between a sea lion and a walrus, is without critics.

Some lawyers say Boren tries so hard to be fair and avoid possible appellate reversals that he has made unnecessary compromise rulings in the “Twilight Zone” trial and has lengthened the proceedings by failing to rein in both sides.

Defense lawyers in the McMartin Pre-School molestation case had their trial moved out of Boren’s court after alleging that the judge had shown a pro-prosecution bias in pretrial rulings.

And there’s the criminal attorney, who prefers to remain nameless, who asserts that Boren is “patient and even-tempered”--or, to put it another way, “dull and boring.”

Thus far in the “Twilight Zone” trial, Boren, who was appointed to the bench in 1984 by Gov. George Deukmejian, his former boss in the attorney general’s office, has made several significant rulings without any clear pattern of favoring either side. He has also maintained firm control in his courtroom, and even a sense of humor, as the attorneys trade insults outside.

Last month, Boren decided that potentially damaging statements made by Landis to investigators could not be presented to the jury because they would also reflect on the other defendants. D’Agostino grew visibly angry at the judge’s decision while defense attorneys contended that it was a clear-cut issue established in case law.

Boren also refused to force a National Transportation Safety Board investigator to testify on the probable cause of the film set helicopter crash that killed actor Vic Morrow and two child actors. D’Agostino had hoped Boren would threaten to hold the investigator in contempt, but instead, the judge upheld federal regulations precluding NTSB investigators from giving expert testimony in court.

And in another decision in the defense’s favor, Boren ruled that a deputy state labor commissioner and a child welfare worker could not testify whether they would have forbidden the children from participating if they knew the specifics of the script.

In several other instances, Boren has ruled in favor of the prosecution. He permitted witnesses to discuss their fears of being blackballed by the film industry because of their trial testimony and allowed evidence to be presented about the use of live ammunition on the set days before the crash.

In both instances, Boren changed his mind weeks after having initially ruled in favor of the defense.

Rather than becoming annoyed by such turnabouts, Landis’ attorney, James Neal, said he respects Boren for them.

“He’s not hung up on saving face in the sense that if he makes a ruling and later thinks it’s in error, he’ll change it,” explained the Nashville attorney, a former Watergate prosecutor.

“He’s courteous to the lawyers,” Neal added. “He allows you time to make your points. And he’s willing to rule on issues.”

While the judge, a family man with six children, may have turned red-faced when Braun complained about his alleged chivalry, “I don’t think he holds grudges,” said Braun, who represents associate producer George Folsey Jr. “His courtroom is very comfortable to work in.”

D’Agostino concurs, saying: “I may not always agree with all of his decisions but he is a man of incredible integrity. . . . He has a remarkably even temperment.”

At least one attorney on the case, though, questions whether the judge’s background has played a part in the unexpected length of the trial, which sometimes seems to be moving in geologic time. The prosecution has yet to rest its case, even though the entire proceedings had been expected to conclude in December.

“He probably wants to give the prosecution the freedom to put on what’s necessary and appropriate,” said Eugene L. Trope, who represents pilot Dorcey Wingo. “. . . (But Boren) takes a look at it (and probably thinks,) ‘You think this case is too long? I was in a case for two years.’ ”

Boren, in a recent interview, said he is sensitive to the issue. Indeed, he noted, the longest trial in state history before Buono’s was a Marin County trial which his brother, Terrence, prosecuted.

“I beat my brother’s record, so we like to tell people we’re both slow,” the judge said laughingly. Boren is a devoted sports fan who also bragged about how he “can still take” his son at basketball by accurate shooting--and cheating.

Turning serious, Boren continued: “I think I’m just as concerned as anybody else in the building about not having a case go any longer than necessary. I may be even a little more shy of that because I have had the background, you know.”

Reminiscent of his style on the bench, the genial Boren spoke comfortably and self-critically to a reporter in his book-cluttered chambers.

“I sometimes let people argue longer than some other people do,” Boren conceded. “But I think in the long run I probably save time because I read things before I get up on the bench and I think I anticipate some of the problems that are going to come up evidence-wise. I (also) will sometimes change my mind about things and I think that in the long run it will probably save the judicial system more time than if I did otherwise” by avoiding successful appeals.

While Boren is restricted from directly discussing the “Twilight Zone” case, he did say “the attorneys have attempted not to be too redundant and they’ve also not restated somebody else’s argument even if they were entitled to. . . . You’ve got, after all, five defendants and the (prosecution). So I think they’ve done pretty well. . . .”

Boren, who served as a Mormon missionary in Austria and as an Army intelligence officer before attending UCLA Law School, also spoke about the impact his prosecution background has on his philosophy and outlook as a judge.

“It’s on my mind at times,” he said. “(But) it’s a two-edged sword because on the one hand you want to try to be fair to both sides and so you try to keep in mind that you perhaps have a background that leans a certain way. And the other edge of that sword is that you may go too far the other way trying to make sure that you are fair.

”. . . I feel that I try to look at (a case) from what I think the law requires and just go from there. And if I’m wrong, I’m wrong.”

Boren, who declared, “Solomon, I’m not” with a self-deprecating laugh during a particularly trying moment in the “Twilight Zone” trial, also reflected about his future aspirations.

“I think I probably would enjoy an opportunity to be an appellate judge,” he said. “But I don’t know, I’ve always felt that the appellate judges were the real intellectual elite of the judge business.”

Was he just being modest?

“No,” the normally low-key judge boomed out. “I really never thought of myself in that way. I think I’m a plugger. I’m somebody that tries to compensate by hard work for his other limitations. That’s really the truth. I think that was one of my assets on something like Buono. . . .

“I mean the previous prosecutor said the case was unwinnable and we won it. And I think that case was winnable and I think that was a bad assessment, frankly. But I think somebody else could have screwed that case up if they hadn’t been patient and hadn’t been willing to just do the work and put it on in an orderly fashion and try to make it stick together.”