Prison Ordered for Officer Who Turned Call Girl

Norma Jean Almodovar, the traffic officer-turned-call girl who ran for lieutenant governor last year on the Libertarian ticket, should go to prison, a state Court of Appeal ruled Wednesday.

In a 29-page opinion written by Justice L. Thaxton Hanson, with the concurrence of Justice Campbell M. Lucas, the court on a 2-1 vote overturned Almodovar’s sentence of probation for felony pandering and ordered her resentenced according to state law requiring a minimum of three years in state prison.

Justice Vaino Spencer dissented in a separate six-page opinion, noting that the mandatory term was “out of all proportion” to Almodovar’s offense.

Almodovar’s attorney, Lawrence Teeter, said he will appeal the ruling to the state Supreme Court.

“That law was meant, as the trial judge said, for the pimp on Hollywood Boulevard,” Teeter said, “not for my client.”

Almodovar, who is now considering running for vice president of the United States on the Libertarian slate, said she was “very disappointed” and considered the opinion “outrageous.”

“I would have hoped,” she said, “there was some justice in the world.”

Almodovar, 36, was a civilian traffic control officer for the Los Angeles Police Department for 10 years before she became a $200-a-night prostitute and wrote a still-unpublished book, “From Cop to Call Girl.”

She was charged with pandering after arranging a date for another traffic officer, Patricia Isgro, with a man willing to pay for sex.

Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Aurelio Munoz, in sentencing Almodovar to three years’ probation, including 120 hours of community service, declared a state law prohibiting probation for panderers unconstitutional cruel and unusual punishment as it applied to Almodovar.

“Even robbers are given probation,” Munoz said at the sentencing Jan. 8, 1985, “and she in no way is anyplace on the level with robbers. . . . It is a procrustean statute that makes up for the shortcomings by being Draconian in nature. In this case, the punishment is clearly out of proportion to the actions of defendant.”

But the 2nd District Court of Appeal ruled that Almodovar was of adult age, educated and knowledgeable and therefore warranted no special treatment under California law.

Knew the Risks

“We cannot conclude the punishment of imprisonment is grossly disproportionate to defendant’s culpability,” Hanson wrote. “She knew what she was doing, she knew there were risks, but she went ahead with the crime. Although the Probation Department and Department of Corrections noted she was otherwise a good candidate for probation, nothing in the record mandates such lenient treatment.”

The justices also upheld the constitutionality of the mandatory-prison law itself, noting that it passed the Supreme Court’s three-prong test for constitutional punishments: weighing the danger of the offense and the offender, comparing the challenged punishment with those for more serious crimes and comparing it with those for the same crime in other states.

Other sex crimes may have lesser penalties, the majority acknowledged, but they said that was “indicative of a legislative oversight resulting from the piecemeal enactment of criminal penalties. . . .”

Harsh Penalty

Lesser punishments provided for more serious crimes, the majority concluded, indicate “disproportionate punishment” but do not mean the harsh penalty for pandering is cruel or unusual.

No other state bans probation for pandering, the two justices noted, but California’s prescribed prison terms are not out of line with other states’ penalties for the crime.

“While on the high side, it (California’s penalty) is not grossly excessive in relation to the other states (roughly half the nation) which consider pandering a felony,” Hanson wrote.