Duffy Retires From Bench but Leaves Mark on Court

When Judith McConnell thinks back over the long and storied career of San Diego Superior Court Judge Thomas Duffy, one episode stands out in her mind. It happened back in the early 1980s, at a time when Duffy and McConnell were judges in neighboring courtrooms, presiding over domestic and civil law matters.

On this particular day, McConnell was ill. So was a second jurist with similar judicial responsibilities. Mon dieu! Would justice grind to a halt, inconveniencing all those litigants with matters scheduled before the ailing judges that day? Not a chance. With scarcely a grumble, Duffy simply handled the calendars for all three courtrooms.

“It was classic Duffy,” recalled McConnell, who now serves as presiding judge of the Juvenile Court. “Juggling three courts is something no human being could do, but he did it. It was typical of how he puts all the rest of us to shame with his incredible energy.”

That anecdote is one of many that surface when judges and others throughout the county’s court system are asked to reminisce about the Honorable Thomas G. Duffy. The white-haired, bespectacled Duffy, who has served as presiding judge of the Superior Court for the last year, ended a two-decade tenure on the bench when he officially retired at age 60 last week.

With his gentle manner, ruddy face and dagger-sharp wit, Duffy will be remembered as a dedicated workhorse-of-a-judge who has used innovative ideas to make a distinguished mark on court administration, colleagues say.

“One of his major hallmarks is his ability to manage and administer and to be very forward-thinking,” Superior Court Judge Wayne Peterson said. “In each of his capacities over the years, he has demonstrated that strength in a no-nonsense way--without sacrificing humor.”

Indeed, an appreciation of the funny side of life--not always easy to maintain given the gloomy, day-to-day agenda confronting a judge--is one quality everyone agrees Duffy possesses. Thomas Murphy, presiding judge of the family court downtown, acknowledged that fact when asked to respond to news of his colleague’s retirement.

“Thank God he’s leaving!” Murphy quipped. “Things can only improve from here on in.”

When asked to search his memory for particularly compelling moments during his career, Duffy himself mostly remembers the comical ones. Topping the list, he said, was the time a respected defense attorney from La Jolla asked that his client be allowed to sit in the audience--rather than at the counsel table--so that a witness would have to pick him out of a crowd.

“So the defendant sat in the audience, surrounded by about 20 young men who all looked just like him,” Duffy recounted. “Then the witness took the stand and the attorney asked her if she could identify the suspect. She scanned the room and said, ‘Yes, it’s that young man raising his hand back there.’ That poor attorney must have wanted to slide right under the counsel table.”

Duffy’s judicial tenure began in El Cajon Municipal Court in 1967, when he became then-Gov. Ronald Reagan’s first appointee to the bench in San Diego County. Before that, the 1954 graduate of Hastings School of Law at UC San Francisco was in private practice in East County and served for eight years as city attorney in El Cajon.

Once on the bench, Duffy became a member of a tight-knit cadre of East County Municipal Court judges known semi-jokingly as “the El Cajon Mafia.” During the 1970s, the group won national recognition for its reforms of the East County court, including streamlining administration and exerting tighter control of the court’s bulky and sluggish calendar.

Also in El Cajon, Duffy initiated a program allowing drunken drivers to go to driving school as a condition of probation, a practice used statewide today. And he helped devise the “trial by declaration”--a traffic hearing in which witnesses submit their statements in writing. Among other things, the process saves the time and cost of requiring a police officer to appear in court.

But perhaps Duffy’s greatest legacy in East County relates to his involvement with “the El Cajon experiment”--legislation in 1977 that granted the El Cajon bench authority and duties normally possessed only by superior courts. That experiment has since been expanded to the county’s other municipal courts, alleviating the criminal caseload shouldered by the overtaxed Superior Court.

“I was kind of busy out there,” Duffy said in a recent interview, modestly musing about his days in El Cajon. “I guess we did some pretty interesting things.”

In 1980, Duffy was elevated to the Superior Court downtown. During the next seven years, he was supervising judge of the domestic and criminal divisions of the court, served temporarily as a justice on the 4th District Court of Appeal in 1984 and spent a year back in El Cajon setting up the new Superior Court there. In between, he served on the faculty of the California Judges College, an annual summer seminar held in Berkeley, and lobbied heavily for state legislation that would have merged superior and municipal courts.

In a fitting denouement to his career, Duffy has spent the past year on the bench as what he mockingly calls “the grand Pooh-bah,” the presiding chief of the 58-judge Superior Court. Colleagues say his strengths as a good people manager and progressive administrator have shone during that time.

“I think he’s demonstrated a real ability to place people who have expertise in an area into the right jobs,” said Murphy. “That’s an important skill. He’ll definitely be missed.” McConnell, meanwhile, lauded Duffy for establishing a “think tank” committee of junior jurists, who he assigned to plot the long-range future of the court system and address critical problems, like the need for new facilities.

“For the first time we’ve got judges thinking of the court system as a whole and really trying to plan ahead,” McConnell said, noting that local court management has historically lacked that element. “That’s a real innovation and they’ve come up with some very good ideas.”

McConnell also noted that morale has been exceptionally high under Duffy’s leadership: “The only thing we get upset about is that we don’t have enough judges and are working too hard,” McConnell said. “But we can’t blame him, because he’s working even harder.”

Pet Project

One pet project of Duffy’s during the past year has been video arraignment, the process of having defendants enter pleas on camera so they don’t have to be transported long distances to the courthouse. Duffy would like to see the technique expanded to other types of proceedings. He also believes the use of court reporters to physically record every word said in court is woefully outdated.

Although he could serve another 10 years on the bench if he chose, Duffy said he decided to retire now to give “younger, more active people a chance to carry on.”

“I’ve had enough,” said the judge, a descendant of an Irish father and a Scotch-Irish mother. “I’m at that point where you realize you can’t accomplish everything, so I figure I’ve done my share by now. And don’t forget, there are only so many years in one life.”

As for the future, Duffy’s most immediate plans include spending a month at his house trailer in Baja de Los Angeles, a gulf side enclave 400 miles south of the border that he treasures because “you can look down the beach and not see anyone.”

Duffy says he and his wife, Sue, both of whom grew up in San Diego County and speak passable Spanish, are “border rats.” The couple has been enchanted with Mexico since their first serious foray into Baja back in 1957, when they “took an old Chevy and just bounced all around the peninsula, exploring. We loved it. I guess I’m an adventurer at heart, always wanting to see what’s over the next hill.”

Next, Duffy hopes to cajole his spouse into poking around Africa for awhile, a journey that will be a prelude to the six-month stint the couple plans in Australia.

When the voyaging is done, Duffy says he’ll try his hand at judicial mediation and arbitration. There’s also lots to be done at the family’s 84-acre ranch in Deerhorn Valley, near Jamul, where the Duffys raised four children, who range in age from 34 down to 16. Finally, a longtime hobby of raising black and yellow Labrador retrievers might get a bit more attention in the coming years.

But will he miss the excitement and challenge of life on the bench?

“Are you kidding?” Duffy jokes. “Of course I’ll miss my friends, and the 20 years have been a wonderful experience. But justice has been my mistress all these years, taking up an awful lot of time . . . Now it’s time to focus on something else.”