County’s U.S. Courthouse Opens, but It’s a Trying Experience

If Judge Ronald W. Rose had been christening a boat rather than a courthouse, it would have taken several tries to shatter the champagne bottle.

The occasion Monday was the first business conducted in the long-sought new federal courthouse in Santa Ana. There were several hitches.

“Following our electrical failure and lack of air conditioning, we will begin our first case,” Rose announced.

Federal prosecutor Dwight B. Moore, ready to do battle over bail for a suspected cocaine distributor, asked permission to start.

“Yes, if you can do it over the sound of the vacuum cleaners,” Rose replied.

It was a brief courtroom encounter in a routine drug case, but many see it as a coming of age for Orange County’s legal community, and a change that will save money for many litigants.

The 34,000-square-foot building, a one-story structure at the corner of Flower Street and Santa Ana Boulevard, houses courtrooms for Rose, a federal magistrate and two U.S. district judges.

It was slowly coming to life Thursday, even before the first official act in Rose’s courtroom.

Down the hall, with U.S. Atty. Robert C. Bonner looking on, five federal prosecutors began moving into offices from which they plan to draw a bead on drug trafficking, bank robbery and white-collar crime.

In charge was Nancy Wieben Stock, a 10-year veteran of federal prosecution.

Stock and three of her colleagues, all Orange County residents, often used to run into one another on Amtrak on the way to work in Los Angeles.

Now, each faces the pleasant prospect of a less-strenuous commute.

Other assistant U.S. attorneys assigned to the office are Moore, Edward R. McGah Jr., Thomas J. Umberg and James McGinnis.

Within an hour of their arrival, workers got the telephones working. But Stock intercepted a door plaque with her name misspelled before it could be hung.

At the nondescript front doors, officials were coaxing a metal detector into action.

“It is exactly the same drill that you have going through a major airport,” said Rod Huston, a security specialist with the U.S. marshal’s office.

The devices were not installed when the building first opened Monday, but they were operating by noon.

Through the front door, Leonard Brosnan, clerk of the federal court in Los Angeles, watched six employees putting the finishing touches on the new Santa Ana branch office.

Unlike others, Brosnan’s office has some experience operating in Orange County. An office was opened two years ago in the federal building next door where lawyers could file papers for the Los Angeles court. That office was moved to the new federal courthouse and expanded.

“We will just continue to try to provide the same efficient, courteous service we have in the past,” Brosnan said.

In a courtroom containing a six-foot-high stack of empty boxes in one corner, the staff of U.S. District Judge J. Spencer Letts was settling in. They will be followed later this month by Judge Alicemarie Stotler, the second district judge to sit in Orange County. They will serve as the new federal bench in Orange County, along with Magistrate Rose, who has held court part and full time for more than two years in the nearby federal building.

Rose said he was “delighted” to see the new courthouse opened.

“I’ve been waiting for this for seven years. It’s long overdue,” Rose declared.

He also said he was pleased with his spacious courtroom, with mahogany and oak desks and benches and 46 seats for spectators. His old quarters in a spare room in the federal building don’t compare, Rose said.

“This is what courtrooms are supposed to look like,” Rose noted.

The building will be formally dedicated on Jan. 15 with the help of lawyers’ groups that have long sought the facility. The branch courthouse was first authorized by Congress seven years ago.

A variety of stumbling blocks--including financing difficulties, disputes over court facilities, and most recently finding a district judge willing to accompany Stotler to Orange County--have delayed the project. The building is a modular structure which is being used as a courthouse under a 10-year lease.

The Orange County facility remains a branch of the Central District Court in Los Angeles, which covers an area from San Luis Obispo to San Diego County. The Santa Ana courthouse is expected to handle many cases originating in Orange, Riverside and San Bernardino counties.

As of 1983, Orange County alone had a bigger population than more than half of the almost 100 federal judicial districts in the nation.

The first case Monday was the arraignment of William Ruiz-Vargas of Fullerton, who was arrested by FBI agents Monday for his alleged role as a distributor of cocaine to four dealers in Lincoln, Neb. If convicted, he faces 40 years in prison.

His defense attorney, Fred W. Anderson of Tustin, said it was the first time he has appeared in federal court on a criminal case in a number of years.

“I haven’t taken a federal criminal case since around 1975. It was too inconvenient. Clients couldn’t afford to hire Orange County attorneys,” Anderson said.

“I want to do more federal work, now that there’s a federal court here,” Anderson said.