Busy Judge Recharges Her Batteries by Staying Involved

A few weeks ago, Goldilocks was on trial in the Santa Ana Municipal Court of Judge Tam Nomoto. She was charged with petty theft, trespassing, vandalism, burglary and malicious mischief in the home of the three bears.

Things were not going well for the defendant when her attorney sprang a surprise witness--a forest ranger who testified that Goldilocks had been lost in the woods and he had ordered her to take shelter and stay put in the home of the three bears until he could get help to her.

Goldilocks was unanimously acquitted by the jury, and Nomoto beamed. “No one ever thought of that one before,” she said delightedly.

The trial of Goldilocks has been going on in Nomoto’s court since 1979, the year Gov. Edmund G. Brown Jr. appointed her to the bench. It all started because Nomoto’s courtroom became the favorite stopping place for local public school students who were being given guided tours of the Municipal Court as an exercise in civics and American government.

“They’d just pop in,” recalled Nomoto, “and frequently the trial in progress would be deadly dull. And I would sit there and watch them and think how boring this must be for those kids. It seemed to me that if we were going to do this at all, we should give them something that would make the law interesting to them.”

So the judge put Goldilocks on trial.

Ever since, about a dozen times a year, school groups come into Nomoto’s courtroom over the noon break to try Goldilocks (or Benedict Arnold for older children). They have been supplied the ground rules and the teacher in charge has cast the major roles. Nomoto presides and the children do everything else--including passing judgment on the guilt or innocence of the defendant.

“It’s been an educational experience for me, too,” Nomoto said. “I’ve learned how terrific kids are. We get such a distorted view from the bench because all we see are the bad ones.”

But just to make sure the point is driven home, Nomoto has the visiting kids remain in her courtroom when it takes up again after the lunch break. And she schedules a real sentencing session immediately afterward. “I talk to the kids about sentencing after the mock trial. Then they see the real thing.”

This procedure catches several of the many facets of this vital young judge: her love for young people and her tireless work with them; a quick and creative mind that looks beyond conventional practices and solutions, and a mental toughness that has won the respect of her peers and law enforcement officials. (She has had two commendations from the California Highway Patrol and has run programs for both the CHP and Santa Ana Police Department to instruct officers on how to testify effectively in court.)

“My first year on the bench,” she said without rancor, “they nicknamed me Lotus Blossom. It didn’t bother me, although it did offend some of my Asian friends. For whatever it’s worth, now they call me the Dragon Lady.”

Although she unquestionably looks like Lotus Blossom with her tiny frame, pageboy hairdo and expressive eyes, Nomoto has been moving much too fast throughout her 37 years to fit a nickname that passive. Born in San Francisco to a Japanese mother and fifth-generation Chinese-American father, she hit the ground running. She completed high school in 2 1/2 years, graduated Phi Beta Kappa from UC Berkeley in three years and received her law degree from Boalt Hall when she was 22.

She was immediately offered a job by a San Francisco law firm whose senior partner told her she would be an asset to the firm on two counts--as a woman and as an Asian. “I resented that so much I came south and hired out to the first law firm that didn’t approach me that way. They really tested me, though. I was the only woman among 44 other attorneys. Their nameplates said Mr. So-and-So ; mine just started with my first name. I got my assignments from secretaries; the men got theirs from senior partners. I was even told to serve coffee once in a staff meeting. I refused.”

But things were different at the Orange County counsel’s office, where Nomoto--who was then Barbara Tam Thompson, her married name--rose quickly to supervising attorney of the probate division. She had been in the job for three years when Brown appointed her to the bench. She was 28 and going through a divorce. That’s when she decided to change her legal name to Nomoto--her mother’s family name--and to use her middle name, Tam, “which I always liked better.”

In nine years since that appointment, she insists that “none of my basic philosophies have changed since I got on the bench.” Talking in her chambers, lined wall to ceiling with books, during the noon break, she is relaxed, affable and sometimes startlingly honest about herself and her feelings. She remarried 2 1/2 years ago. Her husband is an attorney in the Orange County public defender’s office, Brooks Talley, “a Baptist preacher’s kid who has never been baptized. I had a hard rule I’d never date a lawyer, but he was very persuasive--which is why he’s such a good lawyer.”

She has learned during her near decade on the bench how important it is for her to counter the “distorted view” judges--especially criminal judges--get of mankind. “I work at it,” she said. “I do a lot of things to recharge my batteries. I like to teach young adults; right now I teach a criminal procedure class at UCI. I’ve worked closely for years with the Girl Scouts. I do a lot of public speaking at women’s and youth groups.

“But essentially I’m a private person, I suppose from being an only child. The thing I enjoy most is to get on my horse and ride out into the countryside. I always dreamed about having a horse when I was growing up in San Francisco. So when I got out of law school, I bought a horse instead of a Porsche.”

She pointed proudly to a picture of the horse--named, appropriately, Amicus Curiae--in much the same way a parent might show off a child.

“Isn’t he beautiful? I’ve told my husband, no babies before next New Year’s Day because I’ve been invited to ride him in the Rose Parade.”

Are children in the offing?

She retreated a little. “Maybe. I’d like that, but there are so many complications. One of the funny ones is that my parents are against my having a baby--their only chance for a grandchild. My father just doesn’t like children, and my mother can’t reconcile a working professional woman with a successful mother. My professionalism is important to her. She was 17 when World War II started, and it ruined her life in so many ways. She lived through all the Tokyo firebombings and the dreadful wrenching of having kamikaze pilots billeted in our family home where she got to know them before they would disappear. She feels she might have had a profession if the war hadn’t interfered, so she became a strong driving force in my life. She’s tremendous.”

This is the foundation that has driven Nomoto to professional achievements years before most of her peers. “I was really in a hurry,” she said, “but don’t ask me why. I don’t see myself as a feminist. I don’t like labels. But I was fortunate enough to reach professional levels early in my life.”

In the process, she’s learned from the vantage point of the bench the untidiness and frequent ugliness of life. “Drugs,” she said, “are involved in almost all of my courtroom problems--and I think it’s getting worse.” But compounding the drug problem, she said, is a contempt for law that makes it even harder to reach many of the victims of drugs.

“It’s not the minority, low-income young people who cause the biggest problems in court. It’s the upper-income, white, affluent kids. They’re rude and contemptuous and full of hostility. They refuse to accept their own guilt--as if the law applied to everyone else but them.”

She told about such a youth who appeared recently before her. He came in handcuffed with a group of 40 other young offenders. He had received several dozen tickets for offenses ranging from speeding to reckless driving and had never paid any of them or appeared in court to challenge them. Nomoto set his bail at $1,500, and he turned plaintively to the spectator portion of the courtroom and said, “Mom, will you post bail for me?”

When a woman looking deeply troubled stood up, Nomoto intervened. She asked the woman why she should pay for her son’s punishment, and after pondering the question for a few moments, the mother said resolutely that she wasn’t going to. The young man said petulantly, “OK, then, I’ll just sit in jail”--and he did, for 16 days.

Will it help?

“Probably not,” Nomoto said. “We’ll probably see him again because he has no respect for the law--or anything else.”

This is especially difficult for Nomoto to accept because she not only is mentally and physically disciplined to a remarkably high degree but also has a humanist’s view of life and man as capable of unlimited beauty and achievement.

“I was a history major in college,” she said, “and I always especially loved the Renaissance period because man was told then he could do anything he wanted to do--however much his life or personal self would encompass. That’s why I want to continue to grow in as many ways as possible. But especially I want to grow as a person--through teaching and writing and music and my own family life, which has become paramount to me.”

Does that mean she has no political ambitions?

“None,” she said emphatically. “I’m not very good at the political game. I’ve been approached, but it has no attraction to me. The thought of asking people for money”--she rolled her eyes--”well, I could never do that.”

So what’s ahead for Tam Nomoto?

“I don’t know where I’m hurrying any more,” she said pensively. “I really enjoy what I’m doing--and not very many people can say that. I’d like to stay in the judiciary. I certainly wouldn’t turn down any offers for higher judicial office.”

Meanwhile, she’ll be putting Goldilocks on trial every month--and riding Amicus Curiae in the Rose Parade.