In Juvenile Court, Things Just Won’t Be the Same

The people who work at San Diego’s Juvenile Court, from judges to probation officers, say things will probably never be the same there now that Gilbert Smith has retired.

For 19 years, Smith served as a court referee, an official who is appointed by the judges of the Superior Court to hear juvenile cases. Only six weeks have passed since Smith’s last day on the bench, but his colleagues are already describing his departure as an irreplaceable loss.

Those who have worked with him characterize Smith as a straightforward, no-nonsense man whose serious courtroom demeanor belied a wry sense of humor. They say he was a diligent worker who kept abreast of developments in the law and related fields and heard 25% of the 400,000 cases that came before the court over the past 10 years. He was described as an eminently fair adjudicator who won the respect of all the lawyers who appeared before him because he knew the law and always kept the child’s best interest at the forefront.

‘Resource for Everyone’

“He was a resource for everyone who worked in the court,” said Superior Court Judge Judith McConnell, who spent five years at Juvenile Court, four of them as presiding judge. “He had been there while the law was developing. You could bounce ideas off of him and he could tell you what had been tried before and had or hadn’t worked.”

“We’ll carry on, but you don’t easily replace 19 years of experience,” said Mike Roddy, the court’s executive officer. “We’re going out and trying to find the best people we can find. We’ve already hired some very good people. But they’re not Gil Smith.”

In fact, Smith was so knowledgeable and consistently well-prepared that he kept the people around him alert.

“His was one of the courtrooms where you went in and felt ‘I really have to know what I’m doing,’ ” said Connie Via, a juvenile probation officer.

Smith speaks in an almost self-effacing way about his years in Juvenile Court. Conceding that his was a “volume department,” he said his efficiency came from experience.

“Recently, the judges have changed, and when you get a person coming in new, they’re not able to handle a large number of cases,” Smith explained. “Because I had been doing it for so long it had become routine.”

Witnessed Changes

Smith, 60, may have seen a lot of court business become routine, but he also saw the system change drastically. In his early days, dependency cases--those involving youngsters who have been abused, neglected or abandoned by their families--made up only 15% of the court’s caseload. Today, they fill 65% of the court’s calendar.

The nature of the criminal offenses that bring young defendants before the court has changed too. Smith can remember a time when a teen-ager might be brought before the court for smoking a cigarette or skipping school, when parents who came before the court would point to a son’s refusal to get a haircut as proof that they could not control him. Those minor infractions have been replaced by a range of far more serious crimes--from drug-dealing to murder.

“The biggest change we see in kids now is we have some pretty violent kids,” Smith said. But, he added, it isn’t the young people themselves that have changed, but the city around them.

“I can say that it’s a lot more difficult to grow up in this day and age than it was when I was growing up,” said Smith, who was raised in San Diego. “I didn’t know anything about drugs, I never heard of drugs. They weren’t available, and I think if they were, people wouldn’t have had the money to buy them.

“As a youngster, I didn’t have any available money--maybe I could scrounge up a dime for a movie on a Saturday afternoon. Affluence has a price. It’s a lot easier for a kid in this day and age to get in trouble than it used to be. You had to really go looking for trouble years ago. You don’t now. You can find it on every street corner.”

Empathy Expressed

Smith expressed a great deal of empathy for the problems of the young people who came before him, particularly those from inner-city neighborhoods where drugs are widely available but jobs are scarce.

“The gang activity you see among blacks and Hispanics, I think almost all can be traced to the proposition that they are disadvantaged by way of employment opportunities,” Smith said. “It’s true that a lot of kids are given the opportunity to have employment but decline it because of peer disapproval of them working. But I just have a feeling that, if employment were widespread among such people, there would be no reason to seek the approval of the gang structure. If you look at the statistics for unemployment among teen-agers, blacks and Hispanics are inordinately deprived. It’s just scandalous.”

Smith said that, although there seems to be a widespread perception that bad kids grow into bad adults, that has not proved to be the case with many of the youngsters he came to know while on the bench. Although he agrees that young people who perform acts of violence must be severely punished, he thinks that many kids with reputations for being delinquents will outgrow their anti-social behavior if given a chance.

“Much of what we do in Juvenile Court is waiting,” he said. “We’re waiting for kids to mature. We’re stalling, trying not to hit them too hard and going along with their folly and, with each passing month, they’re growing up.”

He cited as an example a young man who had been “a real pain in the neck” as an adolescent. An adult now, he stopped by the courthouse recently to tell Smith that he was about to graduate from law school.

“So, those who would contend that all our cases are failures--it’s just not so,” Smith said.

The other major change Smith witnessed was the growing public awareness of the issues of child abuse and molestation, which has caused the number of cases coming before the court to double over the past five years.

During his last three years as a referee, Smith heard only dependency cases.

“Unfortunately, Juvenile Court, and I don’t think anyone would deny this, is really not a very good step-parent,” Smith said. “But, bear in mind, whether we are a good step-parent or not, is really not the point. We are forced into the role and only after someone has failed.”

In dependency cases, the goal of the court is almost always to return the child to the family, Smith said. Often, the hardest part of the job for him was having to tell parents that they had been found incompetent to care for their own children.

“Sometimes they’re very nice people, they’re just hapless . . . so much so that they just can’t be made safe caretakers for children,” Smith said. “And that is sad. Because you see decent people trying so hard and falling short of any semblance of suitability as potential parents.”

Yet, despite days filled with sad tasks, Smith described his career as a happy one.

“Sometimes it’s depressing,” he said in a matter-of-fact way. “It can be. But you can’t dwell on that sort of thing. A lot of positive things happen all the time.”

People who have worked at Juvenile Court say this attitude was as characteristic of Smith as his long experience. Lawyers and social workers who handle juvenile cases often complain that they are being burned out by the workload. The long workdays take a physical toll, they say, and the traumatic nature of the cases they handle takes an emotional one. But Smith, who frequently heard as many as 60 cases a day, never seemed to be affected by the pressures.

“He would always volunteer for more work,” McConnell said. “He was always calling to see if there was anything more he could do. He just didn’t seem to get tired. He also never seemed to age.

“People do tend to get worn down at that court. The workload is so heavy, the issues are so emotional and the consequences of a mistake are very high. But it never seemed to get to him.”

Deputy Dist. Atty. John Harris, who frequently appeared before Smith in court, said: “I wish we had more people like him that had that attitude. He understood that what he was doing was helping, so why should he be depressed about it?”

“Seen Everything”

Harris said he believes part of the explanation for Smith’s philosophical attitude was that “he had seen just about everything. He was not surprised by anything.”

By the time Smith became a referee, he had already had a full career in law enforcement. He dropped out of high school to joining the Navy and, after his stint in the service, returned to San Diego to finish school and attend San Diego Junior College. When he graduated, in 1950, he got a job as a guard at San Quentin Prison. After 14 months, he decided prison work was too confining and returned to San Diego to attend San Diego State University. He was graduated with a degree in sociology.

In 1955, he became a probation officer and decided to go to law school. He attended the University of San Diego’s law school at night, got his degree in 1960 and joined the district attorney’s office. He served as a deputy district attorney until he was appointed to his position as a referee.

Frank Costa, a deputy district attorney who served side-by-side with Smith at the district attorney’s office and later appeared before him at Juvenile Court, said the calm, thoughtful manner that made Smith such an effective referee was already in evidence 25 years ago.

“The Gil Smith I knew then was no different than the Gil Smith that retired from the bench,” Costa said. “It was an extremely rare occasion for him to lose his temper. And, even when he lost it, unless you knew him, you wouldn’t notice it.

“He had a calming effect on persons who otherwise might be given to outbursts of emotion. He always managed to communicate in a calm, low-key but effective method. That’s Gil Smith. That kind of talent is not something one practices or acquires, it’s something you have or you don’t.”

Although his colleagues said Smith had a knack for finding the solution to the problems that came before him, he said he is sure that he has made mistakes along the way.

“With the calendars as large as they are, it would be foolish to think you could achieve excellence all the time,” Smith said. “You strive for excellence, and you hope for adequacy.”