Candidate for Court Rated ‘Not Qualified’

A Glendale assistant city attorney who is trying to unseat a veteran Municipal Court judge in the June primary was rated “not qualified” in judicial evaluations released Wednesday by the Los Angeles County Bar Assn.

The bar association’s judicial evaluation committee criticized Glendale Senior Assistant City Atty. Scott H. Howard for what it described as a poor judicial temperament. The committee said Howard displayed “poor judgment and a lack of candor.”

To arrive at its ratings of judicial candidates, the bar association sends questionnaires to judges and lawyers whose names are supplied by the candidate and acquired independently by the committee.

Negative Comments

Subcommittees then interview each candidate, raising all negative comments for rebuttal, according to attorney Howard L. Halm, chairman of the evaluation committee.

The bar association does not divulge reasons for its ratings, but Howard, reacting angrily to the review, released some of his correspondence with the bar association and discussed comments made during his interview with the committee.

Howard, 37, is running against Municipal Judge Barbara Lee Burke, a former public defender appointed to the bench in 1981. The bar association rated Burke “well qualified.”

Howard said he planned to file a formal protest and ask for an investigation into the procedures of the evaluation committee and decided to release information about his rating in response to what he believes was a leak on the committee.

He said he was asked questions by a reporter from a legal publication about information that could have only come from the committee.

Howard said he was at first tentatively rated “qualified” but that the committee later downgraded the rating after Howard appeared before the committee to petition for a “well qualified” rating.

In two successive letters that Howard released Wednesday, the committee told him first that his rating could only stay the same or get better through a review but then corrected that statement, saying that the rating could also go down.

Howard said he received the correction the day before his interview. Halm said Howard could have canceled the interview if he had wanted to.

During both his original interview and the review, Howard said, he was criticized for not informing the committee that one of the lawyers who sent in an evaluation form on him was his wife, Burbank Assistant City Atty. Juli Scott. Howard said it did not occur to him to report the connection.

“They felt I should have called them on the phone,” Howard said. “My question was, where do you draw the line? What if it was a law partner, friend, roommate?”

Howard said the committee also criticized him for not listing a racial discrimination case against the Glendale Police Department among his 10 most significant cases. In that case, in which he represented the police, a judge ruled that the department was guilty of discrimination in denying promotion to a black officer. The case is now on appeal.

Halm said he could not discuss specifics of the interviews because they were confidential.

Second Case

In another case involving a Valley judicial candidate, Alan A. Nadir, a Los Angeles deputy city attorney who is running for a Superior Court post against Van Nuys Municipal Judge Terry Smerling, was rated “not qualified” by the County Bar Assn. Smerling was rated as well qualified.

Nadir, whose candidacy has been endorsed by Los Angeles County Supervisor Mike Antonovich and state Sen. Ed Davis (R-Valencia), reacted by attacking the bar’s evaluation system as “arbitrary, subjective and not based on any objective criteria.”

“As a prosecutor for the past nine years, I have advocated tough sentencing, and several people on the evaluation committee are defense attorneys who have not appreciated my tough stand on criminals,” Nadir said.