County Bar Evaluator Quits Over Complaint

The Los Angeles County Bar Assn. requested and received the resignation of a member of its judicial evaluation committee last fall after it learned that he helped in the rating of a Superior Court judge while serving on the board of a company that took $10,000 to support the judge’s election challenger, the association said.

Margaret M. Morrow, president of the County Bar, said the association asked for the resignation of William M. Thornbury, a deputy public defender at the Van Nuys courthouse and one of about 60 members of the evaluation panel, after the judge, who was defeated in the election, complained.

Defeated in June Vote

Making the complaint was former Judge Roberta Ralph, who was defeated in the June, 1988, election by challenger Harvey A. Schneider. Ralph did not raise the matter until 3 1/2 months after the election, which was when she said she learned about Thornbury’s role. There is no allegation of any impropriety on the part of Schneider, now on the Superior Court.

The company on whose board Thornbury serves is the Non-Partisan Candidate Evaluation Committee, which sent an election slate mailer to 780,000 Republican households in Los Angeles County. Schneider was one of many candidates who paid to be included in the mailer, according to the firm’s coordinator, Allan Hoffenblum.

Morrow informed Ralph in a letter last Oct. 11 that she had asked Thornbury to resign and that he had “acceded to my request.”

“I sincerely regret the fact that Mr. Thornbury’s involvement with the Non-Partisan Candidate Evaluation Committee did not come to our attention before he participated in the work of our judicial evaluation committee,” Morrow told Ralph.

The letter was marked “confidential,” but Morrow released a copy of it to The Times after Ralph told a reporter about it.

“We felt it best for all involved to solicit his (Thornbury’s) resignation, and we did that from a standpoint of appearances of propriety,” Morrow said in an interview.

Both in the letter to Ralph and in the interview, Morrow said that she had been assured by members of the evaluation panel that its rating of Ralph as “qualified” and of Schneider as “well qualified,” would “have been no different even if Mr. Thornbury had not been a member,” despite his participation in the four-member subcommittee that interviewed Ralph before the evaluation.

Thornbury, interviewed by The Times, said he believes that the request for his resignation was unjust.

He said Bar Assn. officials knew of his involvement in the slate mail firm in 1986, when he first served on the evaluation committee.

“They found no conflict then,” he said. “They found this no violation of rules, and they invited me back to serve in 1988.”

Both Morrow and the chairman of the evaluation committee, Howard L. Halm, said Thursday, however, that they were unaware of Thornbury’s involvement in the slate mail firm until Ralph informed them.

The chairman of the evaluation committee in 1986, Donald M. Wessling, said he would not comment on what he knew at that time because “anything I might say would be based on an unreviewed record.”

Thornbury said he found his situation no more in conflict than is the case with many members of the judicial evaluation committee who rate judicial candidates whom their law firms are supporting or opposing.

Morrow noted that the written rules and procedures of the evaluation committee state:

“No member may serve as a member of a campaign or similar committee for the election of any candidate for judicial office within the jurisdiction of the (evaluation) committee or make any financial contribution directly or indirectly to, or in any way endorse or sponsor, any candidate for judicial office within the jurisdiction of the committee.”

Thornbury said he does not think the slate mail firm upon whose board he serves is a “campaign or similar committee” within the meaning of that rule.

“We have a situation of sour grapes here,” he added. “She (Ralph) was an incumbent judge who was beaten by an opponent who was almost unknown. . . . She cannot make the claim that I influenced her rating.”

Ralph disagreed. “I really do feel very strongly that if there’s going to be an L.A. County Bar evaluation committee, all of the members of that committee have to not only obey all the rules, but go beyond them to avoid any appearance of impropriety,” she said.

“Mr. Thornbury was not only involved in this committee, but his firm took money from Mr. Schneider’s campaign. It certainly looks strange. . . . I don’t think that kind of behavior should be tolerated by members of the committee. If I had received a ‘well qualified’ rating, I still would have been horrified.”

Disclosure of the Thornbury controversy comes as the county Bar is considering changes in the operation of the judicial evaluation committee.

The committee’s evaluations are widely publicized by the news media and are considered important in judicial elections. The process has frequently been controversial, however, particularly when sitting judges are rated as less qualified than their opponents. Many of those have charged that petty personal considerations or politics play too great a role in committee deliberations.

Bar officials have generally defended the system as providing a valuable service to the public, although Morrow’s predecessor as Bar president, Larry Feldman, said last June that he believed that the Bar “needs to be more definitive in explaining” why it has seen fit to rate an incumbent judge as anything less than “well qualified” for the bench.