The Judge : Rittenband Quits Bench at 83, but His Last Day Is Anything but Dull

Superior Court Judge Laurence J. Rittenband is leaving the bench at age 83, but not because he has lost any of his punch.

“What a lot of nonsense,” he growled at a lawyer’s inept defense the other day. “Put your client on the stand. I’ll ask the questions. In 29 years on the bench that’s the most laughable thing I’ve ever heard.”

When the lawyer persisted, the white-haired Rittenband raised his voice: “You’re wasting my time,” he said.

“I wouldn’t waste your time, your honor,” said the lawyer.

“That’s what you’re doing!”

Prosecutors sing his praises; some defense attorneys have their doubts. But fans and detractors alike say that he is still one of the sharpest judges around.

Occasional Trials

The beetle-browed jurist is not hanging up his robe, despite his years. He will hear occasional trials at the busy Santa Monica Courthouse and decide other cases as a privately paid “rent-a-judge.”

But for the first time in 28 years, the man known as “The Judge” since age 10 will no longer hold that job on a full-time basis.

“He’s a man who doesn’t pussyfoot around. He cuts through the b.s. with a quick rake,” said Ronald H. Carroll, head of the district attorney’s bureau at the Santa Monica Courthouse.

“One of the first trials I ever did before him was an embezzlement case,” recalled Ed Gilmore, head of the public defender’s office in the Santa Monica Courthouse.

“We had it won,” Gilmore said. He said his client “told a good story” and survived the prosecutor’s cross-examination. But then, “Judge Rittenband asked him three questions and it was all over. He’d spotted a few weak points that had gotten by the prosecution and it was all over. Things like that you don’t forget easily.”

“He was always respectful toward me even if he thought my client was guilty,” said Ron Rose, a deputy public defender. “He . . . enjoyed the challenge of pushing the attorneys and seeing how they’d respond. He’s the type of judge they don’t make anymore.”

Hooray for that, said other lawyers who declined to comment for publication. That reluctance “should let you know what kind of man he is,” one said.

But Richard Chier, an attorney who tangled with the judge during the Billionaire Boys Club murder trial in 1987, called him a “gouty old bully.”

“He scowled at your client when your client was testifying,” he said. “He would say things like, ‘Oh, I’d accept their testimony with a grain of salt.’ ”

Paul Fitzgerald, another defense attorney, called the judge “enormously bright” and credited him for loving his work.

But he said Rittenband would often “grimace and telegraph his emotions” if he thought testimony was preposterous.

“You started with three strikes against him (a defendant) and if you could just get struck out without getting hit in the head, you were lucky,” Fitzgerald said.

Rittenband will have none of it. “I’ve had the reputation of being very tough on defendants,” he said. “I will add that they deserved it. If they mean . . . that I don’t coddle them, then it’s true.

“I always diligently try to be impartial and unprejudiced, but once they’ve been convicted I was tough on them.”

Born in New York on Christmas Day, Rittenband walked into the public library at age 10 and asked for help in reaching his goals--becoming a lawyer and then a judge.

The librarian recommended a reading list that started with the Code of Hammurabi, a set of Babylonian laws noted for their severity but also seen as an improvement over the barbarism of earlier antiquity.

It was “strict but fair,” Rittenband recalls, adding that the 4,000-year-old code was “as apt then as it (would be) today.”

Graduating from Stuyvesant High School at age 15, he took a job in a law firm and went to law school at New York University by night. He was on the law review and president of the senior class, graduating at 19 only to find that he was too young to practice.

“Then I got bitten by the intellectual bug. I decided to go to Harvard,” he said.

It wasn’t easy getting in; taking the entrance exam four years after leaving high school, he failed trigonometry, a subject he never studied.

“I was admitted on probation, but I got all A’s so they took me off probation,” Rittenband said.

Quoted From Shakespeare

He graduated magna cum laude in three years, winning admission to Phi Beta Kappa, an achievement that still makes him feel good 60 years later.

The Harvard diploma hangs on the wall of his chambers near a toy owl dressed in a miniature black robe.

“It was one of the greatest experiences of my life--so far,” the judge said. Remembering his studies of English literature, he quoted from Shakespeare about “my salad days, when I was green,” and identified the source (“Antony and Cleopatra,” Act I, Scene 5). Finally old enough to take the bar exam, he returned to his old firm, going on to become a federal prosecutor for bankruptcy and fraud cases. He eventually launched a private practice in New York, but interrupted it after the outbreak of World War II to join the Army Air Corps as an intelligence officer.

Commissioned a lieutenant, Rittenband was injured when he fell into a trench during a nighttime air raid on his base in Algeria. He was hospitalized in Massachusetts and reassigned to a supply base in California, where he was discharged in 1947 with the rank of major.

“It was very delightful,” he said. “I liked the climate when I was here during the war and decided I would stay.’

It was also in 1947 that the young lawyer joined the Hillcrest Country Club, a Westside enclave where he still goes for lunch every day.

“Hello, dearie,” he greets old friends there, shaking hands with the likes of Marvin Davis and George Burns.

Burns hasn’t forgotten the time Rittenband represented a former associate and cost him $40,000 in a dispute over royalties. Despite that, “if he’s in trouble, I’d help him,” the entertainer said.

Second Home

Never married, Rittenband has made the club a second home. He lives around the corner in Century City. He played tennis there until his middle 70s and golf until last year.

Rittenband credits the Hillcrest connection for his introduction to Gov. Edmund G. (Pat) Brown, who appointed him to the Los Angeles Municipal Court in 1961 despite his Republican political affiliation.

He was named to the Superior Court bench in 1962 and moved to the West branch, which covers much of the Westside, in 1968. He has stayed there ever since.

“My only regret is that I never married and had children,” he said. “During the years I met a number of lovely women that I should have married, but I didn’t feel myself worthy of them.”

Then he laughed and added that he has been seeing at least one of those women for the last 40 years. “She doesn’t want to marry me,” he said. “She’s very bright. We lead a much better life this way.”

High-Profile Cases

During the last 21 years in Santa Monica he has heard dozens of high-profile cases. He also won respect among attorneys and other judges because he did not restrict himself to criminal trials but also set aside Fridays to rule on often-thorny questions of civil law.

“He brooked no nonsense in his court,” said Robert H. Philibosian, the former district attorney now in private practice. He was assigned to Rittenband’s court as a young prosecutor.

The two were prominently featured in crime magazines because of a gruesome murder trial in 1972, when defendant Karl Lionel Kearney justified two killings by dismissing the victims as “just an old bag and an old bum.”

“The defendant has exhibited no redeemable virtue which might inspire in anyone any compassion for him,” the judge said when he pronounced the death sentence. “He himself showed none to his victims.”

Manson Case

Philibosian also remembers the day that mass murderer Charles Manson appeared in Rittenband’s courtroom.

“Manson came in and he turned his back on Judge Rittenband and said, ‘I’m not going to face this court.’ ” Philibosian recalled. “He was there with his female followers, and Rittenband very calmly, very coolly but very firmly said, ‘I will not proceed unless you face this court. You will turn around now.’ And Manson turned around. It was almost as if he were hearing the word of a very much higher authority, and he did it.”

In addition to the Billionaire Boys Club two years ago, his other famous trials included those of Frederick Jerome Thomas, the killer of newswoman Sarai Ribicoff, the niece of a U.S. senator; of Scottish drifter Arthur Richard Jackson, whose prison term for his attack on actress Theresa Saldana was recently extended, and of film director Roman Polanski, who fled the country rather than serve a jail term on a charge of illicit relations with a minor. He has also presided over a decade of litigation about rent control in Santa Monica.

“He’s had lot of interesting cases over the years,” said Richard P. Byrne, presiding judge of the Los Angeles County Superior Court. He said that some of those assignments were random, but that others were probably assigned to Rittenband because of his age and experience.

“Whenever you have a case that is complicated--and most of your high-publicity cases become complicated even if they’re not, simply because everybody is looking at them--you want somebody who is experienced to do it, and he had the experience,” Byrne said.

Beyond Retirement

Opting to stay on beyond the usual retirement age of 70 because “it would be difficult sitting at the country club playing bridge,” Rittenband actually gave up his seat on Jan. 31, 1988.

But he stayed on until Friday under a provision for senior judges to help the overloaded courts deal with a flood of cases.

“I’d about had it,” he said of his decision to give up his temporary position, known as “assignment” because such judges are assigned by the chief justice of the state Supreme Court.

“When you’re on assignment you can’t take vacation and get paid for it, so I would have to take time off without being paid for it, and I thought if that’s going to happen, I might as well get paid,” he said, referring to his pension.

But Rittenband did not go quietly. At a hearing Thursday morning, he listened to landlords’ attorneys as they charged the city’s Rent Control Board with violating an earlier order.

Withheld Judgment

As Joel M. Levy, attorney for the board, began to make his case, Rittenband broke in and challenged him repeatedly, saying: “Didn’t you understand this is precisely what I had in mind? . . . I don’t care how you denominate it, the intent was that you not make determinations of excessive rent. We don’t want you people to make these determinations and to penalize (property owners) . . . You have no business determining whether excess rent has been charged. That’s for the courts. You are not supposed to do that.”

Despite the firmness of his comments, however, the judge withheld judgment, giving both sides three weeks to come up with better arguments.

He said in an interview that he plans to hear as many cases as he can in the coming years.

“I’ve done all the traveling I want to do, and I’ve been active all my life,” he said. “As long as I’m in good health, I’ll keep it up.”