Judge Made Juveniles Toe the Line, Ends Up in Exile

The case was chilling. A woman had been raped, then stabbed in the chest. The victim had lived to tell about it. And the jury of 12 had found the defendant guilty.

Afterward, Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Roosevelt Dorn retreated to his chambers to ponder the sentencing of this man whose criminal record began in his early teens.

It was the kind of case that distressed the judge--another face that mirrored the failures of the juvenile justice system. Dorn believed that the only way you could save troubled kids was to grab onto them early and yank hard before the streets got them.

One of the most controversial judges to come out of the Los Angeles Juvenile Court system in years, Dorn is no longer doing what many thought he did better than almost anyone: turn incorrigible youths around.

Instead, Roosevelt Dorn is a maverick judge in exile.

He has a spacious office in the Criminal Courts building with a view of the San Gabriel Mountains shimmering in the distance. His caseload in the court’s adult criminal division is almost half what it was in the crowded Inglewood Juvenile Court branch, where his office looked out on the jail.

Some judges jockey for years to get a post like this. But Dorn was involuntarily transferred downtown in October, amid allegations that he was favoring certain court-appointed attorneys.

The transfer ended a six-year battle Dorn had waged with just about everybody that came in contact with the juvenile justice system--probation officers, public defenders, prosecutors, private attorneys, street gangs.

His downfall was precipitated when the Los Angeles County public defender’s office blackballed his courtroom, pressuring Superior Court Presiding Judge Richard Byrne to remove him from the Inglewood branch.

The public defender’s office, which serves as counsel for most poor juvenile defendants, alleged that Dorn chose court-appointed defense attorneys who would be sympathetic to his get-tough philosophy and not appeal his decisions or object to his overly harsh treatment of offenders.

Critics also accused Dorn of being dictatorial and rude on the bench.

Official’s Complaints

“Dorn was doing outrageous things,” said one high-level official in the public defender’s office, who asked not to be identified. “He’d keep a kid on probation for five years for spitting on the sidewalk. Even worse, there was a small group of private lawyers who were getting all of his court-ordered appointments in exchange for rolling over and playing dead.”

An internal inquiry into these allegations by Superior Court officials found that a handful of private attorneys practicing in Inglewood Juvenile Court were making hundreds of thousands of dollars in taxpayer funds. One small law firm, for example, earned more than $300,000 in the past 2 1/2 years.

No charges were ever brought against Dorn. Instead, he was quietly transferred.

“The figures looked bad,” Byrne said. “When I saw them, it concerned me because equitable distribution of work among the lawyers is important.”

Byrne said a report that his office compiled on the complaints against Dorn was not forwarded to the state Commission on Judicial Performance, which has the power to discipline judges.

“We are not a fact-finding body,” Byrne explained. “In making assignments, I take a lot of things into consideration. If a problem appears to exist, that in and of itself may warrant a reassignment.”

How Dorn, 54, came to be accused of playing favorites with attorneys and mired in scandal is a story as puzzling as many of the dramas played out daily in the courts.

Politics Suspected

Some say that his troubles were political, that he made enemies by bucking the conservative legal bureaucracy with his unconventional but effective methods of dealing with youthful offenders.

Still others believe the controversy is an indictment of a troubled court system in which the county has paid millions of dollars in fees for court-appointed attorneys because the courts are overwhelmed by huge numbers of indigent defendants.

Others say Judge Dorn’s Achilles heel was Judge Dorn--that in his almost obsessive drive to keep kids within the boundaries of the law he may have overstepped the line of judicial propriety.

Dorn’s defenders say he was the last salvation for youths gone astray. His transfer has caused a furor among some inner-city youth workers, school officials and parents. Representatives of youth groups and the National Assn. for the Advancement of Colored People met with court officials earlier this month in a vain attempt to return him to Inglewood.

Dorn’s gutsy character was molded in the cotton fields of Oklahoma and polished in the schools and courtrooms of California. The youngest of nine children, he said he learned early on that “education was the only ticket out of poverty.”

After a stint in the Air Force, he moved to Los Angeles and became a court bailiff. Now-retired Superior Court Judge Ralph Nutter encouraged him to become a lawyer and he attended Southwestern University and Whittier College law school.

Dorn worked for the Los Angeles city attorney’s office, serving as chief of criminal trial division, then became a Municipal Court judge. He was appointed to Superior Court in 1980 by then-Gov. Edmund G. Brown Jr. Two years later, Dorn asked to transfer to Juvenile Court.

Dorn’s tough courtroom demeanor immediately won him both enemies and friends among those he sentenced.

On the bench, he wore a gun under his judicial robes because of death threats he received from gang members. But there also were occasions when Dorn shed tears with youths who proudly showed him their high school diplomas and thanked him for helping them go straight.

Work Habits

Both supporters and critics alike agree that Dorn had uncommon intensity for the job, often working through lunch hours and into the evening. But less than a year after arriving in Inglewood, his troubles with the public defender’s office began.

Dorn said that he found himself faced with parents who were losing their kids to the cocaine dealers and gangs. The courts were so overwhelmed with serious criminals that there was little time or money for those whom Dorn called “children on the edge”--youths who committed no crimes, but were runaways, truants, troublemakers.

So Dorn dusted off the 601a statute of California’s Welfare and Institutions code--a law largely ignored by other judges in the county. Under the statute, parents can petition the Juvenile Court to take charge of their unruly children even though they have committed no crimes. The judge can order them to stay in school, obey their parents, keep curfews and avoid contact with undesirable peers.

But Dorn went beyond this, critics said, by using his contempt of court powers to detain youths in Juvenile Hall who disobeyed his orders. Soon, parents, schools and youth agencies from all over the county were sending troubled youngsters to his court.

Dorn exerted an iron-fisted hold on juveniles, keeping them on probation longer than any other judges, endlessly hauling them back into court for progress reports, tossing them in youth camps for violating orders, and making high school graduation their ticket off probation.

The kids referred to Dorn as “the hanging judge,” and there was a joke among attorneys that the only way a juvenile could get off probation in Dorn’s court was to die.

The county Probation Department became alarmed about the large numbers of youngsters who had committed no crimes being sentenced to youth camps from Dorn’s court.

“The problem is that we were not equipped to handle them,” said Chief Probation Officer Barry Nidorf. “Our halls are filled with juveniles who have committed serious crimes. We can’t mix the kids who haven’t committed crimes with them.”

But many parents and community youth workers disagreed.

Success Story

Judy Chance, a LaVerne mother, heard about Dorn’s work with kids and hauled her teen-age runaway daughter into Dorn’s court. The girl was made a ward of the court, but again ran way. When she returned to court, Dorn sentenced her to 45 days in Juvenile Hall, five days for every day she was away from home.

“He told my daughter that as he saw it she had only three choices: ‘Go crazy, go to the cemetery, or go to a drug rehabilitation and school,’ ” Chance recalled. The girl is now in a drug diversion program and is on her school’s honor roll.

But as Dorn’s crusade intensified, tensions between the judge and the public defender’s office escalated. In frustration, the public defenders made a highly unusual move and began filing a barrage of peremptory affidavits against Dorn. Called “laying paper,” these affidavits enable an attorney to transfer their cases to other judges.

As a result of the papering, Dorn was relegated to taking only those cases that the public defender’s office could not take because of a conflict of interest, including multi-defendant gang cases. In these cases, attorneys would be chosen from a court-approved panel.

Eventually, questions arose regarding Dorn’s association with certain attorneys on the panel.

An audit conducted by the presiding judge showed that in fiscal year 1988-89, about $1 million went to court-appointed attorneys in Inglewood Juvenile Court. Of that, half a dozen attorneys received $317,853, or 30% of the total.

Sixty-eight other court-appointed attorneys received a total of $700,000.

A Times review of court records showed that over a 2 1/2-year period, attorneys Charles H. Clark Jr. and Yolanda Clark of Inglewood received more than $300,000 in county funds representing indigents, mainly in Dorn’s court. Other attorneys earning sizable county fees for taking indigent cases were Roberta H. Kyman of Los Angeles, $146,000; Patricia A. Gartner of Inglewood, $142,000; and, Phyllis E. Brown of Los Angeles, $63,000.

By contrast, the majority of panelists in Inglewood made between $10,000 and $30,000 during the same period.

Dorn has denied that he showed favoritism to any attorneys.

Figures Cited

“The figures looked bad,” Dorn said, “but there were just certain attorneys who were available when other panelists were not.”

The attorneys who received the largest county payments also denied any wrongdoing. They said that the system was so overburdened that they were easily able to obtain extra work.

“We were available,” said Charles Clark. “The court clerks knew if we were called we would come in at any time. Other attorneys on the panel didn’t do that. We’d be in court on other matters and be asked to fill in.”

Attorney Kyman noted that most panel attorneys and public defenders were reluctant to handle the cases involving incorrigible youths because they generated a lot of paper work without a lot of monetary return. She said she was in Dorn’s court so often on those cases that when new filings came in she picked up lots of work.

Gartner and Brown could not be reached for comment.

The Inglewood controversy raises a number of questions, which legislators and courts have been grappling with in recent years.

Last January, a new state law mandated that all courts use private firms that contract with the county to provide defense attorneys when public defenders are not available. These firms operate under a set contract and do not charge hourly fees as do law firms.

The law is intended to cut down on billing costs and make court-appointed attorneys more accountable for their time.

But not all courts have adopted such safeguards. For instance, none of Los Angeles County’s juvenile courts have contracted for such services. Instead, some local courts--like Inglewood--use the panel system.

Recently, the county Board of Supervisors has pushed for the adoption of private contractors to provide court-appointed attorneys.

“The situation has improved since our cases were filed, but it is still not perfect, said Deputy Dist. Atty. Richard Healey, who has prosecuted 10 cases against court-appointed attorneys who overcharged for services in adult cases. “There are still judges out there that are still too cozy with court-appointed lawyers. There are still attorneys making a lot of money.”

Meanwhile, Dorn’s supporters have started letter-writing campaigns to have him returned to Inglewood.

The Rev. Canon Lewis P. Bohler of Advent Episcopal Church in Los Angeles, who is a member of the county Board of Education, said: “My dread was always that Judge Dorn would someday retire, but to hear that they removed him is a blow. He was fair and compassionate.

“If his problems were beyond the parameters of prudent, they should correct it, but don’t remove him. The man is needed.”

Times researcher Joyce Penney contributed to this report.