Public Defender Says Boycott Threat Unique : Courts: A Van Nuys judge faced an unprecedented action by Los Angeles County public defenders after his order led to the manhandling of their colleague.

The top official in the Los Angeles County public defender’s office said the threatened office-wide boycott of a Van Nuys Superior Court judge, whose order resulted in a deputy public defender being dragged from a courtroom by two police officers, is unprecedented in the office’s 75-year history.

Los Angeles Public Defender Wilbur F. Littlefield said the remarks by Judge Raymond D. Mireles that prompted the Nov. 6 manhandling of Deputy Public Defender Howard C. Waco were “outrageous and absolutely uncalled for.”

Littlefield said he was prepared to take the unprecedented action of asking all deputy public defenders with cases in Mireles’ courtroom to file legal challenges, called affidavits of prejudice, seeking to have Mireles removed from their cases.

But that turned out to be unnecessary. Responding to threats from the public defender’s office to boycott Mireles’ courtroom unless he was moved from the criminal bench to a civil judgeship, Presiding Van Nuys Superior Court Judge Richard G. Kolostian declared that no public defender cases will be heard by Mireles.

The judge will preside only over cases in which a defendant is represented by a private attorney or by the county-funded alternate defense counsel’s office, Kolostian said.

“I can’t recall any other case where we’ve said, ‘We’re not going to go into a court, period’ except here,” said Littlefield, who has been with the office since the late 1950s, when the Legislature first gave lawyers in state courts the power to issue legal challenges seeking a judge’s removal.

The furor stemmed from Mireles’ request to two Los Angeles police officers, appearing as witnesses in a drug case in his courtroom, to bring in Waco, who was defending the drug defendant. “Bring me a piece” or “body part” of Waco, Mireles remarked.

Mireles later said he was joking, but the officers apparently took him seriously and dragged Waco out of a neighboring courtroom backward down the courthouse corridor and hurled him through Mireles’ courtroom door, bruising Waco’s leg.

“No lawyer has ever been treated the way Howard Waco was treated, and as the head of the office, I’m not going to stand for anybody treating our lawyers like that,” Littlefield said. “I don’t intend to have it happen again if I can help it.”

The incident last month might have been viewed with less anger if Mireles’ relations with the 540-lawyer office had not been strained by a dispute in March over attorney tardiness. An appellate court ruled against Mireles in the matter.

State law gives defense and prosecuting attorneys the right to file one affidavit per case alleging prejudice by a judge. State law does not require attorneys to furnish proof of prejudice.

Filed en masse, such affidavits can be a potent weapon capable of drumming a judge out of a particular courthouse or off the criminal bench and into a civil post. It’s known in courthouse slang as “blanket affidaviting” or “papering” a judge.

No statistics are kept on the practice, but interviews with judges and lawyers produce the consensus that the tactic is used far more often by the district attorney’s office than by the public defender’s section.

Last year, the district attorney’s office forced the reassignment of Compton Superior Court Judge Arthur H. Jean Jr., who was routinely settling minor drug sales cases with 90-day sentences rather than the 180-day minimum favored by Dist. Atty. Ira Reiner.

Jean said Reiner’s policy was clogging the courts with trials that prosecutors were usually losing, and forcing delays in the prosecution of rapes, murders and other felonies.

In a similar action in August, 1988, Reiner refused to allow Glendale Municipal Commissioner Daniel F. Calabro to hear cases because of alleged racist remarks he had made in his courtroom.

Superior Court Judge Melvin B. Grover was transferred from Van Nuys to Pasadena in 1985, after deputy district attorneys filed affidavits on every new criminal case assigned to his court. Prosecutors accused Grover of mistreating them and prejudicing his rulings in favor of defendants.

Other affidavits by deputy district attorneys in 1985 forced the transfers to other posts of Superior Court judges David A. Workman and G. Keith Wisot.

The public defender’s office generally has a policy against “blanket affidavits,” preferring to leave the decision whether to file such challenges to individual lawyers in the office, said William Weiss, head of the Van Nuys branch of the public defender’s office.

That is not to say that judges are not periodically subjected to blanket affidavit campaigns by groups of lawyers from the public defender’s office, but only that such campaigns do not have the official sanction of the office, Littlefield said.

The contemplated blanket affidaviting campaign against Mireles would have been unusual because it was ordered and sanctioned by department brass, Littlefield said.

Earlier this month, Los Angeles Juvenile Court Judge Roosevelt Dorn was transferred by Superior Court Presiding Judge Richard P. Byrne to Los Angeles Superior Court after a group of deputy public defenders filed affidavits seeking removal from his cases. But Littlefield said, “It wasn’t something that the office did. I’ve gotten complaints that we’re blanket-affidaviting judges, but it’s always turned out that three or four of our lawyers were still going into the courtroom.”

Weiss said, “You don’t use an affidavit just because you don’t particularly care for a judge’s sentencing policies or philosophy or personality.

“The purpose is to remove a judge from hearing a case where you believe your client cannot get a fair hearing. It’s done in the best interests of the client.”

Weiss said he has filed fewer than five affidavits in his 15 years as a trial attorney with the public defender’s office.

“I only used an affidavit when a judge was abusive or completely out of line,” Weiss said. “We figure if one of our lawyers has his feelings hurt, he’ll probably feel better the next day.’

Besides, Littlefield said, once an affidavit is filed, the attorney is stuck with the next judge assigned to the case unless he can prove actual prejudice in a time-consuming hearing presided over by an independent judge.

“You may have a judge that you don’t like particularly, but if you affidavit him, you might get sent to Attila the Hun rather than the judge who is a known quantity,” Littlefield said.

Others point out that the district attorney’s office has more power over judges since it has a virtual monopoly on prosecutions, whereas the public defender’s office is not the only law office representing defendants.

Public defender officials viewed Mireles’ actions as grave enough to warrant extraordinary action because the judge’s suggestion about Waco “could be interpreted as carte blanche to do anything you can to bring him” into the courtroom, Littlefield said.

The run-in with Waco and the March clash between Mireles and the public defender’s office involved a dispute over public defenders not being in court at the time Mireles wanted them.

Angry that public defenders assigned to cases in his courtroom did not show up precisely at 9 a.m., Mireles quietly removed one tardy public defender from a case and appointed a lawyer from the alternate defense counsel’s office, a county-funded lawyers group that represents defendants when the public defender’s office is too busy or has a conflict of interest.

Weiss said he met with Mireles and stressed to him that deputy public defenders typically have to be in two to six courts a day and cannot be in every judge’s court at 9 a.m. Weiss said at the time that he could have his attorneys call Mireles if they were delayed.

Deputy public defenders scheduled to appear in Mireles’ courtroom filed a flurry of affidavits seeking his removal, and Mireles responded by refusing to assign any more cases to the public defender’s office, seeking instead to have defendants represented by alternate defense counsel attorneys, Weiss said.

The public defender’s office appealed the matter to the 2nd District Court of Appeal, which ruled against Mireles, and the public defender’s office was reinstated on the cases.

“What is bad about running a court in a timely fashion?” Mireles asked in a recent interview. “What is bad about lawyers on the public trough coming to court in a timely fashion? Justice starts when the clock strikes 9.

“I get here at 8, and at 9 I am ready. I have read all the reports, I have read all the motions. I am ready to conduct business. There are different theories of running courts. I do my court a certain way, and I do it because that’s the way I perceive my duty to the public,” Mireles said.

But Weiss said the system doesn’t work that way.

“The county of Los Angeles would go bankrupt,” Weiss said, if public defenders were assigned to only one case at a time. “My felony lawyers work very hard. They are not sitting around drinking coffee, they are racing around from court to court to court.

“I think that he has shown in the past, and he’s clearly demonstrated in this situation, that he has negative feelings toward this office as a whole,” Weiss said. “And although that may not affect his judgment on any single case, in the long run that is going to work to the detriment of our clients.”

Mireles denied that he has any bias against the public defender’s office.

“The public defenders in this county are lawyer for lawyer the best legal defense that anyone with or without money can get,” Mireles said. “I’ve always held that opinion about them.”