Reversal of Rape Award Protested : Disabled: A Superior Court judge finds protesters at his house. Court officials and some handicapped activists condemn the rally.

Activists for the disabled demonstrated Wednesday at the Canoga Park house of a San Fernando Superior Court judge who reversed a jury verdict awarding $7.5 million to a paralyzed woman raped in a North Hollywood nursing home.

The demonstration was condemned by court officials and some other disabled activists, who criticized the demonstrators for endangering the judge in a week when a federal judge was killed by a mail bomb.

Carrying signs bearing slogans such as “Judge: what if it was your daughter?” and “We treat the dead better,” 22 members of American Disabled for Accessible Public Transportation (ADAPT) held a candlelight vigil at the house of Judge David M. Schacter.

They were protesting Schacter’s decision in October to reverse a jury verdict in the case of Andrea Nerpel, 39, who was raped at the Laurelwood Nursing Home in 1982. Schacter set aside the award, ruling there was insufficient evidence to support contentions that negligence by the nursing home staff led to Nerpel’s rape.

Protesters said Wednesday the case reflects society’s mistreatment of the disabled.

“We are here to express our outrage that a judge could ignore the rights of a disabled person,” said Lillybeth Navarro-Persina, president of the group’s Southern California chapter.

But court officials and other disabled activists said the protesters were misguided and their tactics inappropriate.

“They haven’t read the ruling,” said Superior Court spokeswoman Rebecca Kuzins. “Her attorney had to prove that the nursing home was negligent. He didn’t do that and that’s why Schacter could not award the damages. It has to do with the failure of the plaintiff’s attorney, who failed to make the case.”

Judge Richard P. Byrne, presiding judge of the Los Angeles Superior Court, criticized the organization’s members for publicizing Schacter’s address in the wake of the killing of a federal judge in Alabama and the discovery of a bomb in a courthouse in Atlanta.

“The publication of a judge’s home address and phone number would be irresponsible at any time, but it is deplorable now,” Byrne said. “Recent events clearly indicate that judges’ concern for security is not an idle fear but a grave reality.”

Schacter, who received several threatening letters after his decision was announced, moved his wife and daughter from the house earlier in the day after police warned him about plans for the protest.

Rock singer and disabled activist Dorik Perman criticized the demonstration, saying it was inappropriate to carry the dispute to the judge’s house.

“If you have a beef against the system, go to the courthouse. Don’t go to his house and start harassing him,” said Perman, a founding member of another disabled rights group called Access Hollywood. “They are going on emotion.”

Nerpel, who was left semi-paralyzed and unable to communicate when she suffered major brain damage in an automobile accident in 1969, was made pregnant by a rapist in 1982. After Nerpel underwent an abortion and was sterilized, her family sued the nursing home for damages.

In overturning the verdict, Schacter chastised Nerpel’s attorney, Alan J. Schultz, for failing to introduce facts to support his contention that the nursing home was negligent and that Nerpel had suffered damages from the rape.

But the protesters Wednesday said the facts speak for themselves.

“The mere fact that she got pregnant is evidence that they were negligent,” said Barbara Faye Waxman, who is confined to a wheelchair and requires a respirator to compensate for muscular weakness.