Judges’ ‘Boot Camp’ Helps Take the Error Out of Trial

The Marine sergeant barked questions at the new inductees. A silent platoon of faces stared back. Wordless panic spread among the new soldiers: Did they have what it takes to fight this war?

This was boot camp, all right. But it was no ordinary training, and these 19 brave souls were hardly your everyday grunts.

They were soldiers preparing for the war for justice, fought with books and balanced judgment. Soon, they would don black robes and march into courtrooms all over California.

These recruits were newly appointed Superior Court judges. And last week, they came to this town sandwiched between Oakland and Berkeley to learn how to judge.

On their first afternoon, John J. Ryan, an Orange County Superior Court judge, was leading a seminar on criminal sentencing procedures. A former Marine sergeant, he has a voice like a foghorn.

“What’s the first thing you do when you’re going to sentence someone?” he demanded.

Silence.

“You call the case!” he said with a wave of his arm, his tattoo flashing from under his short-sleeve shirt. “People vs. Smith!”

Embarrassed giggles from the class. Of course, they thought. I knew that.

Everyone in the class had been on the bench six weeks or less. They included three Orange County judges assigned to the Santa Ana courthouse: former Orange County Dist. Atty. Cecil Hicks; Francisco F. Firmat, elevated from Municipal Court, and Nancy Wieben Stock, the former chief of the U.S. attorney’s office in Santa Ana and the only woman in the group.

The workshop is run by the Center for Judicial Education and Research, which uses $2.8 million in state funds each year to provide orientation and continuing education for California’s 1,500 judges. Although the program is voluntary, 90% of the state’s new judges attend, director Paul M. Li said.

Few states have judicial orientation programs. In most, judges learn the ropes literally by trial and error, Li said.

In the center’s eighth-floor offices, with a view of the Berkeley hills, a battalion of expert judges led the new jurists through five days of mental calisthenics.

Casually dressed in sweaters, jeans and sneakers, the students got nuts-and-bolts advice on how to streamline a crowded court calendar and control arrogant attorneys. They wrestled with questions of judicial ethics and got tips on how to keep cool when litigants’ tempers flare. They struggled with the complex calculations of prison sentences, a process so baffling that one new judge remarked: “I never thought I’d be sitting in a criminal trial hoping the guy’s acquitted!”

By midweek, nervousness faded, and the new judges seemed more like a chummy pledge class in some illustrious fraternity. The veteran judges took the new ones under their wings, scribbling their phone numbers and promising to step off the bench and lend an ear when the new jurists find themselves confronted with thorny legal questions.

Li, who co-founded the center in 1973, said many non-lawyers do not realize that the transition from lawyer to judge is a profound role change. He likened the two functions to parts of an orchestra.

“The lawyer is like the first violinist,” Li said. “He knows his music, and he knows how to respond to the other parts being played. But the judge is like the conductor. He has to know all the parts and make sure they all go together to produce the right result.”

“The most basic fear is that you’re assuming another life role,” Li said. “They don’t know how they’re supposed to be as judges. They sit up there in their black robes and think, ‘Can you still be yourself?’ You have to look wise and act wise. It takes a while for people to realize you can be yourself and still be an outstanding judge.”

The one-week course gives new judges a safe place to ask anything. Instructors do not dispense abstract lessons in law but real down-to-earth advice.

The most lighthearted tips involved food. One instructor-judge shared an unusual method of limiting the time it takes lawyers to select a jury: He tells them they will go to lunch whenever the jury is impaneled. “Almost always, we have a jury by 12:15 p.m.,” he said.

San Diego Superior Court Judge J. Richard Haden, who lectured on criminal pretrial proceedings, outlined the how-tos of arraignments, bail hearings and motions to suppress evidence. He said a new judge’s worst pitfall is having a “God complex.”

If you don’t know something, he said, ask the lawyers, ask another judge or watch other judges in action.

Haden also shared the joys of being assigned to overnight search warrant duty. One judge he knows took such a call in bed and began snoring in the middle of the police officer’s presentation, Haden said. Ever since he heard that story, Haden makes sure he goes downstairs into his brightly lit kitchen and hears those telephone arguments in a standing position.

Darrel W. Lewis, a Sacramento Superior Court judge who spoke about criminal trial problems, said staying awake during a dull trial can be a big challenge. He said he knows judges who “put their bare feet on ice” under their desks so they won’t nod off.

But he concentrated on more serious matters, such as whether a judge should be “an activist” by questioning witnesses on the stand or leave that to lawyers, even if they make mistakes.

The most complicated material came in Ryan’s seminar on sentencing, a legal mine field where judges make the most mistakes. One step at a time, he took them through the labyrinthine calculations of a prison term. Students blanched as they flipped through their reference manuals and tried to digest all the factors: the defendant’s sanity, prior record, credit for time served and eligibility for probation, aggravating and mitigating factors of the crime, enhancements for use of a weapon, concurrent or consecutive terms for multiple crimes and so on.

Ryan assured them this would soon be second nature and would take “about a minute.” They stared in disbelief.

But within hours, their smiles and chuckles were back. Bit by bit, they were getting used to this justice business. And as one student said: “It doesn’t seem so weird after all.”

Over lunches and coffee breaks, the new jurists shared tales of their first weeks on the bench. James W. Edson, who practiced civil law in Long Beach for 30 years before he was named to Superior Court in Norwalk, said his first day started with an embarrassing episode.

“I took a big stride with self-confidence up onto the bench--and right away stepped on my robe,” he recalled with a grin. “It caught me at the back of the neck and I stumbled, but somehow I caught myself and didn’t fall. Everyone in the courtroom was looking at me.”

Edson’s first assignment was handling the criminal court calendar, even though he had little criminal trial experience. It gave him an uncomfortably close look at the impact of drug use, he said.

“People say drugs are tied up with so much of the crime,” he said, “and after two months of sentencing people, I can really see it. You just see the tremendous number of wasted lives and the horrendous monster of drugs.”

Hicks, 63, who supervised hundreds of criminal prosecutions as district attorney for 23 years, said he sees another slice of life in his assignment to family law court, where bitter spouses slug it out over divorce agreements and child custody. Making the adjustment from advocate to impartial decision-maker was “the oddest thing in the world,” but somehow it was not difficult, he said.

“I knew what the role of a judge was supposed to be, and I just did it,” he said.

Stock, 38, a seasoned prosecutor after 12 years with the U.S. attorney’s office, said she had one weekend to read four files, each four inches thick, to prepare for her first trial, a complex business dispute. But she found courtroom proceedings reassuringly familiar.

“Trial is trial, whether it’s state or federal,” she said. “I come from such a formal system (in federal court), and it’s a scenario I’m familiar with. Once I put on the black robe and we face the flag and the bailiff calls the case, somehow I know what to do.”

Lawrence J. O’Neill, a Fresno Superior Court judge, got an abrupt initiation. His first trial was a bizarre, high-profile case involving a 6-year-old Laotian boy with club feet. The boy’s parents refused to permit corrective surgery, contending that the boy’s congenital trouble was compensation for an ancestor’s mistake and that surgery would only deepen the curse on the family.

O’Neill discovered one day that the boy’s father had brought a chicken to court in a bag, intending to slit its throat and use the blood in a ritual if the ruling went against him.

“I had to stop the proceedings and ask (the father’s lawyer), ‘Counselor, is there a good reason why there’s a live chicken in my courtroom?’ ” O’Neill said. “It was amazing. And it happened in my very first trial. I wonder what will happen next?”