Deputies’ Nemesis : Despite His Court Victory, Jim Butler Remains a Man With a Mission

One week after winning $1.1 million in a lawsuit against county sheriff’sdeputies, Jim Butler is trying to get a dealer to honor the warranty on his car.

“Can you believe this guy doesn’t want to make good?” said former Navy chaplain Butler, shaking his head.

For Butler, a 60-year-old Vista resident with steady blue eyes and a firm handshake, life is back to normal--or to about as normal as it is likely to get. For the first time in years, he sat down to read a book that had little to do with his claim that sheriff’s deputies beat and abused him, though it is about the abuse of power.

The phone rings with people calling to tell him stories of their being abused by sheriff’s deputies. It rings with people who first called him months or years ago with tales of abuse and have been calling ever since. And it also rings with people calling to congratulate him on a victory earned after more than five years of litigation, that caused him a heart attack, depression and the loss of his $25,000-a-year business renovating mobile homes.

Butler won his lawsuit after a jury concluded earlier this month that the San Diego County Sheriff’s Department has a policy of violating individuals’ rights. To establish a citizens’ review board that would oversee abuse cases like his, Butler recently offered to give the county $320,000 of his $1.1-million award, if the county sets up such a board. The money would pay the starting costs.

The Board of Supervisors voted unanimously last week to place a measure on the November ballot to create a citizens review board that would monitor the deputies--a move that Butler applauds.

Although Butler won his battle, the fight is not over. Some people were stunned that Butler, who had fought for years to win his lawsuit against county officers, then turned around and offered one-third of the awarded money back to the county. But the offer turned out to be moot when supervisors decided in a closed session last week to appeal the jury’s verdict. This move could cause litigation to drag on for another five or more years.

“As Yogi Berra said,” quoted Butler, sighing with the patience of an aging warrior, “ ‘It ain’t over, till it’s over.’ ”

And he doesn’t live his life now as a man who is about to put a million dollars in his pocket. His idea of going out to lunch is Carl’s Jr.

Butler seems like an unlikely fellow to become embroiled in police controversy. The former priest has no arrest record. He has taught students in a Catholic high school and been a chaplain in Vietnam.

To San Diego County sheriff’s deputies, Butler is a meddling egomaniac who figured he could order them around. But, to family, friends and a growing cadre of supporters, Butler is a local hero, a victim who vanquished his enemy.

“Jim Butler is the kind of man who has a ticket straight to heaven,” said Judy Hejduk, a flight attendant and Encinitas mother who said she was chained, hogtied and beaten in a Vista jail after being arrested on suspicion of drunken driving.

“We need more super-heroes like this,” Hejduk said. “He is one short of an apostle as far as I am concerned.”

Butler shrugs aside any such talk.

“I am not trying to play some kind of hero,” Butler said. “This fight has been for all those who didn’t have the opportunity to fight. It was never about money.”

But waging war against the Sheriffs’ Department has been costly. Though reluctant to be too specific, Butler says he has incurred more than $50,000 in pretrial legal expenses and more than $50,000 in medical expenses, including his heart attack. The trial itself cost “three figures.” To cover these expenses, Butler said, he has taken out about $60,000 in loans and works part time in his new business, California Mobile Home Inspection service.

The costs, however, were more than financial. Feeling overwhelmed by the litigation, which threatened to go on and on, Butler was hospitalized for depression for 10 days in Jan. 1988. For most of his family and friends, this was the first time they had seen Butler falter.

“He was always very positive. He is a strong individual who had a lot of inner strength which disappeared over the five years that this episode dragged on,” said Jack Foley, a priest who teaches high school in Salinas and has known Butler for 35 years, since the two taught in Catholic school.

“He has gone through a lot of pain, discouragement and depression because of the length of time this has dragged out,” Foley said. “But he is a fighter. When he knows that something is right, he fights for it.”

Many realized that, despite the toll the fight was taking on Butler, he was unable to quit.

“The easy thing to do would be for him to back off or to give up, but I think he has been consistently in the battle to try to expose police misconduct and make sure it gets addressed,” said Betty Wheeler, legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union in San Diego and Imperial Counties. “He is not the type of person who could walk away.”

For Butler, the lawsuit has become his career.

His office is filled with overflowing boxes and heaps of paper. His desk can scarcely be seen beneath the piles of letters and papers. In an album the size of two phone books, he keeps a partial history in clippings and letters. The telephone has a recording device attached to it so he can tape calls from people telling tales of abuse, he said.

A partly obscured sign sits atop the television, reading: “Football is NOT a matter of life and death--it’s much more important than that.”

And somehow, that missive is surprising. Does he actually take time out to watch television? Yes. But it’s hard to imagine.

Butler scours the papers to see how they cover his case. He takes to the publicity with greater ease than does his wife, Cathy, a soft-spoken, articulate woman who only agreed to see a recent visitor when promised there would be no note-taking. “I just hate seeing my name in the paper,” said Cathy Butler, a retired nurse.

Jim Butler met his wife while he was still a priest. He had gone to a friend’s Annapolis home to pick up tickets for the Penn State-Navy game. Cathy answered the door; Butler was smitten.

“I told her that some day, somehow we would be married,” Jim Butler said of the second time he saw the woman who became his wife one year after they met.

Butler says he is a private man. To stay fit, he walks several miles with his 11-year-old German shepherd mix, Chula, every morning. To calm his nerves, he sits by the ocean for an hour or two. But, no matter what he does, there is one topic that is certain to get him going--the San Diego County Sheriffs’ Department.

“You get stopped by sheriff’s deputies and you are treated as less than human--there is no reason to do that,” said Butler, pursing his thin lips. “I was outraged, knowing that I had been helping people for years and years and being taken to jail for trying to assist. They turned it around and said I was interfering. It’s very difficult to hear things said about you when you know they are not true.”

On the night of Jan. 19, 1985, Butler and his cousins were in his Vista home in the 1600 block of Foothill Drive. They were cleaning up, having eaten dinner in the ranch-style home that the Butlers have owned for 17 years. When they heard the screeching of brakes, Butler and his cousins, who were visiting from Orange County, dashed outside to offer assistance.

Butler’s house sits off a tight curve in the road that has been the site of more than a dozen accidents, he said. So many accidents, in fact, that the Sheriff’s Department deputies used to bring him flares to illuminate nighttime mishaps, he said. Because of his lobbying efforts, Butler says, the city gradually erected signs to slow speeders.

Exactly what happened during that January evening is in dispute. Butler says he asked Deputy Robert Bishop to turn on the patrol car’s flashers and move it to the hilltop, out of the way of other cars. In the road, Butler says, he was verbally and physically abused. He was then tossed into the patrol car, taken to jail, where he was beaten, denied access to his medication for high blood pressure and put into a rubber-padded cell, he said.

Butler likens the experience to a rape.

“It will never go away--it’s so tragic. The system you believe in, turns on you. That sense of violation is so deep, it will go to the grave with you,” said Butler, playing with his gold-wire rim glasses.

Even now, Butler, who served more than a year as a Navy chaplain in Vietnam, says he wakes up at night if he hears slamming noises. And he wakens, thinking it is the slamming of the jail door or the clanging of bars.

“I went through horrendous experiences in Vietnam. Those don’t come back to me--this does. When I came back and saw man’s inhumanity to man, it was so overpowering,” Butler said. “And that it happened to me--all my life I had been doing good. I was outraged.”

But, during the trial, the deputy county counsel David Florance, attorney for Bishop and deputy Bolitha Laws, also accused of abusing Butler, offered a different picture. Florance characterized Butler as a busybody who thought highly of his own opinions and tried to give orders to sheriff’s deputies, like telling them where to park their car.

“Law enforcement officers are out there doing an important and often difficult job. Having a citizen come and try to tell them how to do their job is dangerous and a real bother,” said Florance, during an interview. “He seems to have a very strong ego in that he feels he knows how to conduct accident investigations better than trained accident investigators. But he was being a real nuisance.”

These contentions during the trial hurt Butler’s feelings because he had thought he was helping when, in fact, he was usually in the way of the sheriff’s deputies, Florance said.

“He is a person who means well and does not realize the problems he’s causing for law enforcement,” said Florance.

Florance, with the blessing of the Board of Supervisors, will be asking for a retrial of the case for numerous reasons, including the grounds that the jury allocated money in its award that was meant to punish the Sheriff’s Department and to send a message out to the community. “The law does not allow for that,” he said.

Tom Adler, one of Butler’s two lawyers, said the request for a retrial was an insult to the jury and would mean a waste of taxpayer’s money.

“The end result of all these legal shenanigans is, they may end up spending more than $2 million instead of $1 million,” Adler said. “I think the Board of Supervisors is trying to shove this problem off until they are no longer in office by delaying litigation at the expense of taxpayers. It’s unconscionable.”

Butler has plans--not grand, but frugal--for his life that include money granted from the lawsuit. He wants to visit relatives in the East and is thinking of writing a book about his experiences. The money, he hopes, will pay off his debts and provide for his retirement years.

The prospect of more years in court makes Butler weary. But he is rebounding from the events of recent weeks with a sense of victory.

“The goal we had was met--to expose abuses. I think I am entitled to be compensated for what they did to my life,” he said. “As long as there is injustice, I will fight.”