Lawyer’s Convictions Led Him to Become Public Defender : The law: Kenneth I. Clayman’s office defends poor clients and constitutional rights. He claims inspiration from television’s Perry Mason.

In the 1940s, Kenneth I. Clayman was a skinny, argumentative kid, the son of Russian immigrant grocers in New Rochelle, N.Y. By 1949, Clayman and his parents had moved to San Diego to operate an egg ranch and to ease his father’s asthma.

And as Clayman got older and more argumentative, his friends began picking on him.

“I was . . . a little on the obnoxious side,” said Clayman, 48. “They’d say, ‘Why don’t you become a lawyer?’ ”

Maybe it was that wiseacre suggestion. Maybe it was all the teasing he took for his beanpole frame, which eventually grew to 6 feet, 5 inches. Maybe it was all those episodes of “Perry Mason” he watched on television.

But something drove Clayman to become a criminal defense lawyer. And something made him take one of the most difficult, low-paying jobs a lawyer can have--deputy public defender in Los Angeles--and eventually take what may be one of the toughest jobs for a defense lawyer in California--public defender in Ventura County--where prosecutors last year won 82% of jury trials and 87% of trials before judges.

Now Clayman oversees 37 lawyers, who represent poor clients charged in simple traffic offenses to complex murder cases. During six years in the post, he has earned respect as a diplomatic administrator and staunch defender of constitutional rights.

“Defending criminals is not the most popular thing in Ventura County, and it’s a difficult job to begin with--it’s kind of like being Scrooge at Christmastime,” said Supervisor James Dougherty. “Everybody wants to put the bad guys in jail, and he’s doing his best to make sure their constitutional rights are protected. Not everybody appreciates that.”

Public defenders are unpopular because “they have to stand up for the underdog, who many times is a somewhat unpopular if not despicable individual,” said Mark S. Borrell, president of the Ventura County Criminal Defense Lawyers Bar Assn.

And by all accounts, Clayman’s deputies must handle a bigger caseload and work under far more pressure than their predecessors did under former Public Defender Richard Erwin.

Defense attorney George C. Eskin has watched the public defender’s office operate under both administrators. Eskin, who has served as assistant district attorney in Santa Barbara County and chief assistant city attorney in Los Angeles, was an assistant to Ventura County Dist. Atty. Woodruff Deem from 1967 to 1970, while Erwin was public defender.

Eskin praised both men as hard-working, competent public defenders, but he said Clayman and his deputies must work much harder.

He noted that Dist. Atty. Michael D. Bradbury’s policy against plea bargaining, instituted soon after he took office in 1978, has forced the public defender to take more cases to trial. While defendants often are able to negotiate guilty pleas to lesser charges in Los Angeles County courts, Eskin said, defendants in Ventura County often have two choices: plead guilty as charged or go to trial.

Clayman said that 5% to 7% of criminal cases go to trial in California, but 12% to 15% go to trial in Ventura County.

But sometimes a client is best served by pleading guilty, Clayman said. “The judges like to demonstrate . . . that if you go to trial and lose, you’re going to do worse than if you plead,” he said.

No records are kept on the success rate of the public defender’s office. But to Clayman, victory comes when one of his deputies is able to persuade a jury to convict a client of a lesser charge. He cited the case of Peter Michael Bergne, who was convicted of second-degree murder and acquitted of first-degree murder and rape in the strangulation death of Linda Anderson.

And sometimes the public defender’s office wins a trial, as in the 1989 case of a Vietnamese client in his 50s who was defended by Deputy Public Defender Alison Ayers. The man’s car failed to stop at a stop sign and plowed into another driver, killing him. Ayers said her investigators were able to prove that the car’s brakes failed and win an acquittal on a vehicular manslaughter charge.

Clayman graduated from UCLA Law School in 1966 and worked 11 months on medical malpractice cases at the Los Angeles law firm of Leo Gelfand after passing the bar exam in 1967. But yearning to handle trials, he applied for a job in the Los Angeles County district attorney’s office.

“That night when I went home, I couldn’t sleep all night,” Clayman said. “I realized I could not be a D.A. My heart was on the other side of the rules of evidence, of illegal search and seizure.”

So he joined the public defender’s office in Los Angeles, where “training was anathema,” Clayman said. “The only way we got training was they’d throw us into the fire.”

Clayman’s former colleagues remember him as affable, hard-working, and a little tentative:

“I think he was like all lawyers,” said Charles R. English, now a Santa Monica defense attorney. “When you start, you second-guess all your decisions, and I think the biggest thing that’s matured in Ken over 20 years is he’s more comfortable in his decisions.”

In the late 1970s, a troublesome client made Clayman realize why he chose to be a public defender.

“To say he gave me grief is an understatement,” Clayman said. The man was “spitting on me, grabbing my tie and trying to choke me out. He cursed me with every word in the book, he ran out on me, he tried to fire me constantly. You know, that thing that everybody says: ‘I don’t want a public defender, I want a real lawyer.’

“All of a sudden I realized . . . that this was exactly the kind of client who needed me most.”

And Clayman remembers visiting the defendant in jail every Saturday morning until he finally earned the man’s trust and cooperation.

Clayman rose through the ranks in the public defender’s office in Los Angeles, spending nine years defending juveniles. In 1975, he became assistant chief of the juvenile division, then chief in 1977. In 1981, he was appointed chief of the misdemeanor division.

Then, in 1984, Ventura County supervisors Dougherty and Susan K. Lacey nominated Clayman from among dozens of candidates to become public defender, a job that now pays $94,260 a year.

Clayman had to fill a huge pair of shoes. Erwin, Ventura County’s first public defender, had held the post since 1966. Erwin was both respected and criticized by the district attorney’s office and Sheriff’s Department.

“Dick Erwin was a flamboyant semi-showman . . . charismatic to the point of using the country boy image a lot to cover up the fine legal mind that he had,” Sheriff John V. Gillespie said. Erwin “had a reputation for getting in the district attorney’s face,” Gillespie said.

“Ken Clayman is more of the kind of person who can work things out in negotiation,” Gillespie said.

Bradbury remembers Erwin as a friend, but “kind of bombastic.” The two often quarreled publicly.

Clayman airs his differences quietly in closed-door meetings and has “brought the office into the 20th Century,” Bradbury said. Under Clayman, deputy public defenders have become more professional and are better trained, making the public defender’s office “a much more formidable opponent in court,” Bradbury said.

Erwin “basically defined what the public defender was,” said Lacey. “So when the choice came and we were able to review the three finalists, we needed an extremely strong person who could walk in and realize he or she was following a legend, and yet create a climate he could work in.”

While most officials admire Clayman’s personal style, many do not always see eye-to-eye with him.

Gillespie said he disagreed with Clayman’s proposal to tighten rules governing conference rooms in the main jail after a sheriff’s deputy overheard a conversation in April between a public defender and murder suspect Gregory Scott Smith.

“I sometimes think the defendants are overly defended,” Gillespie said. “I would much prefer over-prosecution, but that’s typical cop talk.”

Bradbury observed that he and Clayman have a similar philosophy--that their deputies should be tough. “We’re here to see that justice is done, and it takes both of us to do that.”

But Clayman has a ready sense of humor, particularly about the work to which the Perry Mason character helped drive him years ago. “I’m still waiting, after 23 years in the practice, for somebody to stand up in the back of the room and say, ‘I did it!’ ”