Municipal Judges Gain 2 Disparate Reputations : Courts: Critics say the bench penalizes defendants who go to trial. The jurists, who handle one of the heaviest caseloads in the state, deny it.

The 12 judges of the Ventura County Municipal Court often take flak for their rulings from critics who call them unfair, overly harsh and even capricious.

Last November, an article in California magazine picked Judge John J. Hunter as one of the three most unfair and abusive judges in the state.

In June, Judge Arturo F. Gutierrez was criticized for delaying execution of a sentence for a convicted drunk driver who then allegedly killed a high school student in a drunk-driving accident.

And last week, legal scholars dunned Judge Steven E. Hintz for letting a prosecutor serve as foreman of a jury that took 15 minutes to convict a man of being under the influence of heroin.

In fact, the Ventura County Municipal Court has two reputations.

One is that its judges are tough, vindictive men who penalize defendants with stiffer sentences for going to trial instead of pleading guilty. The unofficial slogan around the courthouse is: “Ventura County: Arrive on vacation, leave on probation.”

The other is that the judges are hard-working, competent and fair, handling more than 200,000 criminal, civil and traffic cases per year in the pressure cooker that an ever-increasing caseload has made of the court.

Indeed, Ventura County’s caseload per judge is among the highest in California, outranking even the crowded municipal courts of Los Angeles by nearly 40%.

In the 1988-1989 fiscal year, 16,797 cases were filed per judge in Ventura County Municipal Court, while 12,125 cases were filed per judge in the Los Angeles Municipal Court, according to the California Judicial Council.

The Ventura County Municipal Court handles all misdemeanors, traffic tickets and small claims cases, and arraigns felony defendants who are headed for Superior Court.

On a recent weekday at the main Ventura County Courthouse and the courthouse in Simi Valley, one Municipal Court judge was meticulously working his way through a two-foot-thick stack of cases, another was sternly sentencing a third-time drunk driver to 120 days in jail and a third was patiently listening to the morning’s 12th plea of “guilty with an explanation.”

On some days, the caseload can grow so heavy that judges are forced to handle nearly one case per minute. And sometimes defendants get little more than “assembly line justice,” say prosecutors, defense attorneys and the court’s own judges. “Assembly-line justice is a shocking and horrible way to have to describe it, but in today’s times, it’s far too often true,” Judge Barry B. Klopfer said.

“We have to, by the sheer volume of cases, deal with each as expeditiously and routinely . . . as possible while still trying as hard as we can to maintain a sense of the individuality of each case,” Klopfer said.

Klopfer’s assignment is handling criminal trials, which he says is a little slower-paced than his last assignment, which ended in June when he was rotated out of the job of “master calendar” judge in charge of scheduling criminal cases for trial.

“You start a day down there realizing that if every case that is on the calendar is to proceed to a jury trial, that that day’s worth of cases could easily tie up the available trial courts for weeks,” Klopfer said.

“These judges are today just high-paid bureaucrats,” Dist. Atty. Michael D. Bradbury said. “They’re one cog in this system that deals with a tremendous volume of cases and they’re assembly-line workers. And to stay alive, they have to turn out 5,000 widgets a day. So what tends to be sacrificed is the quality of justice. . . . And frequently, the public goes away feeling they haven’t had their day in court.”

And while the caseload increases steadily--999 cases were awaiting trial at the end of the 1988-89 fiscal year, up from 794 cases at the end of 1986-87--the court has not added a new judge’s position since 1981.

“We should have had 16 or 17 judges in this court for the past few years and obviously we don’t,” Presiding Municipal Court Judge Lee E. Cooper Jr. said.

“With seven trial divisions in this court, as a system we have the capacity to try 500 trials a year. There are nearly 13,000 cases set for trial,” Cooper said. “There’s gotta be some give . . . somewhere.”

The system often “gives” before trial, during what judges call “early disposition.” Without some flexibility in the disposition of cases, the Municipal Court would collapse, Cooper said.

Because Bradbury refuses to let his prosecutors negotiate pleas with defendants, a higher percentage of cases go to trial in Ventura County than in any other county in the state.

In most counties, 5% to 7% of criminal cases go to trial. In Ventura County, 12% to 15% go to trial, while the rest are “disposed of” through guilty pleas by the defendants or dismissals by the court or prosecutors.

Some critics say the Municipal Court judges penalize defendants for refusing to plead guilty and save the court the time and expense of a trial.

Ventura County Public Defender Kenneth Clayman said, “The judges like to demonstrate to you that if you go to trial and lose, you’re going to do worse than if you plead out.” A defendant who pleads out is basically entering a guilty plea.

Clayman quoted a joke making the rounds of the Ventura County Courthouse: in Municipal Court, “The three most heavily punished offenses are driving under the influence, being under the influence of heroin and trial by jury.”

Another defense attorney complained, “The court punishes people for having a trial . . . because if more people had trials here it would break the back of the system and there is no way they can afford to.”

Bradbury’s no plea-bargaining policy prevents judges from letting defendants plead to lesser charges, said the attorney, who asked not to be identified. “They can only scare the defendant by showing that if he doesn’t accept what the district attorney wants, they’ll get more” time in jail, she said.

Defense attorney Phillip R. Dunn said giving stiffer sentences for people found guilty at trial is “extremely offensive. This is occurring with greater frequency than it used to . . . I think they have lots of reasons they state officially as to why they do this. But the truth is that they are trying to coerce people not to go to trial.”

Dunn cited a recent case in which his client chose to fight a first-offense drunk-driving charge in a trial because his blood-alcohol level was very close to the legal level.

“The guy didn’t even testify. All he did was require the people to prove their case against him,” Dunn said.

The man was convicted. But instead of the standard sentence of probation and fines for a first offense, he was sentenced to six days in County Jail, Dunn said. Dunn said he was able to persuade the judge to reduce the penalty to a suspended six-month jail sentence, but the man will have to serve the sentence if he violates the terms of his probation.

Judges and some attorneys vehemently deny the penalty-for-trial theory, saying critics have it backward. Instead, they say, defendants are rewarded with lighter sentences for pleading guilty than they would face if they went to trial.

Judges often learn of aggravating evidence during trial, and sometimes boost the sentence accordingly, Judge Thomas Hutchins said.

The Ventura County Municipal Court bench “is extremely fair and scrupulous about making sure people don’t get punished because they went to trial,” said Hutchins, who is the newest Municipal Court judge in Ventura County, having been appointed from the district attorney’s office 11 months ago.

Bradbury said, “It’s obvious that if the court is penalizing defendants for exercising their constitutional right to jury trials that that would be serious misconduct . . . I have heard that suggested before, but I don’t have any evidence of it.”

Cooper said, “A judge in a high-volume arraignment court does not have time to analyze each crime. That’s a function of volume.”

He said of lighter sentences, “Most judges give the defendant the benefit of that in exchange for an early disposition . . . I think the perception that we penalize people for going to trial is wrong.”

And Cooper added, “One of the first steps in rehabilitation is to get a person to concede he’s wrong and accept whatever penalty is imposed for wrongdoing.”

Cooper and Klopfer also agreed that during trial judges often learn incriminating facts that would not have surfaced in a guilty plea. Those facts often prompt them to increase a defendant’s sentence.

Many Ventura County lawyers also complain the Municipal Court bench is generally too harsh, too intent on jailing convicts to sentence them fairly or work toward rehabilitation.

“They tend on occasion to be a little bit too severe in some of their sentencing,” said James Farley, a defense attorney who works for a group of court-appointed lawyers called Conflict Defense Associates.

He said judges in Los Angeles County often pass lighter sentences than they do in Ventura County. “I think they sometimes take pride in the fact that they are a tough bench, and I think that that sometimes creates problems in that one case . . . where punitive is not really the approach that should be taken,” Farley said.

“It sort of appears that for the most cases they are interested more in jail time,” said another veteran defense attorney, who asked not to be identified. “Some judges don’t want to use the work-release program that was instituted by the Probation Department for minor, non-security risk-type offenders. . . . Everything for them is jail. They don’t consider any of the alternatives.”

Bradbury said of the Municipal Court judges: “For many years, they have probably imposed the longest average sentences in California for driving-under-the-influence cases.”

Cooper said the court often sentences second-time drunk drivers to 30 days in jail, instead of the prescribed 48 hours. “Most are going to go in for 30 days because the consequence of a third offense is 120 days,” Cooper said.

“There are some things you have to do” to impress drunk drivers with the seriousness of their crimes--and with the seriousness of repeated offenses, he said.

Some lawyers say the judges’ penchant for tough sentences comes from the experience many of them gained while working as prosecutors in the district attorney’s office.

But others say the judges are merely responding to the law-and-order atmosphere the county’s residents expect them to maintain.

Defense attorney George Eskin, who served as Ventura County’s assistant district attorney in the late 1960s, said, “I think if they were as harsh and punitive across the board as they’re made out to be, then the criminal justice system in Ventura County would come to a halt” because defense attorneys would take more cases to trial.

“The court is responsive to what it perceives as the public expectations of what the court system is supposed to be,” Eskin said. “I have a feeling that if I were a judge that my sentences just generally would be consistent with what you see in Ventura.”

Presiding Judge Cooper said Municipal Court judges often are tougher sentencers than their city counterparts. “In Los Angeles, it’s practically impossible to put people in jail on misdemeanors” because the county’s jails are so crowded, he said. “You come here, it’s a different reality.”

And Cooper cited a recent FBI report showing Ventura County to have the lowest crime rate of any heavily populated county in the western United States.

Steepling his hands under his chin, Cooper leaned back and concluded, “Until someone can demonstrate to me there is not a causal relationship between what we do and the low crime rate, I’m prepared to indulge a perception that there is.”