Unlikely Reagan Appointee Key to Milken’s Fate : Law: The guilty former junk bond king will be sentenced by a woman of keen intellect and surpassing fairness. But she goes her own way.

When former junk bond king Michael Milken is sentenced, his fate will be decided by a soft-spoken newcomer to the federal bench, U.S. District Judge Kimba M. Wood.

As part of the biggest case Wood has handled as a judge, she will preside over highly unusual hearings due to start Thursday--in effect a mini-trial intended to determine if Milken was a habitual law breaker.

Wood, 46, has been a judge only since mid-1988. She arrived on the bench with virtually no experience in criminal law. But so far she has drawn superlative reviews from lawyers who have appeared before her, who say that she has shown exceptional intelligence, grace under pressure and uncommon fairness.

Several of Wood’s friends, such as former law partner Molly Boast, say that in deciding Milken’s sentence she probably won’t be influenced by the extraordinary publicity the case has received. Nor, they say, will Wood be unduly moved by the hundreds of pro- and anti-Milken letters that have flooded into her chambers.

“She’s got so much character of her own that, as hard as this one is, she will do the right thing,” Boast said. “And it’s not because anyone has had any cause to influence her.”

Milken, 44, the former head of the Beverly Hills-based junk bond department of Drexel Burnham Lambert, will be sentenced soon on the six felony counts to which he pleaded guilty in April. The counts include conspiracy and fraud involving stock market manipulation and other illegal securities transactions.

He faces a maximum of 28 years in prison. Because the case was filed before new federal sentencing guidelines went into effect, the judge has wide discretion on how much prison time, if any, she will impose.

Wood hasn’t been around long enough to gain a reputation for tough or lenient sentences. Besides the Milken case, few if any of the cases she has handled are white-collar crime cases. But Milken’s lawyers may find some cause for hope in the sentence she imposed in the case of a New York fish dealer. He was convicted of making interstate telephone calls in which, among other things, he threatened to rip out the eyes of a customer who he contended owed him money.

Defense lawyer Charles Haydon said his client faced up to 20 years in prison for interstate threats by phone. Instead, Wood sent the man away for six months. “She didn’t give this guy the kind of sentence she could have,” Haydon said.

The slight, youthful-looking judge rarely raises her voice in court. Yet lawyers seem to be on their best behavior in front of her. One reason, several said in interviews, is that her decisiveness and obviously sharp intelligence make them loath to get out of line.

“She doesn’t have to yell,” said Debra L. Raskin, a lawyer who appeared before Wood in an age discrimination matter. “I think her secret is being very smart and cutting through the baloney.”

In interviews, several lawyers praised Wood’s decision to hold the upcoming Milken hearings. The government has demanded that she take into account evidence of additional crimes that Milken allegedly committed beyond the six to which he pleaded guilty. Federal law allows a judge to do so, but only if she first holds hearings in which evidence of the crimes is presented.

In a similar case involving a senior executive of the investment firm Goldman, Sachs & Co. who prosecutors claimed was extensively involved in insider trading, another federal judge in the same courthouse recently refused to hold such hearings. That judge said he would only consider the counts that the executive pleaded guilty to because, he said, hearings inevitably would turn into a full-blown trial, defeating the purpose of a guilty plea and wasting court resources.

Wood, however, said she felt that justice wouldn’t be served if she did that in the Milken case. She hit upon a way to hold the hearings but tightly limit their scope. She ordered that they begin almost immediately and gave lawyers a strict time limit on examining their own witnesses. Wood instructed prosecutors not to attempt to prove each additional crime that they contend Milken committed but to focus on just a few transactions as an indication of Milken’s character and propensity for breaking the law.

“She’s very clever,” said Steven Kimelman, a criminal defense lawyer who was in court when Wood ruled on the hearings. “She handled herself as if she had been on the bench for many years.”

He also said she seemed unfazed by the big-name defense lawyers who appeared on behalf of Milken and others in the case.

A considerable number of celebrities, titans of business and California public officials have written in to ask her to go easy on Milken when she finally imposes sentence. Other letter writers, outraged by what they view as Milken’s pivotal role in the financial excesses of the 1980s, have demanded that the judge show no mercy.

But on other issues and in other cases, Wood has shown considerable independence in her decisions, which suggests that she isn’t likely to be moved by the case’s notoriety or the contents of her mailbag.

In an unusual ruling in an immigration case, the judge overturned a decision by the Immigration and Naturalization Service to deny refugee status to a soldier from Ghana who had helped plot a failed coup. The INS claimed that treason couldn’t be grounds for political asylum. But Wood ruled that in some countries “a coup may be the only means by which political change can be effected.”

And in the Milken case, she didn’t hesitate to break years of tradition in the federal court in New York, ordering that the prosecutors’ presentencing memorandum be made public before the sentencing. The judge ruled that the public interest in seeing the document, which contained the allegations of additional insider trading and obstruction of justice, required her to ignore her more senior colleagues’ longstanding custom.

In an interview in her chambers, Wood spoke modestly about gaining expertise in the incredibly diverse areas of law that federal judges are expected to know. In addition to criminal cases, federal judges routinely rule in cases involving complicated commercial disputes, antitrust law, patents, trademarks and copyrights, labor law, anti-discrimination statutes and basic Constitutional questions.

“It would take more than one lifetime to master all the law you encounter in the federal caseload,” she said.

Yet Wood already has considerable experience in handling big, complex cases. Her specialty in private practice was representing big companies in antitrust suits. As a partner at the law firm of LeBoeuf, Lamb, Leiby & MacRae, she handled some of the firm’s most complicated cases, including representing the insurance consortium Lloyd’s of London in a mammoth antitrust case. Boast, a partner at the firm, said Wood drew attention in her field because of an ability to master the details of complex matters swiftly and cut through to the important issues. She also was successful at negotiating settlements.

The judge said she had been drawn to antitrust work because “more than the other options available in my law firm, it involved an interplay of socioeconomic factors and the law.”

Wood is the daughter of an Army officer who spent much of his career writing speeches for generals. She spent long stretches of her childhood in Europe, especially France. At age 17 she spoke French more fluently than English, she recalls. Wood’s unusual first name was chosen by her mother, who had plenty of time to search for a name while Wood’s father was away fighting in World War II. She says her mother found it in an atlas. Kimba is a small town near the Spencer Gulf in South Australia.

Wood obtained degrees from Connecticut College, the London School of Economics and, in 1969, Harvard Law School.

She was recommended for a judgeship in 1988 by New York’s Republican senator, Alphonse D’Amato, and nominated by President Reagan. Yet she has long been a registered Democrat. In retrospect, that fact, and certain aspects of her legal career, make her seem an unlikely choice for a judgeship by a dogmatically conservative administration.

In the early 1970s, Wood worked for the federal Office of Economic Opportunity, filing class-action lawsuits on behalf of poor people. Such poverty lawsuits later were to become anathema to the Reagan Administration. And some time before her nomination, she had done pro bono work for the American Civil Liberties Union, representing a woman professor in a sex discrimination lawsuit.

Nevertheless, people involved in the process say, she was appointed by Reagan because the Senate Judiciary Committee strongly pressured the Administration to appoint more women. Wood’s record of defending big companies against antitrust suits evidently made her an acceptable candidate to a pro-business Administration. And she had the support of a number of sitting judges whom she had impressed when she gave seminars with them on antitrust law.

Wood is married to Michael Kramer, special correspondent for Time magazine. They live in Manhattan and own a vacation home in Massachusetts. Wood plays tennis, likes to ski and grow vegetables, and formerly, when she had more leisure time, made oil paintings.

Thomas D. White, a criminal defense lawyer, says he recently lost a case involving a narcotics defendant before Wood. But he said that he felt that, more than some other judges, she had been willing to listen to issues raised by defense attorneys.

“I thought she was eminently fair and trying very hard to do the right thing,” White said. “Often, when we have a judge who’s trying to do the right thing, it’s a person who can’t make a decision. But that’s not her. She can do it.”