Lawyers for County Appeal Conviction in Gates Case : Legal action: The judge relied on out-of-date evidence and overstepped his authority in ruling on the early-release charges, the lawyers argue.

A Municipal judge who sentenced Sheriff Brad Gates to jail for contempt of court relied on out-of-date evidence and overstepped his authority, attorneys for Orange County said in an appeal filed Friday.

The appeal, formally known as a writ, was filed in Orange County Superior Court. It seeks to have Gates’ conviction and sentence thrown out. Gates was sentenced in June to 30 days in jail and fined $17,000 by Municipal Judge Richard W. Stanford, who found the sheriff guilty of 17 counts of contempt for having prematurely released jail inmates in violation of state law.

Stanford’s action was, according to the appeal, “an abuse of discretion on the court’s part, and its judgment in that inappropriate proceeding was in excess of its jurisdiction.”

The contempt charges arose from 17 cases in which Gates released inmates from the jails prematurely in order to relieve overcrowding. The county’s five jails, which were built to hold 3,203 inmates, usually hold about 4,400, and the early-release programs had been implemented to prevent the jail population from being even larger.

“The release program . . . necessarily involved judgment and trade-offs,” the appeal states. “The sheriff is not running a three-bed jail in ‘Mayberry’; indeed, he is fixed by the federal Constitution and state statutes with the discretion and responsibility for operating five facilities, housing approximately 4,400 inmates.”

The Sheriff’s Department has for more than a decade been under a federal court order requiring it to hold down crowding at the Central Men’s Jail in Santa Ana. Although the order does not apply to the branch jails, Gates has been reluctant to put more inmates into those facilities for fear that such a move would provoke the federal court into extending its order to include all five jails.

Attorneys for the American Civil Liberties Union, who argue that the populations in those facilities already make them badly overcrowded, requested a population limit on each of the five jails earlier this year. A federal judge refused that request, but inmate advocates have promised to go to court if the county begins packing more people into those jails.

“A prudent manager of a jail system, faced with a federal court population cap on one component of that system, would act irresponsibly if he were to ignore the ramifications of that cap on the other components of the system,” the appeal states. “Overcrowded conditions which violate the United States Constitution in one facility do not become constitutional conditions in another facility simply because there is no federal court-ordered cap.”

Gates, who is recovering from hernia surgery, was unavailable for comment Friday, but members of the Board of Supervisors said they had authorized the appeal and that they believe the county and sheriff will prevail.

“It’s my position that the sheriff, as a prudent manager, has been doing the correct thing,” said Supervisor Roger R. Stanton.

Stanton added that he was surprised by the sentence Stanford imposed.

“It seems common sense to me that a Municipal Court judge would not want to inject himself in this process,” Stanton said. “He’s just going to invite a lawsuit by the ACLU.”

Stanford also could not be reached for comment, although he has said previously that his ruling and his sentence are justified because the sheriff released inmates who had been arrested on suspicion of crimes that should have prevented their being set free early. The sheriff is allowed to release some inmates early to ease crowded conditions, but those suspected of crimes of violence or certain other offenses cannot be cited and released before they are arraigned.

In their appeal, however, the county attorneys argue that the illegal releases had stopped well before the contempt action was brought against Gates. None of the counts on which Gates was convicted were for releases that had been made within the past eight months, and some had been made more than two years ago, according to the appeal.

“The sheriff submits that any conduct of contempt on his part had been purged,” the attorneys state in their appeal. Stanford, they added, “used 18 stale events as justification” for the contempt ruling.

County officials would not speculate Friday as to how quickly they expect to receive a hearing in their appeal. Stanford has given the county until Nov. 1 to present a plan for halting the early releases; should the county be unable to produce such a plan by that date, Stanford has said he will order Gates to jail.

And while the county is pressing its appeal, Stanton said it will continue to move ahead on other fronts so that it will have other choices should the appeal fail. One option being considered is that the county try to finish an expansion of the Theo Lacy Branch Jail early, which would open up more beds for inmates by the Nov. 1 deadline.

“We’re not putting all our eggs in one basket,” Stanton said. “We’ve asked the staff to make sure that we have other eggs and other baskets to put them in.”