Judge Again Refuses to Jail Gates on Contempt Charges

A Superior Court judge Monday refused for the second time to send Sheriff Brad Gates to jail for contempt of court, a move that at least temporarily lifts the legal cloud over the sheriff’s head.

“I’m happy,” Gates said. “I’m glad that this is over with. We ought to quit spending taxpayer money on this type of thing.”

Board of Supervisors Chairman Gaddi H. Vasquez agreed, saying he hoped that Monday’s action “brings this matter to a conclusion.”

In April, Central Municipal Court Presiding Judge Richard W. Stanford Jr. convicted Gates of 17 counts of contempt and sentenced him to 30 days in jail, as well as fining him $17,000. The convictions were the result of Gates and his deputies having unlawfully released prisoners early in order to relieve overcrowding in the county jail system, which typically holds about 4,400 prisoners in facilities designed for 3,203.

But Gates is also under a federal court order that caps the inmate population of the Central Men’s Jail, and he has argued that the early releases are the only way that he can prevent the entire jail system from becoming overcrowded.

Superior Court Judge Eileen C. Moore, who presided over Monday’s hearing, overturned Stanford’s conviction in September after finding that Gates had not willfully violated the law, but rather had done his best to deal with a difficult situation. Her decision Monday not to reconsider the matter allows her previous ruling to stand.

Stanford said that he and the other Municipal Court judges would meet to decide whether to appeal Moore’s ruling.

“We’ll get a copy of the transcript of the proceedings and decide whether to process an appeal,” he said. “I plan to have all of the judges sit down and discuss this case. We’re not going to react in a knee-jerk way.”

County officials urged Stanford and his colleagues to drop the matter, noting that taxpayers are footing the bill for the case and that the legal bills are mounting.

County government has been billed for $35,880 so far in the contempt-of-court proceedings against Gates. The county already has paid $26,868, and the Board of Supervisors is expected to grudgingly approve the rest this month. Neither figure includes county staff time that has been devoted to defending the sheriff.

During Monday’s hearing, Moore said from the bench that she did not believe there were sufficient grounds to justify a reconsideration of her earlier decision or a new trial.

In particular, Philip Kohn, the lawyer for the Municipal Court judges, maintained that Gates’ lawyers had misrepresented aspects of the case when they argued before Moore. According to Kohn, the county counsel’s office denied the existence of a computer system used to monitor the inmate population.

That argument was potentially important because a computer system would have allowed the sheriff to receive up-to-the-minute information about overcrowding and might have prevented the releases of at least five of the 17 prisoners.

Without commenting on whether the county counsel misrepresented that issue, Moore denied that she had been swayed by that portion of the argument.

Kohn and the Municipal Court judges, she said, were implying “that this court was somehow waylaid by the argument about the existence of a computer system. . . . That was in no way the basis for the ruling.”