Associates Call Judge Karlin Open-Minded, Independent : Courts: Friends say she carefully deliberated the case of Soon Ja Du and that she stands firm in wake of criticism.

It was her first jury trial as a Superior Court judge, and Joyce A. Karlin was facing pressure from all sides. She was about to decide the fate of Soon Ja Du, a Korean-born grocer convicted of killing a black girl in a crime that had stirred racial passions throughout Los Angeles.

Black leaders were clamoring for justice. Hundreds of Korean-Americans had pleaded for leniency in letters to the judge. Rather than simply weighing the evidence that was presented at trial, Karlin turned to more experienced judges for advice, sharing her thoughts as she agonized over what to do. When she settled on probation, those who know her say, she expected criticism to follow.

“This is not something that came to her overnight,” said Superior Court Judge J. Stephen Czuleger, a close friend and among those she consulted. “This is something that she worked extremely hard on. They (critics) make such a big thing about how she is a new judge, that she didn’t know what she was getting into. That’s hogwash. She did what she thought was right.”

In the three weeks since, the judicial tables have turned on the new judge. After only three months on the bench, it is Karlin who is on trial.

Los Angeles County Dist. Atty. Ira Reiner has condemned her, vowed to appeal the sentence and ordered his prosecutors to remove Karlin from all cases involving violent crimes. The judge, he declared, “has shown she has no credibility.” Black community activists have denounced her as racist and have threatened to “make life miserable” for her by picketing her Manhattan Beach home. She has been the target of ongoing protests, and is the subject of a petition drive aimed at removing her from the bench.

In the courtroom, she is guarded at all times by four plainclothes sheriff’s deputies. When her bailiff picks up the telephone, it is not unusual for him to hear a death threat on the other end.

In the face of all this, the 40-year-old former federal prosecutor has stood firm. Karlin, the daughter of a movie studio executive and who decided at age 9 that she wanted to be a lawyer, has refused to talk to reporters about the case.

Her friends say that while she worries about her reputation, she remains characteristically upbeat and has no regrets about the Du sentence. They describe her as someone who is not afraid to take chances--someone who takes a stand and does not back down under pressure.

Thus it was no accident that when the presiding judge of the Superior Court did his annual reshuffling of judges just before Thanksgiving, he ignored calls to reassign Karlin to civil or juvenile court and left Karlin exactly where she is--at the criminal courthouse in Compton. She is staying put even though her hope is someday to become a juvenile dependency judge, presiding over cases of youngsters who have been made wards of the court.

“She is standing against the wind,” Czuleger said. “This is something that I know weighs heavily on her, but I do think that she is going to survive. As I have told her once or twice, ‘You’re going to be a better judge after this.’ ”

Said Robert Corbin, a Los Angeles defense lawyer who on several occasions opposed Karlin while she was a prosecutor: “She’s independent. She’s not a person who plays it safe. She’s taken tough cases, and while I’m sure her life would be a lot simpler if she didn’t have this controversy, she did it with her eyes open.”

Affectionately called “Joey” by those who know her well, Karlin is a diminutive woman, so small and slender that as a prosecutor she shunned the podium because it blocked the jury’s view of her. She is extremely youthful-looking; a friend described her as looking “like a woman in her 20s.”

She was born in Caracas, Venezuela; her father was an international studio executive who later became president of Warner Bros. International. She spent her childhood in several countries--Argentina, Italy and Germany--before moving to Chicago with her family, where she attended high school. After graduating from Loyola University Law School in Chicago in 1974, she worked briefly for defense lawyers in Chicago and Los Angeles before joining the U.S. attorney’s office here in 1977.

“She had all the right instincts,” said Chicago defense lawyer David Schippers, for whom Karlin once worked. “She was a tiger when she needed to be in court. Her brains were beyond question. Her integrity was absolute. . . . When she sent me the article that said she had ascended to the bench I thought, ‘Thank God. That’s where she belongs.’ ”

Although she has declined to discuss the Du sentence or the events surrounding it, Karlin’s remarks at the time of sentencing give some clues as to her thinking.

The case turned on a graphic videotape that showed Du and 15-year-old Latasha Harlins struggling over a $1.79 bottle of orange juice. The tape shows Du grabbing Harlins’ sweater and Harlins punching Du in the face. When the girl placed the bottle on the counter and turned to walk away, Du reached for a pistol and shot her in the back of the head.

In rejecting a probation department recommendation for a 16-year sentence, Karlin cited Du’s lack of a criminal record, and said society does not need to be protected from Du because she is not likely to kill again. She also noted that the gun Du used had been altered to give it a “hairpin trigger” and said that Du’s reaction, while inappropriate, was understandable given the terror she and her family experienced during a string of robberies at their South-Central Los Angeles store.

In addition to five years’ probation, a $500 fine and 400 hours of community service, Du was given a 10-year suspended sentence--meaning she can be sent to prison if she violates her probation.

Because Karlin has been a judge for such a short time, it is difficult to track her record on the bench. The majority of the cases that have come before her have involved sentences that have been arranged by plea-bargain.

Although the Du sentence has been harshly criticized both inside and outside the legal community, Karlin gets high marks from most of those who have worked with her as a judge and during her much longer tenure as a prosecutor. She spent 15 years in the U.S. attorney’s office in Los Angeles, investigating and trying some of the most difficult and complex cases the office handled.

Just before being appointed to the bench, she prosecuted the high-profile Darnell Garcia case, in which Garcia and two other Drug Enforcement Administration agents were convicted of running a money-laundering and drug-trafficking scheme. Karlin spent more than four years gathering evidence against Garcia, who recently was sentenced to 80 years in prison. The other two agents, John Jackson and Wayne Countryman, cooperated with the government and were sentenced to 10 years and five years, respectively.

In something of an ironic twist, Jackson--who is scheduled to begin serving his prison term next month--recently visited Karlin in the Compton courthouse to offer his support in the wake of the Du controversy.

“What better accolade than to have somebody that she prosecuted, who is going to jail for 10 years, pay her that tribute?” said Anthony Brookelier, Jackson’s lawyer. “I think it speaks well for Judge Karlin.”

Like most who were interviewed about Karlin, Brookelier described her as open-minded and praised her for looking at each case on its merits. Her colleagues and foes say she was tough when she needed to be, but was not afraid to show compassion or leniency.

“She would always be willing to follow the most appropriate avenue for the case,” said Gerry Biehn, a sheriff’s homicide detective who worked with Karlin when she headed a task force on child pornography. “And if it meant leniency because this was a one-time incident on the part of the offender and there were other extenuating circumstances, then she would lean that way.”

Defense attorney Corbin recalled one case in which his client was convicted of a prostitution charge involving a teen-age girl, but was suspected of committing a murder. It would have been easy, Corbin said, for Karlin to have argued for a strict sentence based on those suspicions.

Instead, he said, “She was able to give the client the benefit of the doubt. . . . Without proof, she did not allow herself to be swayed by what I thought was fairly heavy pressure by the detectives.”

Such praise for Karlin is not universal, however.

Attorney Mark Overland, who represented DEA agent Garcia in the four-month-long money-laundering trial, complains that Karlin was not open-minded and said she tried to introduce evidence at the trial that he thought was irrelevant, including “innuendoes” about his client’s sex life.

“I think she was certainly obsessed with prosecuting Mr. Garcia and I think that she believed a lot of things about him that were not true,” Overland said.

Her critics in the Du case are even harsher.

“I thought she was very insensitive,” said Leon Jenkins, a lawyer for the family of the girl who was killed. “I found that she was meddlesome, that she tried to dictate her way, and I thought that she was not open-minded and most importantly, she wasn’t fair. . . . You’d have to be akin to the Aryan race society to agree with what she did.”

In other cases, she has not been reluctant to send people to prison.

Recently, she ordered a 16-month prison term for a 20-year-old man who had been on probation for a weapons charge and was later found with a gun. “I think he needs a lesson with respect to weapons,” she said.

In another case, she ordered two years in state prison for a man who had an extensive misdemeanor record and was convicted of burglarizing storage containers at a business. The defense had asked for probation; the maximum possible sentence was three years in prison.

Deputy Dist. Atty. Robert Wallace, who prosecutes most of the cases in Karlin’s courtroom, says her sentences have “been fairly comparable to what most judges would have done.”

The exception, Wallace said, is the Du case. He is torn when he thinks about it.

“Is it a bad sentence?” he asks. “Yes, it’s a bad sentence. So you’re left with a quandary: How does someone who is described as an intelligent, caring person with a lot of integrity, how did she end up with this sentence? I don’t know.”