Politics and the Judiciary Coexist, but Often Uneasily : Judges: Fund raising and accountability to the electorate create tension. Karlin’s is the most recent case.

There was uncharacteristic passion in the air as the usually sedate group of lawyers got down to business. Richard P. Byrne, the former presiding judge of the Los Angeles Superior Court, had come to deliver an urgent plea.

“Do you want judges to understand that if they make some kind of decision that is unpopular that the Bar Assn. will not support them?” Byrne asked fervently. “Do you want them to be looking over their shoulder every time they’ve got to sentence? Do you want them to bend with the wind?”

Byrne’s appeal failed. After three hours of agonizing debate, the trustees of the Los Angeles County Bar Assn. voted 13 to 12 not to throw their support behind Superior Court Judge Joyce A. Karlin, the target of a recall campaign since she sentenced a Korean-born grocer to probation for killing a black girl.

As the struggle at last month’s Bar meeting reveals, the recall effort--coupled with the hotly contested election that Karlin faces in June--has generated deep divisions and soul-searching in the Los Angeles legal community. Karlin’s predicament also has shed light on the delicate, and sometimes not so delicate, way that politics and the judiciary mix.

The case has raised anew questions about the way the state selects and retains its judges. Would California be better off with a system more like that of the federal courts, where judges receive lifetime appointments and are removed only by impeachment? Does the specter of judicial elections--in which judges frequently solicit financial contributions from lawyers who may appear before them--pose a conflict of interest? Is the Karlin recall campaign a threat to the independence of the judiciary, as Byrne suggests? Or is it simply the democratic process at work?

The debate also has exposed ethnic tensions of the same sort that have divided the community at large in the case of grocer Soon Ja Du. The Bar vote revealed that Anglo lawyers were more likely to support Karlin, advocating judicial independence. But prominent black and Latino attorneys, representing various minority bar associations, argued that citizens ought to be able to oust a judge whose decisions run counter to the will of the public.

“Who are we, as some intellectual legal ivory tower group, to tell the community that this is an inappropriate time to use the recall effort?” asked Marcia Gonzales-Kimbrough, a county Bar trustee who is also past president of the Mexican-American Bar Assn. “ . . . It seems to me that in this instance, because it has been a very volatile, emotional minority issue, now all of a sudden there is a focus on the independence of the judiciary.”

Said Thomasina Reed, a well-known black attorney in Inglewood who is one of Karlin’s three challengers: “If there are citizens who for any reason want to recall a judge, they have a right to do that. Quite frankly, I’m running for the seat because I think that the voters should have an opportunity to choose between two or more people and decide who they want to sit on the bench.”

But others, especially judges, say the challenge to Karlin will have a chilling effect on all jurists who make decisions that may be politically unpopular.

“This case demonstrates that judges are put in positions where, if they do what they think is honest, they can be criticized for that and ultimately face political consequences . . . ,” says Sacramento Municipal Court Judge Michael Ullman, president of the California Judges Assn. “The message is quite clear: Look over your shoulder because you are being watched.”

Judges and lawyers across the state are keenly aware that Karlin--who has had little time to establish a track record during her six months on the bench--may now lose her Superior Court seat because of public outrage over one ruling. Lofty arguments about independence of the judiciary aside, political analysts say the Karlin race is likely to turn on whether the public agrees, or disagrees, with her ruling in the Du case.

Yet in the legal community, the debate does not focus on whether Karlin was right or wrong.

“It wasn’t a referendum on Judge Karlin,” said Richard Macias, a Bar Assn. trustee who voted to keep the group neutral on the recall question. “It was really a referendum on whether people have the right to engage in their constitutionally protected right (to recall a judge). I said during the meeting that I think the federal system is better, but that’s not the law in California.”

The collision of politics and the judiciary in California is hardly new. In 1986, state Supreme Court Chief Justice Rose Elizabeth Bird and Associate Justices Joseph R. Grodin and Cruz Reynoso were voted out of office after opponents waged a multimillion-dollar campaign that focused on their record of overturning death sentences. Bird’s “box score,” as it came to be known, of 61 reversal votes in 61 death penalty cases was a constant refrain of the campaign against her.

During Edmund G. (Jerry) Brown’s tenure as governor, many of his appointees were challenged on the grounds that they were too liberal. “It was guilt by association,” said Roger Warren, a Sacramento judge who survived such a challenge in 1981. “The implication was that Jerry Brown-appointed judges were crazy or moonbeams.”

And in 1970, then-Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge Alfred Gitelson was defeated for election after a campaign that focused almost entirely on his controversial order to desegregate the Los Angeles school system. Although it happened more than 20 years ago, the Gitelson election remains fresh in the minds of today’s judges. As they talk about Karlin, the Gitelson name frequently comes up.

“It was a very unfair case,” said a Los Angeles Municipal Court judge who did not want to be named. “The judge made an honest call, and he got hung for it.”

In a state where judges are elected, it is naive to expect the courtrooms to be completely devoid of politics, said Larry Berg, an expert on judicial elections who is director of USC’s Jesse Unruh Institute of Politics. Berg notes that the California system of choosing judges is inherently political because judges are appointed by the governor, who often selects members of his own political party.

California is one of 39 states that employ judicial elections in some form. After they are appointed, judges must periodically face the voters in nonpartisan elections, although the rules are different for state judges and county judges.

State judges--who sit on appeal courts or the California Supreme Court--face “retention elections.” There are no challengers in such elections; voters decide simply whether to keep these judges in office. County judges--those who serve on Municipal and Superior courts--face contested elections. Over the years, there have been various attempts to abolish judicial elections, but all have failed.

The law also provides that voters can recall a judge for any reason. In Karlin’s case, the recall backers must collect 300,000 signatures by July to force a recall election. But the campaign will be moot if Karlin loses in the June 2 primary.

By all accounts, judicial races are a quirky business, especially in the case of county judges. There may be no rhyme or reason for who gets challenged and why. The public, meanwhile, often has no idea these elections are taking place. That is because the vast majority of county judges run unopposed, and the names of unopposed judges do not appear on the ballot.

This year, for instance, there are 82 Superior Court judges running for election in Los Angeles County. Only one--Karlin--is in a contested race.

Judicial elections are usually low-budget races. Although candidates for district attorney in Los Angeles County are likely to spend as much as $1 million, Karlin’s campaign budget to reach the same number of voters will be closer to $125,000. Karlin already has spent $64,000 on a statement to be included with the sample ballot the county sends to voters.

Karlin is the only candidate in her race to issue the ballot statement. Her campaign manager, Bob Stiens, said that although the statements are expensive, “you’re reaching every voter in the county, spending about 2 cents apiece.”

Meanwhile, one of Karlin’s opponents, Deputy State Atty. Gen. Bob Henry, filed suit on Monday seeking to compel the county to print his statement at no charge. Similar suits have been unsuccessful.

Although incumbent judges rarely lose elections, they do have some disadvantages. In Karlin’s case, for example, the code of judicial ethics prevents her from explaining her decision in the Du case, while her opponents can hammer away at the ruling. “It’s like putting one arm behind her back,” complains political consultant Joe Cerrell, who represents Karlin.

Most judges find elections a distasteful chore. There are inherent contradictions, they say, in maintaining one’s dignity as a jurist while at the same time running a political campaign. “I’m not a politician,” Karlin said in a recent interview. Said Berg, the USC professor: “Most judges aren’t political enough to know how to cross the street without getting hit by a car.”

From a judge’s perspective, the most troublesome aspect of judicial campaigning is asking lawyers for financial contributions. Yet as Cerrell notes, lawyers are often the only people interested enough in judicial races to donate.

Consider the experience of Alban Niles, the assistant presiding judge of the Los Angeles Municipal Court. Six years ago, Niles waged an unsuccessful campaign for an open Superior Court seat.

At a recent symposium on politics and the judiciary, Niles said he felt so uneasy about asking lawyers for money that he decided not to run for a Superior Court seat again. “You really have to work overtime to protect your integrity,” he said.

Roger Warren, presiding judge of the Sacramento Superior Court, recounted a similar experience. In 1981, Warren survived an election challenge that he described as “probably the most unpleasant experience of my life.”

At the time, Gov. Jerry Brown had--in last-minute appointments designed to fill empty seats right before a judicial election--elevated Warren and two other Municipal Court judges to the Superior Court. But another Municipal Court judge, who had not been promoted, decided to run for the job. He picked Warren as his opponent.

The campaign was personal, with challenger John Stroud complaining that Warren--who sported long hair, had previously worked as a Legal Aid lawyer and who had a weekend business running llama-packing trips into the Sierra--lived “a hippie lifestyle.” Stroud now says he regrets those remarks; he attributes them to his own lack of political sophistication and says he was more angry with the former governor than with Warren.

Warren spent $75,000 to keep his seat; a third of the money was his own. After the race was over, his friends suggested he hold additional fund-raisers to retire his debt.

“I said, ‘Forget it, I don’t want to ever see another fund-raiser,’ ” Warren recalled. “Here are all these lawyers appearing before you all day long and you’re out there at night asking them to contribute money to your campaign. It’s nothing that a judge should be proud of.”

Nonetheless, Warren said, he is not convinced that there is a better system than California’s. While he fears that Karlin’s experience may put pressure on judges to make rulings they know will be popular, he worries that without judicial elections, there would be no accountability.

“The whole problem,” he said, “is we want both. We don’t want judges who are totally immune and divorced from real life, and on the other hand we want them to be sufficiently independent so that they can make decisions based on principle. That’s what judicial elections are all about, and that’s what this thing in L. A. is raising--the tension between those two goals.”

Los Angeles Judicial Races

Here are the candidates for the county’s contested judicial races. Occupational descriptions were provided by the candidates. SUPERIOR COURTS Office No. 17: Bob Henry, deputy attorney general Joyce Ann Karlin* Donald Barnett, attorney at law Thomasina Reed, attorney/board member MUNICIPAL COURTS Los Angeles Judicial District Office No. 3: Gerald T. Richardson, commissioner, Los Angeles Municipal Court John Ladner, Municipal Court commissioner Stephanie Sautner, criminal prosecutor Southeast Judicial District: Frank Gafkowski Jr.* Salvador Alva, attorney at law Whittier Judicial District: James F. Rusch, attorney Yvonne T. Sanchez, commissioner of the Whittier Municipal Court Rio Hondo Judicial District Office No. 1: Richard Van Dusen* Bill Jacobson, attorney at law Citrus Judicial District Office No. 2: Abraham Aponte Khan* Patrick Murphy, professor at law, attorney * Incumbent SOURCE: Los Angeles registrar-recorder

Compiled by Michael Meyers