Judge Defends His Release of Child...

Outraged over the San Diego County Probation Department’s decision to keep a convicted child molester from returning to his workplace where the crime occurred, a North County municipal judge released the convict outright last month after only two days in custody.

Judge Michael Burley’s decision, made without the prosecutor in the case present, allowed Ibrahim K. Edam, 24, to be set free after two nights in the county’s work furlough program. By day, he was permitted to work at Peggy Sue’s Diner in Carlsbad, where he had been accused of molesting a 14-year-old waitress in a locked manager’s office.

Burley’s action is consistent with at least two other controversial sentences of his involving molestation cases.

In one case, Burley declined to give jail time to a former California Highway Patrol officer who pleaded guilty to molesting his 12- and 4-year-old daughters.

In the other, he sentenced a former Carlsbad High School coach to two weeks in jail after he pleaded guilty to molesting a 17-year-old student. Despite the victim’s statement that the coach’s sexual overtures turned violent, including his biting her and pulling out her hair, Burley concluded that two weeks was punishment enough.

“You can take any three or four cases and make a judge look bad,” Burley said Friday. “But you have to consider all the cases I have handled in the past 13 years. It is ridiculous to say I am soft on child molesters.”

The release of Israeli-born Edam, who owned and managed Peggy Sue’s Diner, has particularly infuriated prosecutors, probation officers and the victim’s mother, who said she and her daughter are now in therapy.

According to court documents, the molestation occurred this way:

On Dec. 30, 1991, the 14-year-old Carlsbad girl--employed through a work permit--needed assistance to balance her cash and receipts. Edam offered to help.

Locking the door first, Edam massaged her neck, reached inside her bra and fondled her breasts, she said. He put his hand inside her skirt as she tried to move away, she said. Struggling to escape, the teen-ager said Edam pulled her onto his lap, simulated sex and had an orgasm.

“Don’t worry,” she quoted him as saying repeatedly during the incident. “Just look at me and smile. Look me in the face.”

Edam’s sister came to the door and knocked. The teen-ager’s father had come to pick her up. Edam handed her a $10 bill, she said, and told her to “just smile.”

Carlsbad police arrested Edam. He was charged with two felonies: sexual battery by restraint and false imprisonment by violence. Edam was furious, saying he had only touched the girl’s knee while trying to balance himself on the floor in the midst of counting her cash drawer.

“When I came to this country, I was told you are innocent until proven guilty,” Edam told his probation officer, according to court documents. “All of a sudden, I have two felonies. It is according to who they want to believe, not the evidence they have.”

Edam pleaded guilty to a lesser misdemeanor charge of child molestation. The district attorney’s office recommended 280 days in jail. The Probation Department suggested 180 days.

Edam’s probation officer said she found “inconsistencies in (his) statements and believes he has not been candid.” Calling his offense “intolerable,” Deputy Probation Officer Cathy Valderrama said a review of police reports and a taped, police-monitored conversation between Edam and the victim left “little doubt that the defendant did willfully molest the victim,” according to court documents.

Burley sentenced Edam to 180 days in the county’s work furlough program, which allowed him to return to work at the diner. The victim quit her job the day of the incident.

But county probation officials, citing their policy of refusing to accept those convicted of sex crimes into work furlough and prohibiting convicts from working in the same jobs where the offense took place, took Edam into custody July 29, the day after he first reported to work furlough.

Edam’s attorney, Conrad Judd, complained to Burley, who commuted the sentence July 30. Deputy Dist. Atty. Kate Elkin said Burley modified his sentence without her involvement or letting her file papers arguing against Edam’s release.

“I was in another part of the courtroom when the judge modified the sentence to zero days,” Elkin said. “I was strongly opposed to work furlough in the first place. I wanted straight custody time.”

Burley said he did not have to hold a hearing to modify a sentence, and released Edam because he had no other choice. Probation officers had already screened Edam and accepted him into work furlough when they changed their minds and kept him from working.

“I had to commute the sentence,” Burley said. “This was a misdemeanor conviction, and I was not going to keep this man from earning a living and operating his business. If I did that, the county would be under tremendous liability, and the county is already broke.”

But in a letter to Burley, the county’s chief probation officer said Edam was never screened and that the work furlough administrator, not the judge, has the final say in determining who is accepted into the program.

“An attempt is made to accommodate court recommendations whenever possible,” probation chief Gerard Williams wrote Burley on Aug. 4. “In this instance, however, staff concern for public safety was viewed as more important than the defendant’s continued employment and is considered a sound decision from this standpoint.”

Burley responded with a letter to Williams. The judge said in his letter that he was under the impression the Probation Department should have brought Edam back into court and requested that the judge impose a different form of custody.

Legal experts say the Probation Department has no legal responsibility to return a defendant to court and that Burley could have made a number of other modifications to Edam’s sentence short of letting him go.

But Burley said he wasn’t about to put Edam back in jail.

Suggesting in his letter that Edam might have lost his business over a misdemeanor conviction, Burley warned Williams that “you, personally, could be the first person named in a lawsuit, when clearly this court wanted to punish Mr. Edam, but not to destroy his business and only source of income.”

Burley also mentioned that the victim’s mother had tried to contact the judge and the Probation Department.

“Perhaps her insistence caused your personnel to change their minds about Mr. Edam’s eligibility,” the judge wrote.

In an interview, Burley said he was not pleased with the outcome of the Edam case but took no responsibility for the mix-up.

“I don’t like having Mr. Edam serve two days,” he said. “I wanted him to serve 180 days. I blame the Probation Department.”

But Burley also has raised some doubt about the victim’s version of events, referring to her refusal to take a polygraph examination, letters from four of Edam’s female employees backing up their boss and a family counselor who examined Edam and said the “alleged ‘sexual abuse’ amounted to nothing more than a ‘steadying of himself’ as he was in a very cramped position in the office.”

Besides the Edam release, two other molestation cases have caused the judge controversy.

In 1984, Burley gave no jail time to a former CHP officer who pleaded guilty to molesting his daughters. Burley said Friday that he was simply granting the prosecutor’s request to grant the defendant probation because the case didn’t seem strong enough.

But in an interview in the mid-1980s with the Daily Journal Corp. for his judicial profile, Burley said he didn’t give the ex-patrolman jail time because he feared the lawman would be murdered or beaten in jail. He also cited the case as proof of his courage in resisting outside pressures for stronger sentences.

Referring to a telegram from the National Organization for Women that insisted he deal with the accused severely, Burley said, “I did not give the man time in custody. So how’s that for withstanding pressure of a very powerful voting group?”

Burley recalled Friday that he was either misquoted or “covering” for the district attorney’s weak case against the officer.

Defending his decision earlier this year to sentence a former Carlsbad High School coach to two weeks in jail for molesting a 17-year-old student, Burley said the coach was suicidal and didn’t need a longer jail term. The victim’s father called the 47-year-old coach’s sentence “a little light,” and said it could have been lengthier.

“I am not soft on child molesters,” Burley said Friday, citing stiff sentences in dozens of cases. “I have sent a lot of child molesters to jail, including one who was 6-foot-5.”

Just two weeks ago, prosecutors were infuriated with another of Burley’s decisions.

A drunk driver with a previous driving-under-the-influence conviction crashed his truck, killing his brother who was riding in the back.

Because of the previous conviction last year, the driver received automatic jail time. He spent 90 days in jail from the time he was arrested this year until the time of sentencing two weeks ago. Burley said the time served was sufficient, gave him three years’ probation and released him.

On Friday, Burley explained that he made his decision based partially on the family’s plea that no jail time be served, and because the drunk driver should be working rather than becoming a drain on the taxpayers.

The Probation Department recommended at least a year in jail, and prosecutors had urged passionately that the punishment not be lenient just because a family member was involved.

Once again, a sentence by Burley had North County courthouse observers baffled.

“He is a little bit difficult to predict,” said Larry Beyersdorf, supervisor of the public defender’s office in North County. “Our experience is that it is not unusual for him to take a recommendation of six months in County Jail and sentence (someone to) a year or to no time at all. He is just a person who goes with his own view.”

Others are more forthright about the 51-year-old judge, appointed to the bench in 1979 by then-Gov. Edmund Brown Jr. after three years as a deputy district attorney.

“He is horribly inconsistent,” said one prosecutor. “We have seen innocuous defendants get hammered, and we have seen those who should be in jail get probation. He ends up satisfying nobody.”

Burley says his sentences should be considered in total, rather than focusing on a handful that upset prosecutors or defense attorneys.

“Cases that look bad on the surface turn out to be not so bad when you know all the facts,” Burley said.

In the case of Edam, the 14-year-old victim’s mother told a probation officer in June that the restaurant manager should be in jail.

“He locked my daughter in a room,” she said in court documents. “Imprisoned her in a room and kept her there doing perverted things to her. My daughter is terrified of men. The only man she trusts is her father. This has been very hard for her to deal with. She was violated by a person she respected. We have both been in therapy for two months now.”

The teen-ager’s mother said Edam “should feel what it is like to be locked up, like he did to my daughter. She has changed. He took away my daughter’s dignity and pride.”