Law and Disorder : O.C. Judges, Attorneys Try to Keep Safe in Violent Courtrooms

Divorce lawyer Robert Lemkin calls it an “escape hatch” at his Santa Ana law office--a hidden exit where he can make a quick departure from crazed clients or spouses who might want to kill him.

He’s had an escape route ever since an incident 20 years ago when the ex-husband of one of his clients stormed into his office with a gun and threatened to kill him.

“I was scared stiff,” recalls Lemkin, whose prominent Orange County clients have included John Wayne’s daughter, Aissa. After a terrifying hour and a half, the man finally broke down and cried, handed Lemkin his revolver and left.

Lemkin, 65, now believes he needs more than just a back door. When he moves to a new office this year, he plans to also install a magnetic lock system to keep would-be assailants out of his office.

“Violence and family law seem to go together,” he concedes.

It is one measure of how fear has become an everyday reality for attorneys, judges and others who deal with distraught litigants in a culture overcome by violence.

Lawyers have been shot to death and stabbed with ice picks, knives and pens. They’ve been slugged, threatened with vulgarities, spit at and even received depraved messages on their children’s telephones.

Although violence is nothing new to those charged with upholding the law, a recent spate of incidents across the nation has turned some courtrooms, law offices and even the Los Angeles County Law Library into bloody battlegrounds.

In recent months, at least five lawyers and court officers have been killed, three judges have been seriously wounded and other private citizens have been shot to death or fatally stabbed during courthouse disputes. The bloodshed has heightened fears and led to renewed calls for tighter courtroom security.

Jurists say such violence can manipulate justice by delaying trials, forcing lawyers and judges off cases and even intimidating jurors and witnesses.

“It shouldn’t surprise us that we are seeing more assaults in which lawyers or judges are the victims. The level of violence is up across the board,” says Gerald Uelmen, dean at Santa Clara University’s School of Law.

“Everybody has their breaking point” when they find themselves immersed in either domestic or criminal cases in the court system, says psychiatrist Neil Hartman, an assistant clinical professor at UCLA. He adds that those with mental or emotional problems can be the most volatile.

On June 1, James Sinclair, who had a history of mental problems, shot his lawyer, Michael Friedman, to death inside the Los Angeles County Law Library. After shooting Friedman, 38, he fatally shot himself in the head. Witnesses reported that before he began firing, Sinclair said, “Attorneys have ruined the world; attorneys have done enough damage to the people.”

As attacks have become more vicious, some judges and lawyers have resorted to arming themselves for protection.

After 17 years of practicing law, Santa Ana criminal defense attorney Greg Jones recently got a gun to protect himself against mentally ill clients--particularly one defendant who threatened him during a murder case.

“It’s frightening. I could envision that person getting out of prison and tracking me down,” he says.

Although Orange County Superior Court Judge Luis Cardenas doesn’t carry a weapon, he says that “quite a few of my colleagues carry guns and go to the range frequently . . . to practice their sharpshooting skills.”

“I’m sure there are some judges in this county and others who have guns in their chambers, but I don’t know of anyone here who takes one on the bench,” says Orange County Presiding Superior Court Judge Donald E. Smallwood.

“My view is that the bailiffs provide adequate security. But I certainly wouldn’t question the judgment of a jurist who believed they needed to carry a gun to court for their personal security.”

One Orange County Superior Court judge in particular, according to Cardenas, “wears a gun every day. He started carrying a weapon after . . . he was specifically threatened. I saw him in the (courthouse) parking lot and he had a 9-millimeter gun tucked in his belt.” The judge refused to comment.

Santa Monica attorney Kenneth Kahn was stabbed in the chest with an ice pick by a client in a courtroom in 1987. Despite the frightening assault, Kahn says he would never pack a gun for protection, nor does he believe it’s proper for jurists to arm themselves in the courtroom.

“I think there are some judges who think they are sitting in the Old West. They think it’s macho to have a gun underneath their black robe,” says Kahn.

Even Van Nuys Judge Jessica Perrin Silvers, whose life was threatened in court by a man she once prosecuted, does not arm herself in court. Silvers, who says she feels “lucky to be alive,” managed in 1989 to escape from a deranged defendant who held a gun to her head and then engaged a court bailiff in a gun battle that killed the defendant and wounded the bailiff.

But whether or not they carry a gun, some judges are quick to come to the defense of attorneys attacked by clients both physically and verbally in their courtrooms.

Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Dino Fulgoni jumped from the bench last year to help subdue a criminal defendant who had slugged his defense attorney during a court hearing. Although the judge was uninjured in the scuffle, a deputy public defender and Fulgoni’s bailiff were both injured.

Superior Court Judge David Carter has no patience with criminal defendants who have spit at his bailiffs, used profanities or hurled racial epithets in his courtroom.

When defendants get out of control, he orders their mouths sealed with duct tape.

“It gets him (the defendant) under control and makes it pretty hard for him to look like a hero when he goes back to the jail,” Carter says. “It is fairly humiliating. But it is not painful.”

Legal experts say family law has the highest risk for violence. Attorneys are often dealing with clients who are experiencing the most traumatic events of their lives, says Los Angeles lawyer Joan Patsy Ostroy.

Although Ostroy has never been physically attacked, she says an angry divorce litigant once left a chilling, threatening message on her children’s telephone line.

Newport Beach family law attorney John Schilling says he’ll never forget the time the wife of one of his client’s became hostile when her lawyer told her to be more cooperative during a deposition in a divorce case.

“She jumped out of her chair, grabbed her attorney by the shirt collar and literally threw him across the office. He ended up in a pile on the floor, and she stormed out,” he recalls.

Many violent attacks are being carried out by mentally disturbed people whose “sense of reality is distorted and who view themselves as being persecuted,” says psychiatrist Hartman.

“Unfortunately, the closing of mental hospitals over the last several decades has put people out on the streets who aren’t being treated. Some of these people are time bombs,” says Hartman. And many of them end up in the court system, either accused of crimes or engaged in civil battles.

“When you add the number of weapons that are out there to the fact that there are all these untreated, deranged people, I think it raises the danger for everybody,” he warns.

Some irate clients, on the other hand, go after their lawyers because they genuinely believe they have been deceived or mistreated by their attorneys or the judicial system. “People have a lot of expectations of what their lawyer is going to do for them. And when those expectations aren’t realized, they will lash out at the lawyer because they think they sold them down the river or betrayed them,” says law school dean Uelmen.

Attorneys concede that some of their colleagues may share some of the responsibility for clients’ violence.

“Sometimes the lawyers just aren’t doing good work,” says Irvine attorney Jack Earley.

“Maybe the attorneys aren’t as compassionate or understanding as they should be,” says Jones. Or they treat their clients with the “attitude that these people are all scumbags.”

Attorney Kevin Gallagher, a member of the ethics committee of the Orange County Bar Assn., believes people have grown so cynical about lawyers that “when the average person reads about an attorney being gunned down in court, there’s more than a bit of Schadenfreude-- of subtle joy at someone else’s misfortune--in their reaction.”

“ ‘Well, it was only an attorney, anyway,’ they joke,” says Gallagher, who handles both civil and criminal cases. Gallagher was attacked in a Santa Ana courtroom last year by a client, on trial for arson. Trained in martial arts, Gallagher blocked the punch and slugged his client in the stomach.

“There are some attorneys who treat their clients like they aren’t even people,” says Laguna Hills attorney Gary Pohlson. “In cases like that, the defendants aren’t going to hesitate to attack them physically or verbally.”

“I do think there are situations where clients get so desperate they will do anything to obstruct the process or delay going to prison, whether or not their attorneys treat them right,” says Pohlson. The criminal defense attorney was himself the intended target of a plot by one of his clients to kill him and another attorney.

Moreover, there’s mounting concern that an increasing number of criminal defendants are committing violent acts to obstruct the system, force their lawyers off their case and delay their criminal cases. The reason for this seemingly irrational behavior is that by delaying their cases, they also delay going to a prison facility, where conditions will be much harsher than a county jail.

Also, repeat offenders often don’t want to go back to prison because they face the threat of retribution from inmates they crossed on their last visit through the system.

“Slug your lawyer . . . make threats against your lawyer and you’ll create a conflict of interest so the lawyer will have to pull out is what’s occurring more frequently,” says Sacramento Municipal Judge Michael Ullman, president of the California Judges Assn. “There’s concern that people who want to obstruct the judicial system can do it.”

Recent violence has prompted many judges and lawyers to renew calls for tighter courtroom security.

“Any courthouse that doesn’t have a metal detector going into the building should be shut down. You have to have security,” says Ullman.

While airport security-type systems are being installed in more and more courthouses, many like the Orange County Superior Court building in Santa Ana and the family law court in Los Angeles are not equipped with metal detectors at the entrances.

The new Betty Lou Lamoreaux Juvenile Justice Center and family law court in Orange is equipped with a security system, and Newport Beach family law attorney John Schilling says it has “allayed the fears of man divorce lawyers in the county.”

But Orange County Superior Court Judge Floyd H. Schenk and others believe there is a critical need for a security system in the Superior Court building in Santa Ana and other branch courts.

“It’s so simple for just anybody to walk in these courtrooms. You don’t need someone to get killed in Texas to see that a security system could save lives and protect people here,” says the judge, referring to the July 1 shooting in a Fort Worth, Tex., courtroom that left two lawyers dead and seriously wounded a prosecutor and two appellate court judges.

“With the number of different gang members that come into the same courtroom and with the likelihood that a number of them are probably armed . . . I think it’s just a matter of time before there’s a shooting at the (Orange County) courthouse,” says attorney Gallagher.

With the violence being committed, “you’ve got to be alert in the courtroom,” advises Gallagher. Not only attentive to the legal proceedings, but also to the personalities your dealing with, he says. Gallagher says he had suspected his client was going to throw a punch at him from the moment the man stepped down from the witness stand.

“I could sense it in his body language. He had a hostile, combative aura about him and he was directing it toward me,” he recalls.

Was he frightened by the attack? “No,” says Gallagher, who has been practicing law for 21 years.

“Most people think of attorneys as pencil-necked geeks. But that’s not true. Some of us lawyers--men and women alike--will not be physically intimidated.”