Disorder in Court : Violence against attorneys and judges is increasing. Tighter security is one solution. Another is knowing self-defense.

Divorce lawyer Robert Lemkin calls it an “escape hatch” at his Santa Ana law office--a hidden exit from which 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,” says Lemkin, whose prominent 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 later 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 says.

Violence is nothing new to those charged with upholding the law. Lawyers have been shot and stabbed with ice picks, knives and pens. They’ve been slugged, threatened with vulgarities and spat at; they’ve even received depraved messages on their children’s telephones.

But 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 individuals have been fatally shot or stabbed during courthouse disputes. The bloodshed has heightened fears and led to renewed calls for tighter courtroom security.

“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. Those with mental or emotional problems can be the most volatile, he adds.

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, Sinclair 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, “Quite a few of my colleagues carry guns and go to the range frequently . . . to practice their sharpshooting skills.”

Santa Monica attorney Kenneth Kahn was stabbed in the chest with an ice pick by a client in a courtroom in 1987. Despite the assault, Kahn says he would never carry 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, who 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 to escape in 1989 from a deranged defendant who held a gun to her head and engaged a court bailiff in a gun battle that left the defendant dead and the bailiff wounded.

But whether they carry guns or not, some judges are quick to come to the defense of attorneys attacked by clients--physically or 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 hearing. Although the judge was uninjured, a deputy public defender and Fulgoni’s bailiff were hurt.

Superior Court Judge David Carter has no patience with criminal defendants who have spat 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 a client 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.

Some 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.

Some irate clients, on the other hand, go after their lawyers because they genuinely believe that 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 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.

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 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.

“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 Laguna Hills attorney Gary Pohlson. The criminal defense attorney was 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 cases and delay their criminal cases. By delaying their cases, they also delay going to prison, where conditions will be much harsher than a county jail.

“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.

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.

Although airport security-type systems are being installed in 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 family law attorney Schilling says it has “allayed the fears of many divorce lawyers in the county.”

The violence means “you’ve got to be alert in the courtroom,” advises Gallagher. Not only attentive to the legal proceedings, but also to the personalities you’re 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 says.

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.”