Retired Judges Lured Back to Bench : Courts: State resolves a growing caseload by offering former jurists nearly $400 a day. Critics say reform is needed because many are taking their pensions early, then earning the added income.

Lured by higher pay and a chance to rejoin the fray, many retired judges are returning to the bench to help ease the strain on heavily burdened California courts.

“I’m really too young to retire--and besides that, my wife wouldn’t want me around the house,” said Justice Robert R. Devich, 66, who is serving as a temporary judge in Los Angeles Superior Court after retiring from the state Court of Appeal last summer. “I enjoy being a judge--I really do. I’m learning something new every day.”

Devich, a onetime police officer and prosecutor who spent 20 years on the bench, is among 29 retired jurists hearing cases in the Los Angeles court. “Without them we’d be dead,” said Presiding Judge Ricardo A. Torres. “They keep us alive and going.”

For years, judicial officials had struggled to entice the growing legions of retired jurists to take assignments as temporary judges. But the pay--$40 a day, in addition to their pensions--attracted relatively few takers.

Last year, the Legislature raised the pay to $397 a day--and the response was substantial. The number of retirees ready to serve has jumped to more than 250, compared to about 100 the year before, according to the state Judicial Council.

Authorities say the retirees are playing a key role in maintaining court productivity. No judgeships have been created since 1987 and there are 62 vacancies on the 1,554-member state judiciary.

Meanwhile, the workload grows: 1,003,038 cases were filed last year in the state’s Superior Courts, compared to 910,314 five years ago. Although the number of criminal trials held in Superior Court has leveled off and in some areas has dropped, the increasing number of cases filed puts a demand on courts for arraignments, pretrial hearings and sentencings.

Critics are deploring the cost of this expanding judicial reserve corps. They note that under the state’s judicial retirement system, judges can retire at age 60 after 20 years service at 75% of their salary--for a Superior Court judge, about $75,000 a year. Add to that nearly $400 a day from temporary assignments and an energetic retired judge, working 40 five-day weeks, could be making double the retirement pay, critics say.

“The judges’ retirement system is just about the richest thing that ever came down the pike,” said Rebecca Taylor, senior vice president of the California Taxpayers Assn. in Sacramento. “How can you say you have to have that kind of pay to get retired judges to serve?”

For the last year, the state appropriated $4.2 million for the pay of retired judges. Judicial authorities asked for $4.8 million for the coming year but because of fiscal constraints, $3.1 million has been budgeted.

Officials defend the plan as being less costly than creating regular judgeships and providing new judges with salaries and benefits. Further, they say, retired judges provide the skills and experience that new judges cannot offer.

Authorities agree that the increase in pay has played a pivotal part in luring retirees back. But they say there is more to it than that: Retired judges sense a duty to help ease the courts’ burgeoning caseloads--and they enjoy coming back to resume work they had done for years.

“They don’t like being separated from the system,” said Constance Dove, executive director of the California Judges Assn. “They still want to be judges.”

Many have elected to take temporary assignments rather than enter the lucrative field of private judging--the so-called “rent-a-judge” system in which retired jurists are hired by private parties to decide cases outside the regular court process. Private judges may earn well over $100,000 a year in addition to their pensions.

“(Retired judges) have the best of three worlds,” said Orange County Presiding Superior Court Judge Donald E. Smallwood. “They are getting paid, even if it’s not as much as a private judge. They are judging real cases with real juries. There is a sense of coming home . . . and a sense of fulfilling a public duty to help out the court system.”

Even though retired judges are flocking back, there is growing concern in Sacramento that the judicial pension system offers too much incentive to retire in the first place.

A bill sponsored by Sen. Dan McCorquodale (D-San Jose) that would reform the system and probably reduce the pace of retirements was passed by the Legislature this year but vetoed last week by Gov. Pete Wilson after objections by state Chief Justice Malcolm M. Lucas and the judges’ association.

McCorquodale’s legislation would have trimmed retirement benefits for new judges beginning in January. Instead of collecting 75% of their salary after 20 years service at age 60, the new jurists would have been required to serve 25 years and stay to age 65 to receive such benefits. The new plan also would have ended the practice of increasing a retiree’s pension whenever the salary of a comparable sitting judge goes up.

The bill’s backers said reform was urgently needed. This year the state spent $46 million from the general fund to help pay for pensions.

In a Sept. 29 letter to Wilson, Lucas urged a veto of McCorquodale’s bill, saying it would substantially impair the state’s ability to attract intelligent, ethical and competent candidates for the judiciary.

Wilson rejected the McCorquodale bill and another measure that would have required judges to contribute 11% of their salaries to the pension fund, instead of 8%.

In his veto message of McCorquodale’s measure, Wilson acknowledged concern with the state of the system, but said the bill would reduce the ability to attract superior talent to the judiciary.