If the Shoe Fits . . . : Courts: Drug charges against a Castaic prisoner are dropped when a judge rules the key evidence is no match for the defendant’s foot.

To public defender Robin Bernstein-Lev, the case smelled. Like a stinky old pair of sneakers.

She knew that she would need what she called a “Cinderella defense” for her client, 19-year-old Lazaro Padron, who stood in Newhall Municipal Court two days ago for a preliminary hearing, charged with illegal possession of drugs.

The arrest report, she noticed, said Padron had stashed small amounts of marijuana in one of his “size 8” sneakers that lay next to his prison bunk at the Peter J. Pitchess Honor Rancho in Castaic. Padron was serving a sentence for five counts of felony robbery.

“He told me he wore size 9 1/2,” Bernstein-Lev said Tuesday after persuading the judge to drop the charges.

But pulling off her Great Sneaker Defense successfully, it turned out, would require the courtroom equivalent of using a shoehorn and common sense.

After all, she had to convince the presiding judge, Alan Rosenfield, that Padron’s feet were too big to wear size 8 shoes.

“I wasn’t quite sure it was going to work, so I just shot from the hip,” said Bernstein-Lev, 31, a public defender for five years and a graduate of Loyola Law School.

A Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputy testified that he had found the marijuana in tiny bags of plastic, tucked beneath the insole of a size 8 sneaker, and that Padron wore size 8 shower shoes during the search.

In the courtroom, Padron wore white Nike tennis shoes--size 9 1/2--comfortably, a point his attorney pressed by having him remove one shoe so that the size could be authenticated.

But when Rosenfield denied the attorney’s request for the deputy to read aloud the size of the tennis shoes Padron wore to the courtroom, she prodded the judge to see for himself.

“He said he’d never worked as a shoe salesman,” Bernstein-Lev said. “But I told him it didn’t require going to ‘shoe college’ to find out if shoes fit properly.”

To bursts of laughter in the courtroom, the judge good-naturedly took the case in stride. He stepped down from the bench and, with his thumbs and fingertips, probed the fit of Padron’s size 9 1/2 tennis shoes.

Feeling was believing. Size 9 1/2 was indeed the right fit.

The judge abruptly threw the case out--as if it were a stinky old pair of sneakers.