After 36-Year Career, Defense Finally Rests : Courts: Wilbur Littlefield retires as head of the nation’s largest public defender’s office. He did not idealize his clients but believed passionately in equal justice for all.

There was Wilbur Littlefield, all those years ago, sick of being a private attorney and looking to sign on with the Los Angeles County counsel, when one question changed his fate.

The boss there asked: What do you think about drinking?

“I don’t think I’d ever trust anybody who wouldn’t take a drink now and then,” the gray-haired Littlefield, 71, recalls his answer. “The response was: ‘Well, I don’t drink.’ The interview lasted another 30 seconds.”

And so Littlefield was out the door of the county counsel--who handles civil matters--and in the door of the much grittier Los Angeles County public defender’s office.

The rest, as they say, is history.

Today, Littlefield retires after 36 years there--the last 17 heading the nation’s oldest public defender’s office.

The quirky circumstances of his arrival explain, in part, how Los Angeles County wound up with such an unlikely defender of the office that defends those the public often considers the least defensible--people often accused of rapes, murder and other violent crimes.

The public defender’s office, which represents criminal defendants unable to afford an attorney, tends to attract an idealistic breed of lawyer, fighting for the powerless no matter who they are. But Littlefield never fit that mold.

The folksy man, who talks like the guy next door, never idealized his clients and says flatly: “Some defendants smell bad.”

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And while his lawyers are now defending 86 clients facing a possible death penalty, Littlefield believes in that punishment, explaining: “I feel almost universally the people that get the death penalty have earned it.”

But Littlefield did believe passionately in the ideal of equal justice and earned the respect of his troops by spending most of his tenure fighting to give them the tools to provide it.

Although often described as conciliatory and self-effacing--”cooperative, never a problem,” as Supervisor Deane Dana put it--Littlefield braved the board’s conservative majority during the 1980s to save his department from crippling budget cuts.

When Littlefield did not have the lawyers or resources to handle all the indigent cases, he was among the first public defenders in the nation to make his office “unavailable” to take on new cases--forcing the county to pay private attorneys, who are more expensive, to pick up the slack.

“That kept our quality up and we still remained cost-effective,” Littlefield said.

“He’s a canny politician,” said Charles Lindner, a private defense attorney.

The office has exploded in size since Littlefield arrived in 1957--the 26th lawyer in what was then a small male fraternity. Now it has 558 lawyers, 40% of them women, handling about 500,000 cases a year.

The caseload mounted after 1960s legislation and court rulings mandated that attorneys be provided for the poor in all criminal cases. “He’s been the link between the past and the present, as the pendulum swung to give the defense more remedies and back to a more punitive approach,” said Assistant Public Defender Michael Judge.

Littlefield’s public defenders represent the accused in more than half the criminal cases filed in the county.

Although Littlefield stayed long enough to become the county’s oldest department head, he insisted: “This is not a fun job.”

He announced that he was stepping down after the county’s latest round of budget cutting, which at first threatened to leave his department $12 million short. In the end, his office lost $1.2 million, a small amount compared to other county agencies, but the office’s first cut in 12 years. “The budget was such a pain in the neck,” Littlefield said in his typically simple style.

So he decided, “I’ve been around long enough.”

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Despite his department’s size, and even though Littlefield’s $132,000 annual salary is more than $10,000 higher than the district attorney’s, he is not well known to the public. He never once called a news conference, he said, because he had no reason.

Littlefield was an unlikely bureaucrat, sometimes described by longtime colleagues as a colorful character out of “The Front Page,” the film depicting the exploits of talented but brash 1920s journalists. “He worked hard and he played hard,” said retired Judge Jack Goertzen, an old courtroom foe who became a friend.

Others describe him as a Hemingwayesque character, who in younger years looked like Clark Gable and loved to go fishing or to prizefights with his cronies.

He still keeps a “Smokers Welcome” sign in his Van Nuys office, along with dozens of pipes--one of many ways in which refuses to be politically correct.

Although 28% of his lawyers are minorities, he says without apology of his upper echelon management: “It’s mostly white males.”

He says of promoting women: “I can’t see why somebody should be promoted just because they go to a different bathroom.”

Raised in Westwood, Littlefield was at UCLA when he was called for World War II duty. He ended up in an elite Army unit whose exploits were a 1940s version of the Green Berets. He decided to become a lawyer, he said, after seeing scores of Filipinos executed by their countrymen as suspected Japanese agents--without trials. “I thought that was wrong,” he said.

After the war, he worked his way through Hastings College of the Law as a stevedore on the San Francisco docks.

Littlefield is still remembered for his abilities as a trial lawyer before he became a boss. No one he defended in a death penalty case wound up in the gas chamber.

Hiroshi Fujisaki, now a Los Angeles County Superior Court judge, said that during the 1960s, he and other young public defenders would hang around Littlefield “to get tips. And whenever we could, we’d go into court and watch him. Jurors, like everybody else, were very trusting of him.”

Once he was boss, his staff lawyers came to trust him, too. They say Littlefield knows their names, listens to grievances and would call them as they moved up the civil service ranks, signifying increases in pay and passage to more complicated cases. “He never lost touch with the lawyers in the trenches,” said Ron White, a deputy public defender who works in Bellflower.

Although many lawyers say Littlefield is sensitive to their needs, some criticize his top lieutenants as being too oriented toward administrative concerns or for having punitive management styles. “You’re walking on eggs here,” said one of several who did not want their names associated with any criticism, for fear of retribution.

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But Assistant Public Defender David Meyer, a top staffer who will be acting public defender until a successor is chosen, noted that Littlefield handpicked his managers, and that they carried out his policies.

“He’s loved,” Meyer said. “I don’t know that I’m loved. Very often I’m the messenger who gives people the bad news.”

Some staffers worry that the office will not be able to maintain its nationwide reputation for high-quality defense work, given dwindling public resources. And they are concerned that their next leader, who will serve at the pleasure of the supervisors without the civil service protection Littlefield enjoyed, will not fight for them.

Littlefield counts his greatest accomplishment as bringing credibility to the public defender’s office and building relationships of respect with judges, court administrators and other county agencies. He also instituted training procedures for the lawyers, kept their $42,000 to $97,000 annual salaries on par with county prosecutors and brought in paralegals.

His office has produced a host of star attorneys--including the president of the County Bar Assn. and three of the four defense lawyers in the Mendendez brothers’ murder trial. The chief public defenders in Santa Barbara, Ventura, San Diego, Riverside and San Jose counties also are alumni.

One of them, San Jose Public Defender Stuart Rappaport, said Littlefield mentored him in his climb up the ranks in Los Angeles. Rappaport once considered himself Littlefield’s heir apparent but headed north six years ago.

“I was getting like Prince Charles, aging,” he said. “When they had a going-away party and asked me why I was leaving, I said because Bill won’t go. I told him that someday they’d call him the grand old man of the county.”