Sentencing Puts Ouderkirk Back in Spotlight : Courts: Judge will mete out punishment today to assailants in Denny beating. Most observers say he is strict and is likely to come down hard on Damian Williams.

In a courthouse filled with button-down, middle-of-the-road to conservative judges, most of them appointed by Republican governors, Judge John W. Ouderkirk was not a standout.

Like most of his colleagues in the Los Angeles Superior Court’s Central Division, he toiled in anonymity in one of the busiest court jurisdictions in the country.

That changed last year when the former police officer and onetime prosecutor was named to preside over the trial of the men accused of beating trucker Reginald O. Denny and others in the first hours of the Los Angeles riots.

Few jurists have endured the scrutiny and nationwide publicity that Ouderkirk has since taking the case.

Ouderkirk, 51, will stand at center stage again today in the Criminal Courts Building Downtown when he hands down sentences to Damian Monroe Williams and Henry Keith Watson. After a racially and politically charged trial, a jury convicted them in October on some charges.

During the trial, Ouderkirk’s critics called him everything from a racist to a tool of a corrupt criminal justice system that keeps the state’s prisons filled with black men. His rulings were questioned, and often condemned, in one quarter or another.

The sentencing of Williams today is likely to stir controversy no matter what Ouderkirk does. Some influential voices in the community have appealed to the court to place Williams on probation; others have demanded the maximum 10-year term.

In Los Angeles’ legal community, Ouderkirk generally is viewed as strait-laced and tough--perhaps a result of his law enforcement background, some say--but also evenhanded and exceedingly principled.

“I didn’t agree with any of his findings,” one defense lawyer said about a matter he once had before Ouderkirk. “But he is fair and does what he thinks is right. That’s all you can ask of a judge.”

When criticism came during the Denny trial, it mostly had to do with the perception that Ouderkirk--a middle-aged, upper-income white man--is a product of his class and race. That, some said, leaves him oblivious to the harsh realities some black men face, realities that many believe drew Watson and Williams to the swirl of violence at Florence and Normandie avenues on April 29, 1992.

“I don’t believe he is a racist in any way” said a prominent local legal figure who asked not to be named. “I just don’t believe he is aware that race is playing a role.”

Of two dozen defense lawyers, prosecutors, academics and others in the legal community who were interviewed, nearly all said they expect Ouderkirk to sentence Williams to 10 years in prison, the highest allowed for his conviction on simple mayhem, a felony, and four misdemeanor counts of assault.

None expected Ouderkirk to put Williams on probation.

“It was a serious case with serious ramifications,” Allen Webster Jr., a longtime local criminal defense lawyer and former president of the National Bar Assn., said in explaining why he thought Ouderkirk would display no leniency.

Others agreed, a few also citing political pressure from people who thought Williams was treated too lightly by the jury, which acquitted him of charges that would have made him subject to life in prison.

Still others point to Ouderkirk’s law enforcement background and what they contend is a resulting bias in favor of the prosecution, which in Williams’ case is seeking the maximum sentence.

“He’s very sincere, very affable, but he’s a prosecutor on the bench,” said lawyer Dale Rubin.

Ouderkirk declined to be interviewed, saying he did not want anything he said to be construed as commentary on the Williams-Watson case. But in a 1989 interview with the Los Angeles Daily Journal, a newspaper targeted at the legal community, the judge described himself as “stern as far as sentencing goes.”

At the time he was an unknown, newly installed Municipal Court judge hearing traffic cases. He is now on the Superior Court bench assigned to a so-called “long cause” courtroom in which the most serious and complex cases are heard.

H. Elizabeth Harris, a defense attorney who specializes in capital cases, laughed uproariously when informed that a court publicist had included her on a list of people who might speak to reporters about Ouderkirk.

“As much (prison) time as he’s given my clients, he has the nerve to give my name,” she joked. “I have clients who will never see the light of day because of him.”

Harris said she was not joking about the last part.

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Ouderkirk, a New York native, grew up on Long Island and in Queens with his parents and two sisters.

He is divorced from his first wife--the couple had no children--and this year married Sherry Perkins, once an executive secretary to former Dist. Atty. Ira Reiner, during whose term the charges against Williams and Watson were lodged.

(His relationship with Perkins caused a brief controversy during the Denny trial when a defense lawyer cited it as a conflict of interest and tried to have Ouderkirk removed from the case. An appeals court upheld the judge’s refusal to step down because he had informed the defense of the romance earlier and no one had objected.)

Ouderkirk told the Daily Journal that his father was a cameraman on the Ed Sullivan television variety show and his mother was a bookkeeper. The son, as a small child, ached to be a cop.

Later, he changed his mind and wanted to become a high school teacher. But after moving to California at age 21, he realized his first dream by joining the Santa Monica Police Department.

Capt. Tom Mapes, a 29-year veteran of the Santa Monica force who was a rookie patrolman along with Ouderkirk and still is his friend and sailing buddy, said he remembers the future jurist as one whose slight build and youthful looks belied a fierce tenacity.

Even in those years, Mapes said, Ouderkirk was looking toward higher goals, attending Cal State L.A. during his off-duty time.

After five years as a police officer, Ouderkirk left the department and became an investigator for the Los Angeles County district attorney’s office, lured mostly by the better hours, Mapes said. Ouderkirk received his degree in police administration in 1972.

While at the district attorney’s office, he became interested in the law and enrolled in Loyola Law School, working by day and attending classes by night, said Michael Lightfoot, a former Loyola law professor who taught Ouderkirk.

“He was a solid person and a solid student,” said Lightfoot, who now is in private practice and does not know Ouderkirk socially.

“The night students and the day students are different,” Lightfoot said. “People who go to law school at night are serious. He was committed to getting a first-rate legal education.”

After his 1977 graduation, Ouderkirk became a Los Angeles County prosecutor and eventually was assigned to the hard-core gang unit where he handled murder cases deemed gang-related.

He remained in the job 10 years and in 1989, then-Gov. George Deukmejian appointed him to the Los Angeles Municipal Court. He was elevated to Superior Court three years later.

Deputy Public Defender Leslie Jones, who worked daily in Ouderkirk’s Superior Court courtroom for a year, said he found the jurist to be as hard on prosecutors as he was on defense lawyers. Jones said Ouderkirk often reduced charges if he thought the district attorney had overcharged a defendant.

In the Denny beating case, Jones said, Ouderkirk’s most important accomplishment was keeping the long, emotionally trying proceedings from falling apart. This was particularly true, he said, during jury deliberations when several jurors were removed from the panel.

Throughout the trial, the judge had been cautious, listening patiently to both sides before he made a ruling and treating jurors with great solicitousness.

One of the few times his demeanor cracked was just after the jury began its deliberations.

“If you can believe it, I have been assigned a murder trial to begin Monday,” Ouderkirk said from the bench in exasperation.

Those who have had other cases before Ouderkirk said the implacable exterior has also given way at times to generosity.

Earlier this year, when Lightfoot was in Ouderkirk’s courtroom handling a death penalty appeal issue, Ouderkirk learned that the state had not paid him for the long hours he had put into the court-appointed case.

“He took it upon himself, unsolicited, to write a letter to the (California) Supreme Court suggesting that lawyers should be paid for the work they have done,” Lightfoot said. “I thought that was real stand-up.”

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Last month, Ouderkirk went out of his way again, this time for a man facing a four-year prison term for insurance fraud.

The man, whom Ouderkirk had allowed to remain free for a set period to get his business in order, said in an impassioned speech in open court that Ouderkirk should allow him more time so he could raise money for the care of his daughter. The child’s mother, he said, was a drug abuser.

The deputy district attorney had strenuously objected to the extension, arguing that the man was trying to stall the inevitable.

Displaying a patience that visibly irritated the prosecutor, Ouderkirk calmly listened to the excruciatingly detailed plea, then issued his ruling.

He returned to the man’s family a $2,000 fine he had just collected, apparently intending that it be used for the girl’s care.

Then, Ouderkirk, the self-described stern sentencer, promptly sent the man off to prison.

Times staff writer Edward J. Boyer contributed to this report.

Profile: John W. Ouderkirk

Ouderkirk presided over the trial of Damian Monroe Williams and Henry Keith Watson, the two main defendants in the Reginald Denny beating case. He is scheduled to sentence Williams and Watson today.

* Born: Nov. 17, 1942

* Residence: Northeast Los Angeles County.

* Education: Bachelor’s degree, 1972, Cal State L.A.; law degree, Loyola Law School, 1977.

* Career highlights: Santa Monica police officer, 1970-1975; Los Angeles County deputy district attorney, 1978-1989; Los Angeles Municipal Court judge, 1989-1991; Los Angeles Superior Court Judge, 1991-present.

* Interests: Sailing, travel.

* Family: Married this year to Sherry Perkins. No children.