D. A. Wants Judge Off Felony Cases : Courts: Bradbury uses rare challenge to ban Storch from all new cases. Jurist reduced Newbury Park man’s murder conviction last month.

Declaring war on a judge viewed as one of Ventura County’s most lenient, Dist. Atty. Michael D. Bradbury moved Tuesday to ban Superior Court Judge Lawrence Storch from hearing any new felony cases.

“Judge Storch won’t be hearing criminal cases,” said Chief Deputy Dist. Atty. Kevin J. McGee, a top Bradbury aide.

Bradbury’s use of a rare legal challenge to disqualify Storch from felony cases immediately follows a controversial murder ruling by the judge. It also caps years of bad feelings between the judge and the county’s top prosecutor.

Storch, 60, reduced a Newbury Park man’s conviction from first-degree murder to second-degree murder last month, then gave the defendant the lowest sentence possible.

Storch and Bradbury declined to comment Tuesday.

Prosecutors said their problems with the county’s longest-serving Superior Court judge extend past any one ruling.

“I would not say that there was any single case that was determinative, the straw that broke the camel’s back,” McGee said. “It’s just that we looked back over the last year in particular, and it’s something we felt we needed to do.”

Some lawyers who have tried cases before Storch, as well as several colleagues, were quick to defend him. They described him as a thoughtful and evenhanded jurist.

“He’s respected not only in this county, but all over the state as an excellent judge,” said Superior Court Judge Charles W. Campbell Jr., felony division chief.

He said Storch is routinely assigned some of the court’s most serious criminal cases, including those involving the death penalty.

Superior Court Presiding Judge Melinda A. Johnson said she expects to reassign Storch to civil cases, but downplayed the significance of such a transfer.

“I think Judge Storch would love to go to civil. He likes it very much, and he’s very good at it,” Johnson said. “When it comes to that, it will be like, ‘Throw me to the briar patch. Please. Please.’ ”

Public Defender Kenneth I. Clayman said Storch should not be forced from the felony bench.

“He’s a fair and imminent jurist, and to just put him out of business because they don’t get their way on everything is totally out of line,” Clayman said.

State law allows attorneys to disqualify a judge from a case. Bradbury’s office circulated a memorandum Tuesday to each of the more than 80 deputy prosecutors, ordering them to file affidavits removing Storch “in all new cases.”

It further says deputy prosecutors are to notify their supervisors if they “experience any problems with the courts as a result of this new policy.”

A veteran defense attorney said he believes that Bradbury is using Storch, a 20-year jurist, to send a message to other judges not to reduce a verdict that has been won by prosecutors.

Storch reduced the verdict in the case against Todd Love, the Newbury Park man who shot his sister’s boyfriend to death in June. A jury convicted Love of first-degree murder, ruling that he planned the boyfriend’s death. Storch disagreed that the murder was premeditated and lowered the verdict.

“If you want to send a message to the rest of the judges . . . then it’s not that hard to take on a judge who is the ex-presiding judge of the criminal court,” Oxnard lawyer David Patrick Callahan said. “You send the message that, ‘Hey, if you do something like this, we may say you are soft on criminals,’ which is the death knell for anyone who wants to be reelected.”

Love’s lawyer, Carlo A. Spiga, sharply criticized the district attorney’s move to ban Storch from hearing felonies.

“The D. A. in Ventura County is so used to winning everything that, God forbid, they lose anything. It’s like the sky is falling,” Spiga said.

Defense attorney James M. Farley, who is running for an open Superior Court judgeship, called the prosecutor’s action “a petulant child’s move.”

“They didn’t get what they wanted . . . so now they are going to do this,” Farley said.

In a Ventura County Bar Assn. survey two years ago, Storch earned the third-highest rating on the Superior Court bench--8.05 on a scale of 10.

“He’s probably the best judge you’ll ever encounter,” Superior Court Judge Steven Z. Perren said. “He is a model for which a quality jurist should be judged. . . . He is a scholar. He is a gentleman. He is a judge.”

But one judge said it is within the right of any prosecutor or attorney to disqualify a judge. Superior Court Judge James McNally said there are times when lawyers need that power.

“It smarts when it happens to you, but I’m absolutely committed to the idea that it’s a good law,” McNally said.

Bradbury’s ban of Storch revives an old dispute.

Storch is a longtime critic of Bradbury’s policy against plea bargaining, saying it bogs down the courts with unnecessary trials. Bradbury has described Storch as a whiny judge “who would be very happy if all of his cases went away through plea bargaining.”

And Bradbury described Storch in a 1991 profile as “a fairly lenient sentencer, which on occasion has resulted in additional victimizations.” He cited two cases in which Storch facilitated the release of defendants who promptly committed more crimes.

In 1973, county judges selected Storch to be a Superior Court commissioner to try domestic relations cases. Former Gov. Edmund G. (Jerry) Brown Jr. appointed him to a Superior Court judgeship in 1977. Storch has not been opposed in three election bids. But he has said he will retire at the end of his current six-year term in 1996.