Judicial Panel Head Threatens to Fire Lawyer : Privacy: A commission staff attorney has refused to answer questions about his discussions outside of work with a critic of the agency.

The director of the state’s beleaguered Commission on Judicial Performance has threatened to fire a veteran staff attorney, accusing him of disloyalty after he gave some of the agency’s public records to one of its leading critics, according to documents obtained by The Times.

Commission attorney John Plotz acknowledged to his boss, commission Director Victoria B. Henley, that he gave the reports to the chief attorney of the San Francisco public defender’s office, and that he had criticized the agency. Plotz denied providing Public Defender Peter G. Keane with any confidential information or any details about individual commission cases.

But Plotz, 44, refused to answer Henley’s questions about conversations that he had outside of work with Keane, his longtime friend. Plotz cited his constitutional right to privacy and free speech, said W. Daniel Boone, his attorney.

The Plotz brouhaha heightens the controversy involving the commission, which was considered a pathfinder agency when created in 1961 but in recent years has been severely criticized for meting out little discipline and conducting the vast majority of its work in secret.

“This seems symptomatic of the fetish that the commission makes of secrecy,” said Stephen R. Barnett, professor of law at UC Berkeley’s Boalt Hall School of Law and a longtime observer of the California courts.

Henley declined to return calls seeking comment.

Earlier this year, she told Plotz orally and in writing that she could force him to discuss his conversations with Keane, according to the material obtained Monday.

“The commission recognizes that its employees have free speech and association rights,” Henley told Plotz in an April 19 letter. “However, these rights are not absolute and must be balanced against the commission’s interest in its efficient operation, and its need to preserve confidentiality, as well as the commission’s interest in maintaining a relationship of loyalty and trust between it and its attorneys.”

In her April letter telling Plotz that she could compel him to discuss his conversations with Keane, Henley cited cases from the 1950s in which teachers and transit workers were forced to disclose whether they had been members of the Communist Party or face firing. “That’s really offensive to our post-McCarthy Era sensibilities,” Boone said.

Keane, who is scheduled to testify on the measures this week, said Henley’s actions are an “outrageous inquisition.”

Two bills to reform the commission, sponsored by Democrats, are pending in the Legislature. And just last week Atty. Gen. Dan Lungren added a significant bipartisan element to the reform campaign by issuing a letter strongly supporting the legislation.

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Henley’s questioning of Plotz started in February, about two months after Keane lambasted the commission in a widely circulated article in a legal newspaper, according to the documents. Keane charged that the commission “has dismally failed to carry out” its mission of exposing judicial misconduct and removing corrupt and grossly incompetent judges.

“An examination of the annual reports of the commission for the last five years shows . . . that the ethical standards to which judges in California are held are appallingly low,” wrote Keane, who also is a member of the State Bar Board of Governors.

He then drafted legislation that would dramatically reform the agency, by requiring more openness in commission hearings and adding more citizens to the commission.

Keane is scheduled to testify at hearings on the pending legislation today and Wednesday and said he would discuss the issues raised by the Plotz case. Keane was Plotz’s supervisor in the San Francisco public defender’s office in the mid-1980s, shortly before Plotz joined the commission in 1988 as a staff attorney responsible for investigating alleged judicial misconduct.

Plotz declined comment Monday.

But in response to the threatened firing, he has asked Assembly Speaker Willie Brown (D-San Francisco) and state Sen. Alfred E. Alquist (D-San Jose), who are carrying the reform legislation, to amend their bills to protect commission staff members from being fired, except for just cause.

Commission employees now are in the “extremely vulnerable position” of being subject to a firing at will, Plotz said in a June 10 letter to the legislators. “As you can imagine, the work of investigating judges is difficult,” Plotz wrote.

“Judges are among the best connected and most powerful people in society. The staff of the commission often faces hostility from people who have risen to high office and are used to deference. In order to work effectively, the staff of the commission must work without fear,” Plotz added.

Attached to Plotz’s letter are several letters and legal memos relating to Henley’s attempts to question him about his discussions with Keane, as well as a copy of his last performance evaluation, which praised his work as being “of the highest quality in every respect.”

Christopher Janzen, Alquist’s administrative assistant, said: “We are taking Mr. Plotz’s remarks under serious consideration. We have transmitted the material to other members of the Legislature and it, like Atty. Gen. Lungren’s letter, has continued to create a stir about the effectiveness of the Commission on Judicial Performance.”

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However, a legislative source who is familiar with the commission’s work said that the issues Plotz raised “seem endemic to some of the problems of having all the (commission’s) proceedings in private. It has negative implications for the staff as well as for witnesses.”

In an April letter in which she threatened to fire Plotz, Henley said Keane’s December article included material on the commission’s deliberations that “raised concerns that someone with access to confidential information, perhaps one of the commission’s attorneys, had inappropriately revealed information to Mr. Keane.”

In particular, Henley cited a section of Keane’s article in which he criticized the commission for failing to discipline a judge who “received gifts from parties and attorneys appearing before the judge.” Keane contrasted the commission’s “private admonishment” of the California judge with a series of Pennsylvania cases in which judges were removed from office after accepting similar gifts.

Ironically, Plotz had handled the California case and recommended the private admonishment, advising the commission that the Pennsylvania cases were different. Plotz provided Keane with a copy of the Pennsylvania decision, but did not discuss the California case, which was described in a public commission report.

“This is the first time I have heard that Plotz was involved in the California case,” Keane said Monday. “Henley’s statements don’t make sense. Where would the motive be for him to furnish privileged information to me so that I could write a criticism of what he did? He’d have to be a masochist, which he’s not,” Keane said.