Ito Succumbs to the Sirens of Celebrity

The courthouse crowd is starting to call him “Judge Ego.”

That might seem unfair to Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Lance A. Ito, except for his nightly appearances this week on KCBS-TV Channel 2 Action News in an extended interview on the past, present and future of his favorite judge, Lance A. Ito.

Judge Ito, who usually treats the press with contempt, is this week’s star of the 11 o’clock news. The very same judge who last week displayed a copy of a cartoon portraying reporters as jackals is now, in the words of the KCBS advertisement, “face to face with Tritia Toyota” in “the interview everyone’s waiting to see.”

That’s amusing in light of Ito’s pretrial advice to fellow judges: “The sirens of mythology pale in comparison to the allure of seeing yourself on CNN. The results, however, can be about the same.”

A lot of reporters are angry about what they see as Ito’s hypocrisy, the way he had so eagerly become just another act in the Simpson media circus.

But I’m more cynical than angry. Ito’s spin on Ito showed that the judge--so critical of coverage of the trial--is just like everyone else, a sucker for a favorable story about himself. The man who scorned the media turns out to have been lusting for its attention.

His motives may have been innocent, but once he succumbed to the siren song of media attention he found--like so many before him--that things spun out of control.

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Ito’s debut occurred during one of television’s most important nights--a Sunday evening during the highly competitive sweeps month, when networks battle each other for viewers.

KCBS and its owner, the CBS network, had packaged the night with the skill of a good boxing promoter. The main event was the first episode of “Scarlett,” the miniseries sequel to “Gone With the Wind.” The show had received publicity and some good reviews. But if the viewers didn’t like it, Scarlett’s audience might melt away before the evening ended.

To make sure the audience would stick around, KCBS needed what the fight promoters call a strong undercard. That’s a popular fight staged after the main event. Its purpose is to keep the customers in the arena, buying beer, even if the main event is a dog. Judge Ito is KCBS’ undercard.

He’s a strong one. In his interview, Ito told a moving and inspirational story of his Japanese American family’s journey from a World War II internment camp in Wyoming to the middle-class comfort and security of life in Los Angeles’ Silver Lake district.

Ito’s heritage, it turns out, is a powerful force in his life. He told reporter Toyota that “I recall my parents wanted me to go to Japanese school . . . as you probably had your parents pressure you to spend four hours in Japanese school. As a third generation Californian, I rebelled against that . . . no one else in elementary school had to do that. . . . That ended after a long, intense battle of personalities with my parents and that’s one of my bigger regrets, that I didn’t follow through with that.”

He said his parents “never openly discussed” their years in the internment camp, where they, along with other American citizens of Japanese descent, were held prisoner through the war. “It was something they were very ashamed of and they have tried ever since to be good Americans in every sense of the word,” he said.

Toyota asked, “Don’t you think it’s very sad that they had to feel ashamed they had to go through that terrible injustice when it wasn’t even their fault? How does that affect you?”

“I think it affects me in just about everything I do,” Ito said. “Growing up, I knew my parents had been deprived of opportunity. My father graduated from the University of California at Berkeley. His academic plans to go on to medical school were stymied. . . . My mother . . . never had the opportunity to go to an excellent university.

“I have been to Germany on two occasions and have gone to some of the concentration camps,” he said. He recalled the conditions of those camps and how he was reminded of the Japanese internment. “To see the barracks in Heart Mountain, Wyoming, and to see the same types of initial carvings and the types of human beings who lived there, the comparison is inescapable.”

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On the Sunday night news, Toyota said Ito had “turned me down several times” when she asked for an interview. She noted that judicial rules prevent judges from discussing their cases “so I agreed I would not ask him about the Simpson trial.”

This cast an aura of judicial sanctity about the interview.

But he was in the thick of media madness. Full-page newspaper ads trumpeted his appearance. More promos appeared on the news. Sandwiched between the TV promos for Ito on the Sunday night news was a report about another prominent Simpson trial figure, defense attorney Robert L. Shapiro: “He has reportedly hired agent Ed Hookstratten to field possible offers for books and TV. Sources say two TV producers are interested in using Shapiro on a talk show.”

Shapiro, Ito. Ito, Shapiro. That’s the way it looked on TV. By the time the judge’s interview began, his boyhood recollections were mixed up in my mind with Shapiro’s bid for a post-trial talk show job.

Naturally, not all the prospective jurors could avoid seeing the judge. In fact, the first one to be questioned by him Monday said he saw an Ito promotion on “Murder, She Wrote” earlier in the evening. “Well, it’s sweeps week,” explained the judge, referring to the period when ratings services measure the size of the stations’ audiences.

This seemed to excuse everything. He didn’t remove the prospective juror even though earlier he had removed one person for watching a Barbara Stanwyck western on cable television and another for waking to the sounds of a clock radio.

Ito excused them because he said the media was polluting the trial atmosphere and he wanted to protect the jurors from the electronic and printed poison.

He has emphasized the point with his tirades against the press, and his long colloquies with prospective jurors about the media’s inadequacies.

Now, he’s on TV every night, and if he’s not talking about the trial, you wouldn’t know it from KCBS’ promos for some of the segments: “Living in the spotlight of the trial of the century. . . . The man in the eye of a legal storm on the wrongs and the rights of the system.”

Ito has kicked honest men and women off the jury panel for less. If publicity is so harmful to a fair trial, why is he participating in it?