L.A. Brutality Case Lawyer’s Road to Judgeship Blocked : Courts: A senate panel approved Samuel Paz. But vehement opposition from police groups has stranded him.

There are few sure bets in life, but the approval of Samuel Paz as a federal judge seemed like one of them.

The story of why it has not happened--and why it may never happen--is a cautionary tale about what can transpire when law and politics collide.

A widely respected Los Angeles lawyer and a former president of the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California, Paz is a plaintiffs’ police-abuse attorney with the distinction of having won one of the largest jury awards in the country for a victim of police brutality.

Nominated by President Clinton, Paz had Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) as his patron, a stack of complimentary letters and the blessing of the American Bar Assn. after the group’s famously exhaustive screening process. Approval by the Senate Judiciary Committee seemed inevitable. Confirmation by the Senate would be routine.

All that would make Paz one of the first Mexican American judges of the federal District Court in Los Angeles, and would bolster Clinton’s idealized vision of a diverse federal work force filled with people who “look like America.” Paz, 51, boasts other personal credentials: He is the husband of a fund-raiser for the National Conference of Christians and Jews, a father of two, a lecturer to Latino students on the importance of education.

He seemed so perfectly poised to be a federal judge that he gave up his law practice, sold the Alhambra office building that housed it, attended a weeklong “baby judges school” in Washington and even lined up two law clerks and a secretary.

But sometime in the fall, after Paz’s uneventful Senate hearing, the path of his nomination hit a surprising dead end.

While candidates for positions as federal trial judges rarely prompt opposition, Paz had sparked denunciations from five police organizations, a conservative judicial watchdog group and the editorial board of a newspaper on the other side of the country--the Washington Times, a key conservative force in the capital.

“Time and again Mr. Paz has proven himself not to be a friend of law enforcement or equal rights for all citizens including police officers,” wrote Joe Flannagan, chairman of the Los Angeles chapter of the Peace Officers Research Assn. of California, in a stinging letter to Boxer.

The group, which represents more than 39,000 local law enforcement officers in California and Nevada, accuses Paz of filing too many unjustified lawsuits against police officers who the group says were merely defending themselves in difficult and dangerous situations.

A video showing Paz speaking at a seminar for lawyers on how to sue police officers only incensed them more.

“He is making his fortune off our backs,” complained E.F. (Skip) Murphy, state president of the peace officers group.

In early October, with controversy hanging over Paz’s name and an election in the offing, the Senate Judiciary Committee simply dropped his nomination like a hot potato.

The official excuse: Committee members ran out of time before the 103rd Congress adjourned for an election break, as they did on 13 other nominees. Boxer has promised to resubmit Paz’s name to the White House for renomination when the Senate goes back into session in January.

Paz, meanwhile, waits in an odd limbo between law practice and the federal bench. He is reluctant to talk about his dilemma, refusing to blame anyone for it. He insists he is waiting calmly for the storm to die down.

“We all knew that these were political decisions made by political people and there are many political considerations,” he said.

His stunned supporters are less accepting.

“It is already a really sad topic,” said USC law professor Erwin Chemerinsky. “I think Sam would be a terrific judge. He’s smart, conscientious, the epitome of good judicial temperament.”

“He had been cleared by the ABA,” said Santa Barbara attorney Laurie Harris, a member of Boxer’s judicial screening committee. “He had a quick and cordial hearing, at which no problems were raised. He had every reason to believe he would be confirmed.”

Paz’s detractors vow to continue their crusade against him. And if the liberal-minded Paz faced problems when the Senate Judiciary Committee was chaired by Democrat Joe Biden and counted Boxer’s California colleague, Dianne Feinstein, among the political majority, Paz could be doomed next time around. The committee will soon be headed by Republican Sen. Orrin Hatch of Utah, a staunch conservative.

Ed Whelan, who will be general counsel to the Republican majority of the committee, declined to comment on Paz’s chances or those of any other judicial hopeful. But at a meeting of the conservative Los Angeles Lawyers Division of the Federalist Society on Friday, Whelan excoriated several of Clinton’s already confirmed judicial appointments and warned that the Hatch-led committee would fight any nominees it deemed “activist” judges.

“I welcome those clashes,” said Whelan. “We will expose to the American public the addle-brained, soft-on-crime policies of liberal activist judges.”

Even if committee members regard Paz with less hostility than that, they could grill him until he is charred beyond recognition.

“Sam’s timing couldn’t be worse,” said one federal judge, speaking on condition of anonymity.

Some Paz supporters say the same record that has agitated his opponents is what qualifies him for the bench.

“My gosh, if someone who spends his entire professional career enforcing the Constitution doesn’t get confirmation, then who should be confirmed?” said Venice attorney Stephen Yagman, who also represents people suing law enforcement officers for excessive force.

But the quirks of the process defy any easy logic, and may have turned Paz into a man without a job awaiting a position that won’t materialize.

Banking too soon that a nomination will become an approval is “like not buying car insurance and figuring you’ll never have an accident,” said one former Reagan Administration official who worked with federal judicial nominees.

As Paz saw it, he had to begin shedding his law practice in preparation for confirmation; waiting too long, he reasoned, would have risked stranding his current clients when he suddenly became a judge.

“Traditionally, as I was led to believe, once you’ve had your hearing, there’s generally not much of a problem--especially for someone who has been found qualified by the ABA,” he said.

Indeed, senators--conforming to the tradition of “senatorial courtesy”--normally give considerable deference to their colleagues’ District Court nominees. Unlike Supreme Court nominations, which frequently precipitate major controversies, a federal trial judge candidate rarely ignites such a brouhaha. The Senate Judiciary Committee has rejected only three such candidates since 1938.

Paz, however, was never the typical judicial candidate.

Legal experts say they can think of no current federal judge who had been primarily a plaintiff’s lawyer in police brutality cases. Most are culled from the ranks of federal and state prosecutors, corporate lawyers, and municipal and state judges. Boxer’s other federal bench choice, former Municipal Judge Richard Paez, sailed through his confirmation process and is now the first Mexican American federal judge in Los Angeles.

Paz, on the other hand, is best known for an $8.9-million verdict he obtained on behalf of Adelaido Altamirano, a groundskeeper who was shot by a Los Angeles police officer and paralyzed from the waist down in a case of mistaken identity. Eventually, Altamirano accepted a $5.5-million settlement.

Paz was also co-counsel in a major case in which 120 plaintiffs sued the Los Angeles Police Department’s undercover intelligence unit for illegal spying. The case was settled when the city agreed to pay plaintiffs $2 million and to disband the intelligence unit.

Paz’s detractors were quick to exploit his lack of pedigree.

“Paz has absolutely no experience, at any level, as a jurist,” wrote Shaun J. Mathers, president of the Assn. of Los Angeles Deputy Sheriffs. (Paz’s supporters note that 11 of the 27 federal trial judges in Los Angeles had no judicial experience before being named.)

Paz also left a paper trail less in law journals than in the Op-Ed pages of newspapers such as The Times, where he often staunchly criticized police actions.

After a sheriff’s deputy shot and killed 19-year-old Arturo (Smokey) Jimenez--a gang member who was later found to have PCP in his blood--in the Ramona Gardens housing project in East Los Angeles in 1991, Paz told reporters that the incident was “a classic example of an officer who violated all the rules.”

Paz represented Jimenez’s mother, Elva, in a civil suit against the Sheriff’s Department. After a two-week trial, the county agreed to an out-of-court settlement in which it paid her $450,000.

In a letter to outgoing Judiciary Committee Chairman Biden, sheriff’s association president Mathers said the case was an example of Paz’s “offensive and inflammatory practice of making allegations to the media prior to investigations of officer-involved shootings. . . . The officer’s actions to protect his life and the life of his partner, who had been knocked unconscious by the PCP-charged suspect, were determined entirely justified. Yet Mr. Paz continued to incite the community against the Sheriff’s Department and the deputies.”

Paz was hardly alone in his critical comments. The Jimenez case was singled out as “most disturbing” by the Kolts Commission in its lengthy 1992 report on the department. The commission said the shooting was “a story of deficient training and flawed judgment and a deputy who was not suited for a (gang unit) assignment.”

As recently as 1991, Paz acknowledged that he was an unlikely judicial candidate. “I don’t believe I’ll ever be appointed,” he said that year in an interview with the Los Angeles Daily Journal, a legal newspaper. “The Republican governors (George Deukmejian and Pete Wilson) are hostile toward an attorney who had given consideration to civil rights.”

Now Paz feels his unusual background “was part of the reasons the senator (Boxer) wanted to consider my nomination. . . . I think she sees it’s necessary to have some balance on the court.”

Paz’s bid has been supported by a wide variety of individuals, including a host of liberal members of Congress, Dist. Atty. Gil Garcetti and longtime ACLU activist Stanley K. Sheinbaum, who became president of the Los Angeles Police Commission in the wake of the Rodney G. King beating.

“This was a time when the broader community was turning against the police,” but Paz “never joined that bandwagon, certainly not in the obsessive way that certain others were doing,” Sheinbaum said in a letter to Boxer last August.

Sam Chapman, Boxer’s chief aide on judicial appointments, says she is still committed to Paz’s nomination and will resubmit his name to Clinton.

Justice Department official Eleanor D. Acheson, who oversees judicial nominations, would not comment on whether the Administration will renominate Paz or any other stalled candidate. However, Acheson said she has had a “very positive” meeting with Hatch and is optimistic about future Clinton nominees.

It is unclear how supportive Boxer’s frequent Democratic ally Feinstein will be on this sticky issue. Several sources said Feinstein was quite relieved that she did not have to cast a vote on Paz’s nomination during her tense reelection campaign against Republican Mike Huffington, who attacked her vote for a federal judge from Florida who was accused of being soft on crime.

For Paz to be confirmed, Boxer will have to “go to the mat” and vouch for him, according to Elliot Mincberg, legal director of People for the American Way, a liberal advocacy group. Boxer has already committed herself to renominating Judith McConnell, a San Diego Superior Court judge in a similar limbo. Some opposition to McConnell arose because of her 1987 decision awarding custody of a teen-age boy to the gay partner of his deceased father, over the objection of the youth’s natural mother. The political question, Mincberg says, is: “How many people can one senator go to bat for at a given time?”

Staffers for the senator who could be Paz’s greatest hurdle--Hatch--will not reveal how he is leaning on the Paz nomination. Hatch has already asked Paz in writing to respond to his police critics, and Paz has responded by saying he has no animus toward police.

Paz continues to team-teach one course at Loyola Law School, where he is an adjunct professor, and he acts as a consultant to other lawyers. “I’m doing quite well economically,” he said. He insists that his limbo is an emotional respite from a usually grueling work pace.

“This is the first vacation I’ve had in 25 years,” said Paz, whose children are 6 and 14. “This is actually a pleasant time to be with my children and spend time studying.”

For the moment, he has found a contemplative haven at USC Law School. At Chemerinsky’s invitation, he is a “judge-designee in residence.”

“I think they made that name up,” Paz chuckled.

The unpaid position allows him an office and resources to study legal issues regarding securities, patents and intellectual property--”things I was not familiar with,” he said. “I’ve been using this time to be as best prepared as I can to take the bench.”