THE O.J. SIMPSON MURDER TRIAL : That Sound You Hear Is Ito Taking Back Control of the Courtroom

The Ito Slam is still echoing through the O.J. Simpson courtroom.

When Judge Lance A. Ito pounded his hands on his desk late Thursday afternoon, and fined two lawyers $250 each, the sound of it shocked his courtroom, waking up the dozers, and serving notice that the judge meant business.

Ito was uncharacteristically mean as he halted an argument between defense attorney Peter Neufeld and Deputy Dist. Atty. George Clarke, whose battle over a piece of paper looked as though it was about to turn physical. He sent the jury from the room, and said: “Both counsel are sanctioned $250. Get your checkbooks out.” The lawyers looked stunned. “Right now,” the judge said.

This has been coming for weeks. The judge already cracked down on the attorneys’ long and repetitive questions and has tried to contain some of their posturing. He kicked out a member of the audience for talking, and confiscated beepers and a phone that went off in court.

The atmosphere in the courtroom has changed. More work is done. The judge has become more of an imposing, even somewhat frightening, figure. On Thursday, I had a piece of candy in my mouth, a semi-violation of the no-gum-chewing rule. I bit down on it. The person sitting next to me turned his head at the loud cracking noise and, for a moment, I was certain Ito would toss me out. It reminded me of the time I was covering a trial in federal court and the judge halted the proceedings when he caught me reading a newspaper.

Not that long ago, Ito was criticized by the pundits for being too soft. Now that he’s imposing discipline on a trial that often seems out of control, he’ll no doubt take heat in the media for being a dictator.

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Despite efforts by California to educate jurists, judges say the only way to learn how to control the courtroom is by on-the-job training.

When California judges are appointed or elected, they receive a letter from the Center for Judicial Education and Research inviting them to a weeklong orientation course at the center’s office in Emeryville, in the San Francisco Bay Area. The center is a state institution which, since 1973, has run educational programs for the state’s judiciary.

Experienced judges teach the newcomers how to abandon their pit dog mentality of a combative lawyer for the demeanor expected of a judge. Among their subjects are fairness, ethics and judicial conduct.

In addition, the center holds two-week judges’ colleges in Berkeley offering courses in trial conduct, evidence, sentencing and other aspects of court practice. Postgraduate courses, books and videotapes are also offered.

Ninety-five percent of the state’s judges attend these courses, and the Los Angeles County bench is one of the most enthusiastic participants.

But judges’ school is not enough. “It’s like telling someone all the techniques, abstractly, of how you swim but you still don’t know whether you can swim until you get in the water,” said retired Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Burton Katz, who moved from the district attorney’s office to the bench. “You don’t know how you’ll do until you are placed in the caldron,” Katz said. “Sometimes you surprise yourself by doing well. Other times, you’ll say that you overreacted.”

Katz, now a Simpson trial TV pundit, said he thinks Ito is going through one of the most difficult periods of on-the-job training that a judge has experienced.

“I don’t think any judge, even Ito, was prepared for this kind of celebrity,” said Katz. Ito knew, Katz said, that “the world was watching his fishbowl. . . . He not only wanted to be fair, but to give the world the impression of fairness. In doing that, he lost control. The high-powered lawyers seized the opportunity and pushed the envelope.”

With the Ito slam and his other measures, Katz said, the judge “can back off a bit,” although he added that “if you are going to err, it’s should be on the side of control.”

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Finally, there’s the matter of decisiveness.

A judge in the hurly-burly of Los Angeles’ trial courts doesn’t have time for reflection or study. Before the Simpson trial began, I had a long talk with a veteran Superior Court judge about the requirements of the job.

You’ve got to be quick, he said. Decisions are made in a hurry. You do most of your own research, at home at night, and then come back the next morning to announce your decision. Unlike an appellate judge, you don’t have a clerks corps of bright law school graduates to research and write for you.

And these are for cases that never make the media. Multiply the pressure a hundred times or more for the Simpson case, alleviated only slightly by Ito’s volunteer law school researchers.

As we can see every day in Ito’s court, the only way to learn to be a judge is by painful, and very public, experience.