Lawyers Bar Judge From Their Cases : Courts: Public defenders repeatedly disqualify James P. Cloninger, who they say treats their clients too harshly.

A year after the district attorney’s office systematically blocked the county’s most senior judge from hearing criminal cases, the public defender’s office is using the same tack against another jurist, the newest member of the court.

Deputy public defenders, allowed by law to disqualify one judge per case, last week started removing Superior Court Judge James P. Cloninger from all their new cases.

Since most criminal cases are handled by the public defender’s office rather than by private attorneys, courthouse sources said the net effect of the move may be to drive Cloninger out of the criminal department and onto the civil bench.

The move comes despite the fact that many public defenders criticized the district attorney’s office last year for doing the same thing to Superior Court Judge Lawrence Storch, who now hears civil cases.

Assistant Public Defender Jean Farley said there is no office edict to disqualify Cloninger, but all the deputies appearing before him basically have decided their clients would be better off elsewhere.

“There are a great deal of problems--many, many, many,” Farley said. “His position on sentencing is sometimes shocking. His rulings on evidentiary issues are many times prosecution-biased. It is the position of many attorneys in this office that he puts the D.A.’s case on for them.”

Cloninger, who was elevated from the Municipal Court bench to Superior Court in April, did not return phone calls seeking comment.

But Superior Court Judge Charles W. Campbell Jr., who presides over the court’s criminal bench, called the practice very disruptive.

“It’s disturbing to me because the D.A.’s office did this last year,” Campbell said. “They drove Judge Storch, one of the finest judges in the county, out of the criminal department.

“They can make it very difficult for us to manage our cases.”

Ventura County has 15 Superior Court judgeships, although one of them is unfilled. Five judges are assigned to hear criminal cases and five handle civil trials, while the remainder preside over specialty courts, such as family law or juvenile.

Storch, the county’s senior judge, had presided over felony criminal cases for years before Dist. Atty. Michael D. Bradbury announced that his office would disqualify the jurist from all further cases. Bradbury gave no specific reason for his action, but it was taken shortly after Storch reduced a Newbury Park man’s first-degree murder conviction to second-degree.

Cloninger, 42, was a longtime homicide prosecutor in Orange County before moving to Ventura in 1990 to take a position as a deputy district attorney. Gov. Pete Wilson named Cloninger to the Municipal Court bench in 1993, then elevated him a year later to the Superior Court.

Public Defender Kenneth I. Clayman, who was openly critical of Bradbury for ordering his deputies to summarily disqualify Storch from all their cases, said Thursday that the behavior of his deputies is different because none of them has been ordered by management to disqualify Cloninger.

Assistant Dist. Atty. Kevin J. McGee called Clayman’s position “a distinction without a difference.” Campbell, too, scoffed at the claim that the public defenders are acting any differently than prosecutors did a year ago.

Farley, who is one of Clayman’s top assistants, said there have been several meetings with deputy public defenders about the “various horror stories” coming out of Cloninger’s courtroom.

Although there is no blanket policy to disqualify the judge, Farley said a public defender would be foolish to take a client in front of Cloninger if he or she knew that a similarly situated defendant had been treated harshly by him.

That, Farley said, has been happening over and over.

In Cloninger’s courtroom, public defenders “feel as though there are two prosecutors, and one of them is wearing a black robe,” she said.

Private defense attorney Louis Samonsky, who was skeptical about Cloninger’s initial appointment to Municipal Court, said Thursday that the judge won him over during his time on the bench.

Although he noted that he has made few appearances before Cloninger in Superior Court, Samonsky said he has not attended a hearing “where he did not behave in a decent way, or act fairly and compassionately.”