Where Livin’ and Justice Is Easy

Court TV’s very long cables, which have up-linked justice in progress from a famous-name rape trial in Florida to an assisted suicide in Michigan, managed to reach beyond a notorious throat-slashing double murder trial in Los Angeles.

Downtown’s Criminal Courts Building is a monument to the institutional architectural style that could be called Sunbelt Stalinist. Inside, it is dingy and minatory, its crammed elevators lurching up and down 18 floors bearing their odd democracy of jurors, lawyers and defendants, and the commingled smells of hot dog breakfasts, overripe laundry and dueling colognes.

On the same Tuesday morning that the world’s press platoons were training enough camera wattage on the CCB to raise blisters, another county courthouse, a very different one nearly 30 miles distant, made its own modest bow on Court TV.

The Malibu courthouse is a sweeping single story fronted by a long, immaculate loggia unadorned by graffiti. A sign inside warns that persons entering the courthouse are technically subject to search, but there is no metal detector; the more usual enforcement is set forth on the signs made of that faux-wood plastic that is grained like no tree that ever lived: “Persons wearing shorts, bathing suits or bare feet not permitted in court.”

Court TV had come to Malibu’s Department W, the courthouse’s only Superior Court courtroom, for the sentencing of two men who often wear bathing suits and bare feet, but who had been wearing sport shirts for their court appearances.

It is the kind of California story that the other coast loves. It is a hot-tub-gone-dry comeuppance theme, a “surf and turf” classic about a champion longboarder and the father of another surfing pro convicted of battering a third surfer who had drifted into the competition area on those Malibu waves that pound the shore practically within sea-spray distance of this courthouse.

*

Courtrooms in Pasadena, in West Covina, even in the same CCB where the Simpson matter held forth were fully booked for business as usual on Tuesday, with a preliminary hearing for a man accused of torturing his grandmother and stabbing her to death with scissors, a court date for a woman charged with murdering a 2-year-old, the trial of a urologist accused of drugging and raping a patient.

Out in Malibu’s Department W, the two surfers were sentenced to probation, restitution and community service in a brief proceeding that was wrapping up before the Simpson verdict was read to the Downtown courtroom and the world.

The day before, again in Department W, a civil trial over the sale of a million-dollar house had filled the jury box--but not the courtroom.

And that morning in the same courtroom, the arraignment of a woman accused of stealing a $100,000 horse, a Dutch warmblood stud named Zooloog, was put off until next month.

Young prosecutors sent here to cut their teeth find felony trial experience to be a little thin on the ground; they may feel like LAPD rookies anxious for an assignment to the hopping Rampart Division but sent instead to the more peaceable reaches of Devonshire Division.

Officials are hard-pressed to find a Malibu-area honoree for one of Gil Garcetti’s “courageous citizens” awards this year. They would have had plenty from the ferocious fires of two years ago, but so far no one in these parts has to dodge bullets to drag a gunplay victim to safety the way they do in other court districts.

In Malibu, surely the most placid of the county courthouses, horse theft and surfing assault are major cases. It is not only the weather that is cooler out here.

*

That is not to say that the courthouse stands empty.

The restaurants strung like stucco pearls along PCH mean a lot of drunk-driving arrests. The beaches mean a lot of auto burglaries. Gang warfare sometimes tumbles onto the hot sands of Zuma and Topanga. There was the recent embezzlement from the local dry cleaner’s, and a transient-to-transient stabbing.

Oh yes, and the “Topanga shooting.” Three guys who came to look at a refrigerator for sale didn’t like the guy who was selling it, and fired off a few shots. Into the ground.

And there is a steady trail of domestic violence, from the ramshackle month-to-month rentals to the beachside palaces.

Perhaps business is carried on almost too casually; the bulletin board notices about ballroom dancing classes and animal abuse and marine wildlife rescue convey an unconcern that not everyone here feels.

“Everybody thinks we’re out in Bambi-land,” says one county worker. A deputy district attorney was just added on for the increased caseload, and maybe those breezy, unguarded front and back doors aren’t such a great idea. It wasn’t a gangland hit when an estranged husband shot and killed his wife in another courthouse; it was just another domestic dispute. And those they have aplenty, even in Malibu.