Glendale Judge Rebuked for ‘Improper Conduct’

The California Commission on Judicial Performance on Monday publicly admonished a Superior Court judge in Glendale, who owned $45,000 worth of stock in the Walt Disney Co., for not disqualifying himself from four cases in which he ruled in Disney’s favor.

Judge Charles W. Stoll was also admonished for using court stationery to write two letters to a collection agency on behalf of a family member.

Stoll conceded he broke the state regulation regarding stock ownership but said he did not know he owned enough shares to fall under the requirement to disqualify himself.

“It never occurred to me that the 1,000 shares I had in an IRA account was enough to disqualify me,” he said. “I ‘fessed up to it when I learned about it.”

The shares, valued at about $45,000 at the time of the violation, would be worth about $60,000 at today’s stock prices.

Stoll also admitted to writing the letters, but said he was not attempting to use his influence as a judge and that he wrote “personal” on top of each missive.

But the state commission ruled that Stoll had engaged in “improper conduct” in both cases. Under state law, a judge must disqualify himself from a case if he has a financial interest of more than 1% in a concerned company or stock worth more than $1,500, said Victoria Henley, director and chief counsel for the commission.

“The commission found that Judge Stoll’s explanation that he had failed to familiarize himself with the provisions of the Code . . . served to aggravate, rather than mitigate, his misconduct in failing to disqualify,” the commission wrote.

The commission concluded that Stoll wrote the letters to the collection agency “in an effort to influence the recipient,” violating a Canon of the Judicial Code of Conduct that declares that judges “should not lend the prestige of judicial office to advance the private or personal interest of the judge or others . . . “

Stoll defended the letters, saying they were merely factual and that he had clearly marked them as personal.

“If I’d used the [court’s] address, but not the letterhead, they wouldn’t have said anything,” he said.

The complaint against him, he said, was filed by the collection firm. There was also a complaint by a former Disney employee, Aprile Boettcher, who had attempted to sue the company for allegedly eliminating her job after a pregnancy leave. Boettcher did a routine check on Stoll and discovered he owned stock in Disney, said Boettcher’s attorney, Robert Racine.

The Boettcher case was transferred to the court of Superior Court Judge S. James Otero, but was dismissed after it “resolved itself,” Otero said. The details of the resolution are confidential.

Such public admonishments to a judge are not common. The commission on judicial performance issued just six of them last year.

Henley said that a public admonishment falls in about the middle of the agency’s methods for criticizing judges. The disciplinary measures increase in severity from a letter of warning to private admonishment, public admonishment, censure and removal.

“My personal view is that it was a technical violation,” said Otero, supervising judge for the North Central Judicial District, where Stoll works.

Stoll’s offenses fell far short of violations that caused two California judges to be removed from office last year: One bought a used Mercedes-Benz and engaged in four other business transactions with a litigant in his court, and the other used her influence to help people she knew--once to aid someone to whom she owed money.

But Stoll’s violations were serious, said Art Margolis, who represents defense attorneys accused of ethical violations and serves as a consultant to lawyers on ethical matters.

“He had a conflict of interest,” Margolis said. “He had litigants who were appearing before him who had every right to expect they would be given an impartial hearing by someone who did not have a financial interest in either party.”

Technical violations, said Racine, are nonetheless significant. “If you don’t read a murderer his Miranda rights, you can say that’s a technical violation,” he said, but it’s serious enough to warrant the dismissal of a case.

Stoll, who is 65 and plans to retire this year, has never been publicly disciplined before, said Henley of the commission on judicial performance.

“I’ve kept my nose clean for more than 40 years in the legal profession,” Stoll said woefully on Monday. “I’m 65 years old and I just ran for my last election anyway. . . . Obviously I wanted to go out with a clean record.”