Judicial Recommendations

Thankfully, negative campaigning is rare in contests for judgeships. Lawyers’ codes of professional ethics limit what they can say about their opponents; usually, the candidates rightly concentrate on proclaiming their own accomplishments.

But it is easy to get lost in the crowd of contenders for all offices when campaigns take the high road. It is telling that many lawyers responding to an Orange County Bar Assn. poll last spring said they did not know much about several judicial hopefuls. If the lawyers themselves are unfamiliar with the candidates, average voters are likely to know even less.

On election day, voters across the county will pick two new Superior Court judges. Voters in South County will pick a new judge for the Municipal Court in Laguna Niguel. None of the candidates is an incumbent, and all have been lawyers for a decade or more. Two aspirants for Superior Court are currently Municipal Court judges.

In Office No. 17 of the Superior Court, we prefer Nancy A. Pollard. She has been an attorney in Orange County for more than a dozen years and has handled a variety of cases.

In this county, there is no such thing as a judge who is “soft on crime,” and Pollard pledges to enforce fully the spirit of the three-strikes law. At the same time, her experience in representing political asylum seekers early in her career has made her sensitive to the rights of the powerless. Judges need to be able to see the court through others’ eyes. For many defendants, who are presumed not guilty when they walk into court, the power arrayed against them in the form of police and deputy district attorneys can seem awesome.

Pollard is also a veteran trustee of the Coast Community College district and is currently its president. That gives her an extra dimension of experience serving the community.

In Office No. 22 of the Superior Court, Carla M. Singer has been an able Municipal Court judge and gets the edge for elevation to the higher court. She has been a district attorney’s investigator, fraud investigator in the state attorney general’s office and judge for nearly six years. She has also been a deputy district attorney in Orange County and has been endorsed by her former colleagues’ organization.

In South County Municipal Court, we prefer Carl Biggs, a deputy district attorney who finished first among the six candidates in the March primary but did not get the 50% needed to avoid a runoff. Biggs is knowledgeable and has valuable experience as a prosecutor in the county’s anti-gang TARGET program. He is now a supervising deputy district attorney in Juvenile Court.

In his campaign, Biggs properly has also beaten the drum for increasing the number of judges in the Laguna Niguel courthouse. Despite the enormous growth in South County population, the court houses four Municipal Court judges, the same number as 15 years ago.