Lone Justice

During his long career as a federal judge, Terry J. Hatter has stood firm in his conviction to protect individuals when he thinks government is unjust.

He has taken on the U.S. Armed Forces, forcing the Navy to readmit a gay soldier and ordering the Pentagon to stop discriminating against gays.

He has challenged the Immigration and Naturalization Service, blocking the deportation of 20,000 Central American immigrants seeking asylum here.

He has chastised the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department in a ruling for allowing deputies “motivated by racial hostility” to “intimidate and ridicule blacks and Hispanics” and brutalize minority suspects.

He has ruled against the city’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority, siding with passengers who fought a bus fare hike they believed discriminated against low-income riders.

He has blasted harsh federal sentencing mandates and complained that prosecutors and Los Angeles police use them rather than less restrictive state charges to win long prison terms for black and Latino drug dealers, while whites go free.

And on Friday, he stymied a federal probe of corruption at the Port of Los Angeles by dismissing bribery charges against a former import executive because the government’s star witness--an INS agent--lied in court.

But none of Hatter’s crusades has lasted as long or provoked as much emotion as his quixotic odyssey to keep a convicted drug dealer from serving the long prison term federal law says he deserves.

The Pacoima man, Bobbie Marshall, has by all appearances reformed since his arrest.

And over seven years, through a long series of courtroom standoffs, Hatter has steadfastly refused to sentence Marshall to the prison term that prosecutors say is the shortest sentence allowed by law and good conscience.

“This is probably the most frustrating situation that I have found myself in [during] some 16 years on the federal bench,” Hatter said during a hearing on the case last fall. It was one of several times that he had ordered the prosecution and defense to negotiate a term shorter than the nine years Marshall faces.

With three prior drug convictions, Marshall faced a 24-year sentence when he was arrested in 1989 for selling crack cocaine from his mother’s home, across the street from a Pacoima elementary school.

Marshall agreed to plead guilty in exchange for a 14-year term. But while he was out on bail, he embarked on a course that to Hatter made even that reduced sentence seem like a miscarriage of justice.

Marshall began volunteering at local schools, parks and churches, doing everything from painting and cleaning to organizing young gang members against violence and drugs. He became a churchgoer, and a counselor to young men in Pacoima’s roughest neighborhoods.

In what even prosecutors concede has been a profound transformation, the high school dropout and drug addict became a respected community activist.

And by the time he appeared before Hatter for sentencing, Marshall’s list of supporters included some of the northeast Valley’s most prominent and respected citizens--ministers, school principals, a U.S. congressman and a police commander. Even prosecutors now say Marshall has been a “model citizen” since his arrest.

Impressed with those testimonials, Hatter allowed him to remain free on bail and refused to approve the 14-year prison term.

“This man [Marshall] is working in the community with young Hispanic and black males . . . the ones who are most at risk, the ones who need help the most,” Hatter told the court. “He is providing some help to that community. And if I can provide them with just a little bit of hope, then I will have at least lived up to my oath. And the only way I can do that is if Mr. Marshall gets out there and continues doing what he is doing.”

He sent the U.S. Attorney’s office and Marshall’s defense lawyer, Denise Meyer, back to the bargaining table, resulting in the agreement by prosecutors to a nine-year term, giving Marshall credit for the years spent doing community work since his arrest.

But because they are bound by federal sentencing rules that mandate stiff prison terms in crack cocaine cases, prosecutors refused a shorter sentence.

That was not good enough for Hatter.

In March 1994 he sentenced Marshall to half that time, 4 1/2 years. Marshall agreed to be taken into custody in May 1994 and was sent to Terminal Island Federal Prison.

The following December, a federal appeals court dismissed that sentence, ruling that Hatter had no right to modify the plea bargain.

Since then, Hatter has publicly agonized over the Marshall case, railing in court that the federal government, in its quest to look tough on crime, is slamming the door on convicts who might find redemption by helping their communities.

“The White House does its things for its political reasons, the Congress does it, and the public suffers while they both talk about being tough on crime,” Hatter told the court earlier this year, as he delayed sentencing once again. “And we just know that there are not the good-faith efforts to do something about the root causes of crime.

“I will not be a party to this injustice,” he said. “The Congress cannot make me do this, the president cannot make me do this.”

Legal observers say Hatter’s conduct in this case is extraordinary, but his passion is no surprise to those who know the jurist well.

Appointed to the federal bench in 1979 by President Jimmy Carter, Hatter is known for his great integrity, for not being afraid to let his personal convictions influence his decisions.

“Judge Hatter . . . is a man of great intelligence and independence who feels very strongly about this matter,” said Richard Drooyan, chief of the criminal division of the U.S. Attorney’s office in Los Angeles. “He’s not afraid of expressing those views and acting upon those views.”

During his legal career, Hatter, 63, has served as a public defender in Chicago, where he grew up, and as a federal prosecutor in San Francisco in the 1960s. He spent several years in legal and administrative positions with federal anti-poverty and legal aid agencies, including as head of the Western Center on Law and Poverty. He also worked for former Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley as the city’s first director of criminal justice planning.

Though he has built a reputation as one of the region’s most liberal jurists, lawyers who have argued cases in his court say that view is incomplete.

“I think he’s far too complex a man to characterize as a liberal or a conservative,” said Steven D. Clymer, a former federal prosecutor here who now teaches at Cornell University’s law school in New York. “He’s a man who takes his job extremely seriously, . . . who tries very hard to be fair.”

Hatter has been a harsh critic of federal sentencing mandates that take discretion from judges in an effort to toughen and standardize prison terms. But Clymer said that Hatter has carried that criticism too far with his refusal to sentence Marshall.

“I sympathize with him because he thinks [the sentencing rules] are unfair,” Clymer said. “But I think the judge is wrong to refuse to follow the guidelines. Congress has the right and the ability to tell him how to sentence people. If the statutes require a certain sentence, . . . it’s out of Judge Hatter’s power to oppose that.

“He may be right that it’s an unduly harsh sentence in this case, but he’s wrong not to stick to it.”

Hatter would not agree to be interviewed about the Marshall case, but his pronouncements from the bench make clear that to him, getting Bobbie Marshall out of jail is as much about justice for the Pacoima community as it is about fairness to the convicted drug dealer.

“I’m concerned about the community getting a break,” Hatter told attorneys in 1992, when he agreed to let Marshall remain free on bail. “He is now providing some help to a community that needs a break. And I’m not going to dismiss that.”

Hatter, who is black, grew up on the South Side of Chicago during an era when the city was still so segregated that he could not accompany his light-skinned mother, who was an attorney, into many of the city’s establishments.

He has felt the sting of racism--he was once refused service at an East St. Louis, Ill. lunch counter, even though he was wearing his Army uniform at the time--and the burden of being one of few black judges on the federal bench weighs heavily upon him.

“I grew up in a community such as that in which [Marshall] lives now,” Hatter told the court, in a 1992 hearing on the case. “I don’t think the president of the United States, I don’t think most congressmen . . . understand these kinds of communities.

“I know the pain that [Marshall] has inflicted upon the community. But I also know what he has done to try to alleviate that pain and the hope that he is bringing to people. I can’t overlook that.”

Hatter told Marshall that his efforts to reduce his sentence may fail, “But if you’re able to save one child, keep one person from having the horrendous record that you have, then it will be worth it.

“Someone is going to have to take some chances. I’m willing to take that kind of a chance.”

But Hatter last week acknowledged that he may have carried his protest as far as it can go.

His choices now, when court reconvenes on Jan. 13, are to agree to the nine-year sentence, set the case for trial or send Marshall to another judge, who might well impose a harsher term.

“The judge has indicated that he will go ahead and sentence Mr. Marshall on Jan. 13,” Drooyan said.

Marshall’s attorney intends to appeal to President Clinton for a commutation of that sentence, and Drooyan said his office will not oppose that request. But it stands little chance of succeeding, both sides admit.

That means Marshall, who has been in federal prison since May 1994, will probably spend the next seven years behind bars.