Judge’s Suspension Adds Drama to Court Race

The election for Superior Court won’t come until June but an extraordinary drama already surrounds the seat of Judge Robert Bradley.

Bradley, the only declared candidate for that seat, is recuperating in an alcohol-treatment center. Arrested on suspicion of drunk driving twice in one month, he showed up at work Tuesday apparently drunk. He was suspended from his duties and led from the building, his career in shambles.

If Bradley were to resign, Gov. Pete Wilson could appoint a replacement, who would then run in June with the advantage of incumbency. A spokesman for Wilson, however, said he doubted the governor would take that action so close to a scheduled vote.

Meanwhile, at least three strong contenders are in the wings. All say they are seriously considering a run--a commitment that can cost as much as $100,000.

Each is not only a veteran attorney, but an attorney who represents a distinct point of view.

Career prosecutor Kevin McGee is a member of the county’s law-and-order establishment--the complex of prosecutors and police whose endorsement has been crucial to most judicial candidates.

Gary Windom is a public defender--a lawyer whose work by its very nature always puts him at odds with prosecutors and often with police.

And Cathleen Drury is a specialist in family law, a discipline she and others say is neglected if not shunned on the current bench.

Candidates for the job, which pays $103,690 annually, must file their papers with county officials between Jan. 26 and Feb. 4.

Here’s a look at the potential candidates thus far.

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Kevin McGee has been second in command in the Ventura County district attorney’s office for the past three years, overseeing a staff of 90 prosecutors and more than 400 other employees.

A lawyer well-versed in criminal and civil law, McGee would become the third chief assistant district attorney since Bradley to move up to the Superior Court bench if elected.

And local attorneys say he has a strong chance of doing just that.

McGee expressed interest in the position last week, after Bradley checked into an alcohol-treatment center. McGee did not commit, but said he was weighing the decision and would decide “preferably sooner than later.”

“I’ve been approached by people in the legal community about running and I’m giving it very strong consideration,” McGee said during an interview last week. He has since declined to comment further.

McGee’s name has been circulated as a possible candidate for a judicial appointment for about a year. But sources say the 44-year-old Democrat may have been passed over because of pressure on the governor to appoint an attorney with extensive civil experience.

McGee is held in high esteem by his fellow prosecutors, who describe him as a compassionate supervisor who respectfully listens to the opinions of others--even if they differ from his own.

“Kevin is an extremely thoughtful and patient person,” said Chief Deputy Dist. Atty. Lela Henke-Dobroth, who has worked closely with McGee over the years.

“He is probably one of the most honest and forthright attorneys I have ever met,” she said. “He is open to listening to all sides of an issue and does keep an open mind. He would bring an extreme degree of integrity to the bench.”

But while praising McGee as an honest and no-nonsense lawyer, defense attorneys say the last thing the county needs is yet another prosecutor on the bench.

More than half of the county’s 27 judges were career prosecutors before being elected or appointed to the bench, and several others spent at least part of their pre-judicial careers in the district attorney’s office.

“My opinion has always been that we need more diversity on the bench,” said Ventura defense attorney James M. Farley, who ran unsuccessfully for the Superior Court in 1994.

Assistant Public Defender Duane Dammeyer agreed, saying he was reminded of the imbalance at Friday’s installation ceremony of the new presiding and assistant presiding judges.

There were only four women, one black and one Latino representing the 27 judges on the Superior and Municipal courts. And the majority, he said, were former deputy district attorneys.

“Where are the family law specialists on the bench? Where are the defense attorneys? It just seems to me to limit the bench to former prosecutors, you are getting a very narrow look compared to the diversity of the county,” Dammeyer said.

Ventura County civil attorneys have made the same argument.

Their efforts appear to have been persuasive. The last two appointments by the governor were given to former civil attorneys, one to the Superior Court and the other to the Municipal Court.

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But supporters of McGee point out that he is not a career prosecutor. McGee spent two years with a Los Angeles insurance-defense firm, taking a part-time position in 1982 in the Ventura County district attorney’s office. Civil attorneys say that makes him a more well-rounded candidate.

“I think that Kevin McGee is very well-respected,” said Oxnard attorney David Shain, former president of the bar association. “Kevin is a very reasonable person with a good mind.”

While echoing the call for diversity, Dammeyer could find few complaints with McGee personally.

“I think he has always been fair,” he said. “He doesn’t cheat you on discovery. He plays by the book.”

McGee was born in Imperial County, the fourth of six children, and grew up in the Riverside County city of Palm Desert.

In 1976 he received a bachelor’s degree in history from Loyola University in Los Angeles. He received his law degree from Loyola Law School and passed the State Bar in 1979.

McGee joined the district attorney’s office in 1982 and rose through the ranks handling misdemeanor and sexual-assault cases. He became a supervisor in 1988 and was elevated to the No. 2 position in the office six years later.

McGee lives in Newbury Park with his wife, Shelley, and their three children: Brian, 16, Danny, 14, and Katie, 10. Colleagues describe him as a family man who enjoys community sports and other activities with his children.

“He would make a fantastic judge,” said Deputy Dist. Atty. Michael Frawley, who has worked directly under McGee for several years. “He is very much a law-and-order guy. But his whole legal experience is steeped in seeking the truth. And I think that is what the public respects.”

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Gary Windom, a probable contender for Bradley’s post, acknowledges his current job could prove a liability. He has been a public defender for 13 years--a credential that many in conservative Ventura County might equate with being liberal and soft on crime.

On top of that, Windom is a Democrat seeking entry to a largely Republican establishment, but unlike McGee, Windom does not come with a set of preestablished law-and-order credentials. He also is an African American in a county where blacks account for less than 3% of the population. But Windom is betting that voters will see a need for diversity on a local bench composed mostly of white ex-prosecutors.

“I believe that being black does not hinder me as much as some people think, and being a Democrat doesn’t hinder me as much as some would hope,” he said.

“But there’s a common misconception about the duties of public defenders. The public doesn’t understand we’re an integral part of the legal community, that we’re here to make sure the constitutional principles that apply to criminal law are actually looked at, considered and followed.”

Still, many Ventura County voters have shied away from defense attorneys as judges and favored candidates who have the backing of law enforcement.

When Windom ran for a Municipal Court seat in 1992, he lost by a 26% margin to Edward Brodie, a prosecutor who had been a California Highway Patrol sergeant. Brodie was endorsed by Dist. Atty. Michael D. Bradbury and then-Sheriff John Gillespie.

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One attorney summed up the practical requirements for winning a judge’s seat in Ventura County this way:

“You need endorsements from the district attorney and the sheriff. And you need enough money to get your campaign material into people’s mailboxes at the same time as the absentee ballots. Period. End of story.”

Windom, 48, says the breadth of his experience could sway voters as well. He was a civil attorney for 10 years before being recruited into the public defender’s office in 1984. He teaches at Ventura College of Law, serves on two statewide criminal justice task forces, and is involved in a variety of community activities.

Besides, he contends, a “judicial temperament” is more than the sum of entries on a resume.

“The question is: ‘Will you follow the law and have the integrity to treat people like human beings--even those in total despair, and mete out decisions within the bounds of the law?’ ”

After a few years as a public defender, Windom turned down an opportunity to join the prosecutor’s staff. That decision pleased his boss, Public Defender Ken Clayman.

“Gary has forgotten more about the rules of evidence and how to try cases than most people learn in a lifetime,” Clayman said. “He exhibits intelligence and fair-mindedness, and he’d bring versatility and diversity to the bench.”

Some of the prosecutors with whom Windom has sparred praise him.

“He was very professional and very forthright with me,” Deputy Dist. Atty. Jacqueline Wise said. “He was very pleasant to work with and he was genuinely concerned for the victims.”

Wise and Windom opposed each other in the case of Silverio Ambriz, the El Rio man who in one night forced four female drivers off California 118 and raped one of them in a lemon orchard. Ambriz was convicted Dec. 11.

But some prosecutors are bitter over Windom’s role in the defense of Spencer Brasure.

Brasure is one of two men accused of torturing and killing a 20-year-old Redondo Beach man in a remote Ventura County campground. The two allegedly bound Anthony Guest, stapled wood to his ear, glued shards of broken glass in his mouth, and set him on fire. From his jail cell, Brasure allegedly wrote to friends demanding the death of five witnesses he called “the main rats.” Prosecutors claim Windom and Deputy Public Defender Robert Willey supplied Brasure with police reports listing the names, addresses and telephone numbers of those witnesses.

Brasure’s trial is set for February.

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In November, a judge declined to remove Windom and Willey from the case, but they removed themselves days later.

Windom said his office staff members had been winnowing through about 8,000 pages of documents related to the case and missed a police report identifying the witnesses. Normally, all identifying information would have been blacked out before clients could see it, but the report had accidentally been tucked into some medical records.

Windom said the public defender’s office begged off the case because of a legal conflict that had nothing to do with those documents.

One prosecutor not involved in the case contended the leak to Brasure was deliberate. Windom, however, called that claim “an outright lie” and “a political ploy.”

“Whoever said that is totally lacking in the facts of the case,” Windom said.

One of the more notorious of Windom’s recent cases involved the Los Angeles Police Department’s Special Investigations Section, a much-criticized unit that has been dubbed a “death squad.” Officers from the SIS tracked two men into Ventura County, watched them rob a liquor store in Newbury Park, and in a gunfight shot one of the men 27 times. The survivor, Robert Cunningham, was paralyzed from the waist down. Last year he was convicted of first-degree murder for provoking the shootout.

“The true murderers in this case are walking out of the courtroom today,” Windom said after the jury returned its verdict. “That unit must be stopped.”

Windom grew up in Oxnard and went to UC-Santa Barbara. It was there he met and married Elizabeth, his wife of 28 years. A Camarillo resident, he has four daughters ranging from 8 to 26 years old, and two grandchildren.

After graduating from Marquette University Law School and practicing civil law for 10 years, he took a 56% pay cut to join the public defender’s office.

“I decided I wanted to be a judge,” he said, “and I needed experience in criminal law.”

Since then, he has sought an appointment to the bench from Govs. George Deukmejian and Pete Wilson. Both Republican governors passed him over, an act Windom attributes to his Democratic affiliation.

Windom is a deacon at St. Paul’s Baptist Church and chairman of the local chapter of the Black Americans Political Action Committee. He has been a driving force behind establishing a mentoring program for minority teenagers in Oxnard and has been involved in many youth activities.

“I don’t play golf,” Windom said. “I don’t play tennis. What I do is work with kids.”

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If she decides to run, Cathleen Drury would make family law her key issue--just as it was when she took home 43% of the vote in a 1996 contest against then-prosecutor Don Coleman.

Coleman made it to the Superior Court, but Drury’s respectable performance showed she had struck a chord with voters. Her appeal was simple: Courts are not just places where criminals are sent away but places where families are broken or mended. Yet family cases were the least coveted among the judges and few of them have experience in family law.

In an interview last week, she said that would remain at the center of any campaign she might run.

“The issues are the same,” she said. “Diversity of opinions and backgrounds among the judges is critical.”

Family law gets short shrift in the courts, she contends. Most of the judges are former deputy district attorneys who are unprepared for the rigors of complex divorce cases and child-custody disputes, she said.

“Prosecutors represent the people of the state,” she said. “They don’t have a lot of experience in dealing with the idiosyncrasies of individuals.”

The president of the East County Bar Assn., Drury, 45, has herself been through two divorces. One of them left her feeling so betrayed by the system that it prompted her to go to law school.

Drury’s children, a 23-year-old daughter and an 11-year-old son, live with her in Thousand Oaks.

“She’d bring life experience to the bench,” said Diane Rowell, a family law specialist in Thousand Oaks. “A single mother raising children will have a different life experience than a 40- or 50-year-old man from an intact home.”

David Shain, a former president of the Ventura County Bar Assn., also was enthusiastic about Drury.

“She’s a fine attorney,” Shain said. “She’s a person who feels passionately and strongly about her clients, a person with good general civil experience who would certainly make a fine addition to the bench.”

He acknowledged, however, that Drury could face tough sledding in a race against a prosecutor.

“If we are to use history as a guide, one would have to conclude it would be an uphill fight,” he said. “Given the political makeup of this county, prosecutors tend to be very well-received.”

Drury graduated second in her class from San Fernando Valley College of Law (now the University of La Verne) in 1983. She has specialized in family law since the mid-1980s and also serves as a judge pro tem, or a substitute judge, handling family cases, civil cases and small claims.

She helped found the East County Bar Assn. and chaired the East County Courthouse Development Committee.

Meanwhile, for six months in 1994 and 1995, she co-hosted a morning drive-time talk show with Dick Whittington on KNJO radio in Thousand Oaks.

Drury, who listed no party affiliation in voter records, said she probably would not make up her mind on running until shortly before the Feb. 4 filing deadline. “I remember how grueling it was in 1996,” she said. “The main factor for me is whether I really want to gear up and set that kind of schedule again.”