Season of Renewal Makes Good Time for Fresh Starts

Another May has come. The tree trimmers are out in force around my neighborhood, wrecking the place if you ask me. The schools have entered the final stretch before summer. And the fog has started rolling in along the coast.

Let’s see, what else does this spring bring?

The latest trial of the century--the Dally case--has reached an end of sorts. Or maybe it hasn’t. And the latest sad scandal of the day--the fall from judicial grace of Judge Robert C. Bradley--continues to unwind.

We pay an inordinate amount of attention to things like the Dally case and the misadventures of Judge Bradley. In a world that usually offers complex choices and few clear solutions to the biggest problems, these are subjects that permit us all to shoot from the hip.

Michael Dally and Diana Haun should get the death penalty. No, they shouldn’t. Judge Bradley should be banned from ever stepping into a courtroom again, except as a defendant. No, we should be more merciful than that.

When it’s all over, there’s usually not a great deal to be learned from the latest big murder case or the most recent local scandal. Like the coastal fog and summer break, we all know that murder and scandal will visit us again.

Still, there is a need for some assessment. It may be true that these have become our modern public circuses, little more than the distraction issues of the moment. But they also test our systems and our basic values, allowing us to see if we need a tune-up here or there.

Think back to all the judicial weirdness surrounding the O.J. Simpson case, and I hope you will agree that Ventura County’s judges acquitted themselves well in our much-smaller trial of the century.

There were some rough spots early on in terms of the difficult job of balancing free press and fair trial issues, but the late Judge Frederick Jones did a masterful overall job of maintaining the proper atmosphere in the trial of Diana Haun. Judge Charles Campbell followed that with an equally firm and fair approach in the Michael Dally trial.

The innovative approach of importing Santa Barbara jurors to neutralize the impact of the intense media coverage of the Dally case worked well in both trials in assuring a sense of fairness. Would the verdicts on guilt or innocence have been the same with Ventura County juries? Most likely. The actual death penalty decisions? A good question.

As usual, there was a bit more attention by the courts to protecting the rights of defendants than to courtroom access issues. We are glad that Judges Jones and Campbell allowed cameras in the courtroom on key occasions. However, daily access would have worked just as smoothly.

Michael Dally and Diana Haun? In the end, they turned on each other in a blaze of angry denunciations and name-calling, their cocaine-fueled love affair now as cold as the futures they both face for the duration of their lives. The Dally children? The tragic legacy left behind.

And then there was Judge Bradley.

While his colleagues were doing their best on the Dally case--a case that at one point was assigned to him--he was, quite simply, making a mess out of just about everything, clearly qualifying for membership in the legion of human beings with serious drinking problems who have gone before him.

And what are we to learn from that?

What we already knew, of course. That alcoholism can wreck a judge’s career and family life just as easily as anybody else’s. That too many of Judge Bradley’s friends and colleagues on the bench were just as inclined to try to excuse the problem as in every other case where alcohol or drugs turn one of us into a human wrecking ball.

For the moment, the Bradley children are victims of the judge’s misadventures. But it doesn’t need to stay that way. Their father has a lifetime ahead of him to try to make up for the past few months, and if he can stop drinking, he has a good chance.

That’s the nice thing about May. It is a time of rebirth, a chance to start things over again. We hope Judge Bradley makes the best of it.