Gordon Ringer; L.A. Judge Subpoenaed President Nixon

Gordon Ringer, veteran Los Angeles County Superior Court judge who became the first state court jurist in history to subpoena a sitting U.S. president, has died. He was 69.

Ringer, known throughout his adult life as a heavy smoker, even puffing cigarettes as he sat on the bench, died of emphysema Friday at his Long Beach home.

In legal circles, Ringer developed a reputation as brilliant, fair, courteous, tough but also compassionate, and with enough street smarts to identify with the suspects as well as the legal scholars and orators who came before him.

Few who knew Ringer were surprised, then, at his apparent audacity in ordering President Richard M. Nixon to appear in his Los Angeles courtroom to testify in February 1974. Ringer was presiding over the trial of Nixon’s former chief domestic affairs advisor, John D. Ehrlichman, and two former members of the White House plumbers unit, David Young and G. Gordon Liddy. The three men were charged with the 1971 Labor Day weekend break-in at the Beverly Hills office of Dr. Lewis J. Fielding, Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist, in a trial that became known as “Watergate West.”

When Ringer was informed that the president’s subpoena had not arrived in Washington a week after he issued it, the judge said with characteristic candor: “I’m rendered speechless.”

The subpoena was ultimately delivered, garnering national attention for Ringer, but Nixon never appeared in the Los Angeles court. A month later, Ringer dismissed the state criminal charges against the men and discharged the subpoena, yielding the case to federal courts as one involving “matters primarily of national interest.”

Ringer’s straight talk endeared him to members of the media covering his signal cases. But he never hesitated to lash out at a reporter any more than he did at a defendant or lawyer whom he considered out of line. In 1968, for example, the judge reacted furiously when a radio reporter testified kindly about Charles Manson follower Leslie Van Houten, hoping to persuade Ringer to modify her life sentence for murder.

“I’m about ready to explode!” the judge said. “The bias of this witness is so obvious. His misconception of his private civic function, together with his duties, obligations and rights under the 1st Amendment to the Constitution of the United States is so blatant that I think it would be a service to the cause of justice in this state if this witness were allowed to slip quietly off the witness stand.”

Van Houten’s sentence stood.

Among the judge’s other notable cases was that of Marvin Gay Sr., who fatally shot his son, singer Marvin Gaye, in 1984. Exhibiting his reputed compassion and fairness toward the 71-year-old retired minister, Ringer suspended a six-year prison term and placed him on five years’ probation, saying: “Sending [Gay] to prison or requiring any additional County Jail time would be a death sentence.”

The elder Gay died earlier this year.

Reacting to Ringer’s death, Los Angeles County Dist. Atty. Gil Garcetti told the Los Angeles Daily Journal, a legal newspaper, that Ringer “was an extremely bright man, one who was viewed by both sides as fair, open-minded and always in search of consensus.”

Los Angeles County Public Defender Mike Judge echoed that Ringer “earned a well-deserved reputation as a wise, practical and empathetic judge. He was trusted by all sides to handle the most serious cases.”

Born in New York, Ringer grew up in Los Angeles, received a degree in philosophy from UCLA, studied French in France (later translating a book titled “Royce’s Metaphysics” from French to English) and earned a law degree at USC. After going into private law practice, he pursued doctoral studies in Romance languages at UCLA, gaining a reading knowledge of Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, old French dialects, Latin, German and Old Norse.

After clerking for the Los Angeles Superior Court, he joined the state attorney general’s office, eventually heading its Los Angeles division.

Ringer, a nominal Democrat sometimes considered conservative on the law, was appointed to the bench in 1972 by Republican Gov. Ronald Reagan.

A widower, Ringer is survived by a son, Mark.