Perren’s Candidacy Surprises Only Him

For an appellate court justice who spends his days dispensing legal opinions, Steven Z. Perren has suddenly become a man of few words.

Last week, Gov. Gray Davis announced he was submitting four names--including Perren’s--to a State Bar committee to consider as possible successors to the late California Supreme Court Justice Stanley Mosk, who died in June.

Perren, a 59-year-old moderate Democrat who for nearly two decades has operated in one of the state’s most conservative counties, has earned wide respect along with a reputation as a sharp and hard-working jurist.

He received a rating of “exceptionally well-qualified,” the highest possible, from a bar evaluating committee when Davis appointed him to the appeals court in 1999. The evaluation was based, in part, on intellectual capacity, experience, fairness, work ethic, courage and integrity.

But don’t ask him to talk about any of it.

“I don’t talk ‘me’ very well, although I suspect my reputation is to the contrary,” Perren said last week, sitting behind a cluttered desk at the 2nd District Court of Appeal in Ventura.

Perren said he was surprised by the governor’s decision to include him on the list of candidates, all moderate Democratic judges with solid legal credentials.

Those who know him were not, saying Perren’s experience makes him an excellent candidate.

On the Ventura County Superior Court, Perren presided over civil, juvenile and criminal court matters, including three capital murder trials. Two of those cases ended with jury verdicts in favor of death, and Perren imposed the sentence.

Since his appointment to the Court of Appeal, he has written five published opinions on issues ranging from land-use planning to employment law. Five months ago, he issued an opinion reversing a Los Angeles judge who rejected a defense motion challenging the exclusion of African American jurors on a criminal trial.

“I think this is something he is just made to do,” said appellate attorney Wendy Lascher, who handles cases across the state and is familiar with Perren’s decisions.

“He is a very thoughtful person and he likes to get into the policy of things,” she said. “He doesn’t really have a track record as an appellate justice so far. But he has voted to overturn actions on the Superior Court, and that in itself makes him somewhat unique.”

Lawyers and judges who know Perren, including the toughest law-and-order prosecutors, say he would be an exceptional choice for the high court.

“He is an extraordinary person who has certainly earned this distinction, not only as a prosecutor and an attorney in private practice and a judge, but as a contributor to the community,” said Ventura County Dist. Atty. Michael D. Bradbury, who has known Perren since the late 1960s.

“My esteem for the governor has gone up immeasurably,” said Superior Court Judge Charles W. Campbell Jr., a Republican and former prosecutor who has known Perren for 30 years.

“Somebody is advising him well on this because he couldn’t do better,” Campbell said of the governor. “It would seem to me that you would want someone with a broad range of experience and who is a big thinker. I think Steve meets that perfectly.”

A grandson of Russian immigrants who landed at Ellis Island in the late 1890s, Perren grew up in the Wilshire District of Los Angeles and later North Hollywood. His father owned a Jewish delicatessen in Burbank.

“He was the only game in town,” the son remembers fondly.

In 1967, Perren graduated from UCLA with a bachelor’s degree in history and a law degree. He married his wife, Diane, and several months later headed to Vietnam with the U.S. Army Signal Corps.

Before shipping out, Perren stopped in Ventura to visit a friend from law school who introduced him to George Eskin, the assistant district attorney at the time.

“I told him when he got back he had a job,” Eskin recalled.

Perren took him up on the offer after returning from the war in 1969. He spent about four years in the Ventura County district attorney’s office before going into private practice, with an emphasis on personal injury and insurance defense cases.

In 1982, Gov. Jerry Brown appointed him to the Superior Court.

Ten years later, Perren handed down his first death sentence after presiding over an emotionally charged case involving the kidnapping, rape and strangulation of an 8-year-old Northridge boy, Paul Bailly, whose body was on set fire near Simi Valley.

“The monstrousness of this killing cannot be overstated,” Perren said when sentencing Gregory Scott Smith, a former day-care aide from Canoga Park. “The life of an innocent and utterly defenseless child was destroyed.”

Six years later, Perren tackled another volatile case. Michael Raymond Johnson was accused of shooting Sheriff’s Deputy Peter Aguirre Jr. at point-blank range as he responded to a domestic disturbance call in Meiners Oaks.

Tensions ran high. Perren implored the attorneys on both sides to keep their emotions in check and focus on the task at hand.

“This case is about a terrible crime and a terrible loss,” Perren said. “It is about Michael Raymond Johnson and the death of Peter Aguirre. There is animus between counsel. That’s no secret. I regret that. But to the best of my ability I want to do what is just as to what Michael Johnson is convicted of.”

Although he handled a variety of legal matters as a Superior Court judge, Perren’s passion belonged to the Juvenile Court, where he spent several years dispensing justice to troubled Ventura County teens.

He played a major role in the county’s efforts to secure funding for a new $65-million juvenile justice center to replace a rundown and overcrowded juvenile hall. The new center will bring courtrooms, detention wards, classrooms and counseling services under one roof.

It will be named for Perren.

“The bricks and mortar soon to stand here will afford a child a safe place, a time out, in which he or she can get the education so far lost to them and can begin to reform the behaviors that brought them here,” Perren said during a groundbreaking speech in June.

“This is a place,” he said, “that says to the kid ‘we care,’ not a falling-down fortress that screams of its indifference.”

At the time of the governor’s announcement last week, Perren was just starting to find his footing on the appellate court.

For example, in a March reversal of a criminal case, Perren wrote that the court erred when it rejected a motion by a defense attorney challenging the exclusion of African American jurors in the trial of a man accused of stealing a television.

The man was convicted and received a prison term of 26 years to life. His attorney appealed, arguing that the court failed to force prosecutors to justify the exclusion of black men when they were picking a jury.

The trial judge ruled that the challenge could not be brought because African Americans did not constitute an identifiable class under the law. And he refused to allow prosecutors to state for the record why African Americans were being excused.

Perren said the trial court erred in both instances.

“Although we give great deference to trial courts when they distinguish bona fide reasons for exclusions from sham ones . . . exclusions may not be made on improper group bias,” he wrote in reversing the judgment against the defendant.

The State Bar’s evaluations will be completed within six weeks. A three-member commission headed by Chief Justice Ronald M. George will approve the choice.

In addition to Perren, the finalists are 5th District Court of Appeal Justice Dennis Cornell in Fresno, U.S. District Judge Carlos Moreno in Los Angeles and Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Dennis Perluss.

Acknowledging that it makes him sound like an Academy Award nominee, Perren says he is grateful just to be considered.

“Truthfully,” he said, “it is an honor.”