In Kline’s Case, the Dots Don’t Seem to Connect

By most accounts, Ronald Kline was a fine judge.

Oh, the judge is alive and still on the November ballot for reelection, but it’s safe to put his career in the past tense--the public tends to frown on people charged with possessing child pornography on a home computer. After that charge came to light, a 37-year-old man came forward and alleged that Kline molested him 25 years ago. As a result, authorities charged Kline with a single count of child molestation.

The judge, 61, has pleaded not guilty but said this week he wants his name taken off the ballot. The obvious question is why he didn’t think of that months ago, or, better yet, simply resign?

I’ll take a wild guess the answer is that he has bills to pay and remains on paid administrative leave unless or until he’s removed from the bench.

That stuff will play itself out. A more intriguing proposition has intrigued me over the past few months since his arrest: Namely, nothing the judge is accused of involves his conduct on the bench or how he did his job. No one suspected a thing.

I don’t know what kind of connection I’d expect to find between his public and private lives. But does it strike anyone else that Kline, while being accused of something society recoils at, handled his job with aplomb? Should it bother us that we can’t, even in retrospect, make the case that his alleged outside behavior affected his courtroom behavior?

I asked a former judge if I’m the weird one, but he eased my mind a bit by acknowledging the unusual dichotomy.

“In hindsight, a couple of people said some things were a little erratic, that there were days when he seemed unhappy about something from the moment he took the bench,” the former judge says. “But we’ve had a lot of judges ... whose mood swings were greater than his.”

The former judge, a one-time colleague of Kline’s, didn’t want to be identified because of the sensitive nature of the situation. I asked him if, even now, anyone could connect the dots.

“Nobody has come up with anything,” he said. “Everybody is saying, ‘Should I have seen anything?’ But they thought the mood swings were just attributable to him not getting enough sleep or his favorite ballclub having lost a game. In general, the legal community didn’t see this coming and did not have a clue.”

I asked the former judge how any “secret” criminal life would ever reveal itself in a judge’s behavior or rulings.

“If a guy was abusive to attorneys, called them names and gave them a hard time, and then you found out he was beating his wife at night, you could see the connection there,” he said. Or, if a judge acted inappropriately around female attorneys and later were discovered to have sex-related crimes in his background, courtroom observers might berate themselves for not making the connection. Or, the judge added, some unusual social behaviors might send up a flare.

Kline’s comportment never raised any concerns.

In a sense, his caseload of commercial litigation was so far removed from the allegations that have surfaced that it would have provided the perfect cover. So did the very nature of being a judge, which leads many on the bench to maintain a fair amount of privacy and eschew a lot of socializing.

The practical reality is that Kline, if found guilty, will lose his judgeship simply by being a felon. That doesn’t address the issue of whether someone who looks at pornographic pictures is automatically disqualified as a competent judge of cases involving complex civil litigation.

Such questions, I realize, are abstract musings. In the real world, Kline’s goose is cooked.

“You know why it seems weird?” the former judge said, speaking generically, not of Kline. “It’s because we traditionally put judges on pedestals. They make decisions on which our lives turn, so we want them to be wise, all-knowing and conscientious. We give them so much power, that we hope they are that way. So if you find out that someone who seemed to be doing the wise, conscientious and all-knowing thing just fine turns out to be a nut case, that scares us a little bit.”

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Dana Parsons’ column appears Wednesdays, Fridays and Sundays. Readers may reach Parsons by calling (714) 966-7821 or by writing to him at The Times’ Orange County edition, 1375 Sunflower Ave., Costa Mesa, CA 92626, or by e-mail to dana.parsons@latimes.com.