David M. Schacter dies at 68; presided over several high-profile trials

David M. Schacter, a retired Los Angeles County Superior Court judge who presided over several high-profile trials in his 21 years on the bench and publicly feuded with the media over access to his courtroom during one, has died. He was 68.

Schacter died Feb. 25 at his home in Winnetka after a two-year battle with Parkinson’s disease, said his daughter, Danna.

In 1996, Schacter presided over a trial in which actor Clint Eastwood was sued by his ex-girlfriend Sondra Locke. The case led to a landmark decision by a California appellate court and eventually the state Supreme Court, after Schacter ruled to close the courtroom to the public and the media for proceedings held in the jury’s absence. He also ordered that transcripts be kept under seal until after the trial.

The ensuing higher court decisions that overturned Schacter’s ruling marked the first time courts recognized that the public and press had a constitutional right to access civil trials. Before the rulings, those rights had been established only for criminal trials.

At the time of the trial, which took place in the wake of the highly publicized O.J. Simpson case, Schacter called his decision to close his courtroom a “very, very small intrusion on the 1st Amendment.” He said the measure was necessary to ensure a fair trial for the parties by preventing the jury from being influenced by information from the media. Some of his colleagues on the L.A. bench stood by him, saying the appellate decision had “the potential for broad, adverse impact on the court’s operation.”

More recently, Schacter oversaw the civil trial that followed actor Robert Blake’s acquittal in the murder his wife. After the jury found Blake liable for the death of Bonny Lee Bakley, Schacter denied a request by the actor’s attorneys to throw out the $30-million verdict because of alleged jury misconduct.

Before he was appointed to the bench in 1985 by then-Gov. George Deukmejian, Schacter prosecuted obscenity and other sex-related crimes for the L.A. city attorney’s office and worked on maritime law for the Long Beach city attorney’s office. During his time as a deputy city attorney for Los Angeles, he successfully argued a case before the U.S. Supreme Court defending the city’s prosecution of tape-recording piracy. He also served as commissioner on the Santa Monica municipal court from 1981 to 1985.

Colleagues and family members remembered Schacter as a skilled attorney and judge with a sense of humor. To keep his courtroom amused, he once placed a skeleton in the jury box to represent a juror who had died of boredom, his daughter recalled.

“When he was trying a case, there would be a crowd of attorneys in there watching him --one, to learn, and two, to be entertained,” said Kenneth Lee Chotiner, a retired L.A. County Superior Court judge who was a friend of Schacter and worked with him in the L.A. city attorney’s office.

Schacter was born in 1941 in Toronto to a father who was in sales and a mother who did secretarial work. As a boy, he and his family moved from Canada to Southern California, where he spent most of his youth and eventually became a U.S. citizen, his family said.

In 1963 he received his bachelor’s degree in English from what is now Cal State Northridge and in 1968 his law degree from San Fernando Valley College of Law.

His family said he was an inventor who held a patent for a VHS-related mechanism and applied for a patent for a board game. He was also an avid collector of British lead toy soldiers and vintage cameras, which he recently donated to the Burbank Historical Society and the American Society of Cinematographers, respectively, family members said.

In addition to his daughter, Schacter is survived by his wife of 41 years, Marcia.

Services were private.

victoria.kim@latimes.com