County Bar Pushing for a Non-Prosecutor to Fill Judge’s Post

After years of naming former prosecutors as judges in Ventura County, Gov. Pete Wilson appears to be weighing the appointment of a civil lawyer to replace retiring Superior Court Judge Charles McGrath.

Ventura County Bar Assn. members say Wilson’s appointment secretary and a state nominee-review commission have been circulating the names of two candidates for McGrath’s spot--neither a prosecutor.

And that bucks a trend that saw four of the past five judicial appointments go to top assistants of Dist. Atty. Michael D. Bradbury.

But while neither of the governor’s two newest candidates was ever a prosecutor, one may not be so far afield from the pattern.

Municipal Judge John R. Smiley is a former civil attorney who has earned his experience in criminal law on the bench. But the other candidate is civil attorney Glen Reiser, who routinely defends the district attorney’s office and Bradbury himself in civil lawsuits.

At least one Ventura County bar member expressed some concern about the Reiser-Bradbury connection but agreed with fellow members that the bench needs more civil experience.

“It doesn’t sit well with me to have the prosecutor’s attorney hearing cases, hearing my cases,” said Louis B. Samonsky, a veteran criminal defense attorney.

“Some of the best judges on the bench are former prosecutors,” Samonsky added. “But I do believe a diversity of background is certainly a helpful thing to have, because [civil attorneys] are more receptive to the problems that private counsel has in dealing with clients.”

That philosophy--and longtime frustration with the minority status of former civil attorneys on the bench--drove the local bar to push hard for a non-prosecutor this time around.

“When you’ve got 16 out of 28 judges who were straight from the D.A.’s office and several more who were government lawyers without civil experience, you’re not representing the bar,” said member Ron Harrington.

Harrington and bar President John Howard met with Wilson’s appointment secretary, John Davies, for nearly an hour in July to plead their case.

“It was a long meeting and it was very instructive, and he made a point of . . . emphasizing that he knew what we were talking about,” Howard said recently. “He gave us a tremendous amount of time to make our case, and it sounded to us like he was going to recommend the governor pick someone with a civil background.”

However, there may be other candidates under consideration.

Sources say the prime candidate from the prosecutor’s office, Assistant Dist. Atty. Kevin McGee, is not likely to be named to fill this vacancy. McGee and Bradbury have declined to comment.

But other candidates have applications still on file in Wilson’s office, and all with strong civil backgrounds: Municipal Judge David R. Long, Oxnard attorney Richard Regnier and Ventura law partners Byron Lawler and Henry J. Walsh.

According to retired attorney George Eskin, a member of the State Bar of California’s Commission on Judicial Nominees Evaluation, which reviews candidates, this is how the judge-picking process works:

Judicial Appointment Secretary Davies sifts through the nominees and applicants and forwards their names to the bar’s evaluation commission--a sort of peer review committee of bar members and citizens from around the state.

It sends out questionnaires to lawyers, friends and potential critics of the candidates, asking them to comment and rate the candidates’ ability, experience, temperament, reputation, work ethic, health and biases.

Commission members then collate and review the questionnaires, talk with the people who answered them and issue a report known as a “blurb.”

The blurb contains raw statistics from the comment questionnaires, it lists the candidate’s strengths and weaknesses, and it rates the candidate anywhere from “exceptionally well qualified” to “not qualified,” Eskin said.

Then the commission forwards the blurbs to Davies, who sorts them, interviews the leading candidates and recommends appointments to Wilson, Eskin said.

The commission is more concerned with evaluating the candidates’ qualifications than their politics “or whether a person’s a prosecutor,” Eskin said.

But he also noted, “I know the governor’s office is sensitive to the fact that there has been criticism around the state--not just in Ventura County--that between Gov. Wilson and Gov. Deukmejian, prosecutors were the prominent choice for judicial appointments. I wouldn’t be surprised if the governor appointed someone from private practice.”

For their part, the two newest candidates have differing reasons for pursuing McGrath’s Superior Court seat.

Reiser said he applied for a judicial opening in 1991 and was offered a judgeship in 1993 but had to turn it down.

“I was asked if I was still interested, but I would have had to close my law office in three days,” Reiser recalled. “I couldn’t do that.”

Reiser said he hopes for a judgeship because of “the civic duty, and the ability to offer a service to the communities and to the bar. . . . And the challenge.”

Municipal Judge Smiley is already handling some of the duties of a Superior Court judge under a statewide court-consolidation plan designed to pare the huge backlog of civil cases and make the system more efficient.

But he said he would look forward to handling more Superior Court duties, such as felonies, probate cases and juvenile offenders.

“It’s like anything else, when you have the ability to do a variety of things that were not traditionally available to Municipal Court judges,” Smiley said. “I am quite content being a trial judge, and would simply like to be able to expand the kinds of things I could do as a Superior Court judge.”

For Byron Lawler, a civil lawyer since 1964, a shot at McGrath’s post is an opportunity to bring parity to a bench that is heavy with former prosecutors.

“There are many judges on the bench today in Ventura County that have criminal law backgrounds,” Lawler said. “And it’s very difficult for them to switch into civil matters and handle them with the knowledge and experience someone with a civil background would have. . . . I felt the bench should have people on it who were civil practitioners who had a great deal of experience.”