In the courtroom of the presiding judge of Alameda County, California, hangs a photo collage of all of the members of the Alameda County bar in the early 1950s. I forget the year, but there aren’t more than about 50 mug shots in a sepia-toned photo about 16 by 20 inches. There are several future judges, including a couple who came back to Alameda County after serving with the prosecution at the Nuremberg trials.
Still legendary among these is Thomas Lester, aka T.L., aka Les Foley, for many years the only municipal court judge in southern Alameda County. Foley was a famous drinker, a noted taskmaster and such a capricious judge that you never knew what he would do next. When I came along, he had already retired, but the stories about him were legion. Bill Moore, my partner for a time, told me about a long, six-martini lunch with Foley, followed by an afternoon court appearance in front of him, during which the judge loudly dressed him down for some real or imagined fault.
Most of the stories are in a similar vein: Foley throws a tantrum, somebody is fully embarrassed in front of an entire courtroom full of people and the story is wildly funny, but only in retrospect. Evidently nobody took serious offense, as they kept drinking with him. The bench-bar was a community, after all; a brotherhood.
(A currently sitting judge, a generation younger than Foley but old enough to have appeared in front of him many times, has agreed to provide me with some of the more interesting stories. I’ll post them here if he keeps his promise.)
I wasn’t admitted to the bar until 1979, but even then, courts in Alameda County still had a small-town feel about them. Most attorneys knew each other and most judges knew most attorneys. Today, there are too many attorneys in Alameda County to know even a fraction of them, and too many “new” judges whom I have never met. But say what I will about the de-frocked judge (and I will soon, I promise), he introduced me to most of the Alameda County judges and a good part of the Alameda County bar.
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I’ll probably catch hell for admitting this, but in those days, if you were a member of the club and knew where to go, favors were done.
For instance, DUI, or drunk driving, more commonly known by those in the biz as a “deuce,” after Vehicle Code section 23152, is and was a “priorable offence,” meaning the penalties are increased for each subsequent conviction. Several mornings a week, a group of deputy district attorneys and a group of defense attorneys would meet in a judge’s chambers for Pre-Trial Conferences on misdemeanor matters, most of which would be DUIs. If you played your cards right and were considered one of the good old boys, you could plead your client guilty to his fourth or fifth or tenth drunk driving charge and ask, “Priors dismissed for the purpose of sentencing?” The judge would agree and would sentence the defendant as if this were his first conviction.
Or, if the defendant’s blood-alcohol level was less than 0.13 percent (the legal level at that time was 0.10 percent), the DA and the judge would usually allow you to plead the defendant guilty of reckless driving, rather than the more serious offense of driving under the influence.
Under heavy public pressure, the legislature eventually plugged these loopholes.
And traffic tickets were dismissed, although you had to be careful not to abuse this privilege. You could get your own ticket dismissed easily, and maybe two or three a year for favored clients or family. Particularly if a sob story went with it. But the most beautiful part of this job perk was that any judge could dismiss a ticket, so you always went to the judge with whom you were on the best terms.
We could also get anyone out of jury duty, and I played this card dozens of times for friends and family.
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Today we would call these practices “corrupt,” but it was a different world 30 years ago. With the exception of drunk driving (which had not yet achieved the widespread public awareness it enjoys today) these same judges meted out true justice tempered with real-world knowledge. They were hell on criminals, but less-than-draconian towards those offenders who seemed to have merely made a bad mistake in judgment.
One of them, for instance, now-retired Judge Robert K. Byers, whom I consider a hell of a jurist and somewhat of a friend, was known by the defense bar as “Bye-Bye Byers” for the number of defendants he sent to jail. (My de-frocked judge, however, bragged that he had never sent a defendant to jail. So he’s the exception.)
They understood that the prison system could accept only so many bodies, that a brush with the law and the criminal justice system is enough to put the fear of God into many first-time defendants and that jail or prison time might only not accomplish anything more, but might actually be counterproductive.
Since those days, the number of beds available in California’s prisons has doubled or tripled and the number of people behind bars has tripled or quadrupled, yet the overall crime rate has not fallen significantly. Maybe a little laxity from the bench – and a little less rigidity imposed by mandatory sentencing laws – was a good thing for society.
It was certainly cheaper, and we were just as safe.
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There used to be a bar and restaurant across the street from the Hayward courthouse called Katrina’s, where judges and attorneys would adjourn after 5 p.m. to have a drink or two, socialize and swap stories. (That sort of easy camaraderie doesn’t exist anymore, although individual judges may socialize with individual attorneys and the two categories meet on friendly terms at larger functions.) Particularly on Fridays, you could always count on finding three or four judges at Katrina’s at the end of the day.
I don’t know, but surmise that it became a little too close to home for comfort and that too many litigants also headed for a drink after court, where they might find their judge laughing and sharing a drink with the attorney from the other side. For whatever reason, in the mid 1980s, the venue moved to an Italian bar and restaurant (also long gone) called Antonino’s, which was a mile or two away from the courthouse.
Naturally, the attorneys followed them.
The de-frocked judge and I stopped by Antonino’s one Friday evening for a couple of pops. While he was grabbed by a friend the minute we entered, I walked the length of the bar looking for two empty stools. I passed by Judge A and Judge B and Judge C and Judge D and found myself repeating, “Hi, Judge. Hi, Judge. Hi, Judge. Hi, Judge.”
If I didn’t know better, I’d be singing the theme song from “All in the Family:”
Gee our old LaSalle ran great
Those were the days.