Taking Care of Enemies
I should have listened to Lyn, Bill Spruance’s long-time secretary and probably the only real friend he had in the world. For some reason, she genuinely liked him – but she also saw right through him.
“If he makes you a promise of any kind, get it in writing,” she advised. “Try not to go to lunch with him on Friday, or any day, if you can help it. And don’t get on his wrong side.”
He wasn’t a good enough attorney to make life miserable for anybody except those who worked for him, but when he took the bench he took with him a long list of grievances – and promptly began accumulating more – and used his power to settle scores old and new.
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One such grievance stemmed from a run-in several years before with another attorney. The two had been on opposite sides of a case, there was a pissing match in open court and Spruance was held in contempt. After taking the bench, he let it be known that the other attorney would be well advised never to set foot in his courtroom.
Unfortunately, the other attorney eventually found himself in Spruance’s court while representing a criminal defendant. The attorney made a motion to disqualify the judge under a code section authorizing such disqualifications if the judge is prejudiced against a party or his attorney “so that the party or attorney cannot or believes that he or she cannot have a fair and impartial trial or hearing…”
These motions are routinely granted without argument. Indeed, the law specifically prohibits a challenged judge from holding a hearing on the motion. If the judge objects to the challenge, the matter must be sent to another judge for a hearing. Yet Spruance put the defense attorney through the ringer, grilling him in open court about the facts behind his motion for disqualification and claiming to remember neither the trial in which he had been held in contempt nor his threats against the defense attorney.
Finally, he granted the motion, but only after ordering the defense attorney to pay the fees of all the witnesses who had been subpoenaed to appear at trial that day – an order with no legal grounds whatsoever.
The Supreme Court found that he acted “out of revenge and in bad faith.”
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But the worst one was when he ordered a Deputy District Attorney – who was in court asking for a search warrant – to sit in the jury box and refused to let him leave the courtroom. Spruance was angry because the DDA had filed an appeal from his judgment in a different case and began questioning him belligerently about an affidavit filed in that case, which was not before him at the time. Eventually, the DA declined to answer any more questions and the following exchange occurred:
Mr. Behrendt: May I ask what purpose these questions are being asked me at this time?
The Court: I don’t believe, Mr. Behrendt, that it is your position as an officer to ask the court any questions. The court is asking you and the court, I believe, is entitled to a little courtesy.
Mr. Behrendt: I have always been courteous to this court, Your Honor, and –
The Court: Now, the –
Mr. Behrendt: — and I have a right to reserve any answer to –
The Court: Well, now, Mr. Behrendt, I’ll tell you what. You have a seat in the jury box.
Mr. Behrendt: Am I being held, Your Honor, in custody at this time?
The Court: If you wish it this way.
…
Mr. Behrendt: Is the court holding me in contempt or holding me in custody at this time?
The Court: The court is telling you to sit down.
Mr. Behrendt: Your Honor, at this time I intend to leave the courtroom unless I am being placed under arrest for contempt.
The Court: Mr. Behrendt, don’t leave the courtroom. I’m telling you to sit down. Now, that is a court order, if you wish.
Mr. Behrendt: Is the court placing me in custody at this time, Your Honor?
The Court: It depends on what you do, Mr. Behrendt. The court is telling you to sit down, Mr. Behrendt, I don’t want to do anything rash. Now, you sit down.
Mr. Behrendt: May I ask the court what authority it is holding me in this court?
The Court: Mr. Behrendt, that is a court order, to sit down until such time –
Mr. Behrendt: May the court define my status at this time, why I am being held inside this courtroom?
…
The Court: Mr. Behrendt, I have had enough of you, now, you sit down.
Mr. Behrendt: Your Honor, at this time –
Mr. Court: Mr. Behrendt, this is the last time. Now, sit down.
Mr. Behrendt: Excuse me, Your Honor, I intend to leave the court. If I am no longer required –
The Court: You are required here.
Mr. Behrendt: May I ask the reason the court is requiring me to stay in this courtroom?
The Court: [To the bailiff] Do you want to escort him to a seat, please?
Mr. Behrendt: Am I being placed in custody at this time?
The Court: Would you escort him to a seat, please? You may have a seat in the jury box.”
Not surprisingly, the Supreme Court held that the judge was completely out of line in bringing up the earlier matter – not to mention holding the Deputy DA in custody on a whim.
Much as a 12-year-old child views things, however, nothing was ever Spruance’s fault and he later sought to explain away his actions by claiming there was a “technical difficulty” in the search warrant that the DA was seeking. The Supreme Court saw through this one, also: “Petitioner’s attempt to put a gloss of good faith over the entire incident…failed to conceal the fact that his conduct was clearly motivated by feelings of animosity toward [the Deputy DA.]”
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And then there was the time he gave a defendant the finger for showing up late for traffic court.
And there was also the time when a defendant was testifying at trial and Spruance gave him a raspberry, or Bronx cheer, to indicate that he didn’t believe his testimony. It seems the good judge was angry at the deputy public defender representing the defendant because he had refused a plea bargain suggested by the judge.
…and also the time Spruance got a traffic ticket and persuaded a reluctant Judge Robert Fairwell to dismiss it. That was bad enough in itself, but he then altered the court record to make it look as if the ticket was dismissed because he had gone to traffic school.
In his appeal from the order removing him from the bench, he blamed all of these matters on being overworked, on the “loose practices” prevailing in the judicial district and on his inexperience, and asserted that while he may have made mistakes, “nobody complained.” But the Supreme Court having none of it.
“[T]he evidence is clear and convincing that when attorneys did object, petitioner retaliated,” the court wrote, following up with a few choice phrases about the extent of its displeasure with Spruance and the “clear evidence of [his] petty tyranny and favoritism.”
“Taken as a whole the record indicates that petitioner engaged in a pervasive course of conduct of overreaching his judicial authority by deciding cases for reasons other than the merits, by improperly influencing another judge, and by using the judicial process to gain special favors for friends and political supporters….[P]etitioner has under color of judicial office repeatedly committed petty, vindictive, vulgar and otherwise unjudicial acts….Clearly, petitioner abused his judicial authority and acted out of revenge and hostility….[P]etitioner’s contemptuous “raspberry” was a deliberate and malicious attempt to prejudice the defendant’s case, motivated by petitioner’s anger toward the deputy public defender… [T]here can be no mitigation for maliciously motivated unjudicial conduct….”