A very personal story

Dog breeders are an irresponsible bunch, always breeding for the wrong traits.

Take border collies, for instance.  They’re among the smartest dogs around, primarily because they’re a newly recognized breed by the American Kennel Club.

Let the AKC recognize a breed of dogs and they’re immediately bred for “show” traits, without respect to what made the breed different and interesting in the first place.  Take a water dog like the poodle and start breeding it only for looks and in only a few generations you have a useless – but pretty – dog.  Take a working dog like the Irish Setter and start breeding it to show in the ring and you’ve turned a calm, smart, well-behaved dog into a neurotic mess.

Take collies, who used to be working dogs.  Ruined.  Take German Shepherds.  Ruined.  Take schnauzers.  Ruined.  Take Gordon shepherds, English shepherds, Irish wolfhounds.  Ruined, ruined, ruined.  The traits that made these dogs valuable as working dogs or as pets have gone by the wayside in favor of withers height, muzzle shape, coat length, color and density and general prettiness.

Less than ten years ago, the AKC was debating whether to “recognize” border collies as an accepted breed.  “Please, please, please,” begged the responsible owners and breeders of border collies.  “Don’t recognize them.  You’ll ruin them.”

But the AKC, voracious for registration fees for every newborn pup from registered parents – and for advertising dollars from its annual Westminster Kennel Club dog-and-pony show – wouldn’t listen.  “Another new breed?” the elderly New England bachelors and crones bay with ears perked up and tails wagging.  “And we get how many dollars for each new registered pup?  Open the gates and let ‘em in!”

You could call them Stepford Dogs, and nothing illustrates this name better than the nasal-sounding fellow who narrates the Westminster Kennel Club’s annual televised beauty show.  He’s been announcing these shows since Dick Clark was too young to dance on “American Bandstand” and his voice hasn’t changed a bit.

Long after I’m gone, this guy will still be droning on television, “The Bernese mountain dog is an ancient breed, loyal and faithful…The komandor is an ancient breed, loyal and faithful…The dachshund, or dachl, is an ancient breed, loyal and faithful…”

*

I currently have two Dalmatians – my sixth and seventh in the last 20 years.  The Dalmatian is an ancient breed, loyal and faithful.  And severely damaged by the AKC’s breeding standards.

The Dalmatian has never been what you might call a “working” dog, like collies and shepherds, or a “sporting” dog, like retrievers and setters.  Its only usefulness was to keep the horses calm.  Originally bred as coaching dogs, the Dal seems to have a particular affinity for horses, can run for miles beside the coach horses and used to sleep with them at night.  Back when fire engines were pulled by horses, they became a favorite of firemen and have been identified with firemen ever since.

But they’re a bit skittish, a bundle of energy, stubborn, excitable and extremely smart.  In fact, they’re generally smarter than their owners, and if they’re not highly trained or if they don’t get enough exercise, they can be a double handful.  All of my Dalmatians have been so wily and mischievous that I firmly believe if they only had opposable thumbs there wouldn’t be any trouble they couldn’t get themselves into.  They’re a marvelous breed, but certainly not for everybody.

*

So when you take this personality and begin breeding only for certain characteristics without regard to temperament, you’re asking for trouble.  A number of years ago, there was an attempt to breed miniature Dalmatians, a project that ended in disaster because the dogs chosen as breeders were chosen for size only, without regard to temperament.  In just a few generations, this experiment produced a pool of smaller, but wholly unmanageable, dogs.

But the breeding practices of the AKC are not significantly better.  AKC breeders strive for perfectly round, well-separated spots, each about the size of a fifty-cent piece.  The eyelids must be rimmed in black, all the way around, like a fashion model with freshly applied eyeliner.  Spots all running together are frowned upon and a “patch,” or solid black ear, is a definite no-no.

But Dalmatians also have a couple of genetic faults that the AKC totally ignores.  They tend to have high uric acid, due to a missing gene, which can easily cause kidney stones, and they are prone to deafness in one or both ears.

Responsible breeders – if there are such things – now have all of their newborn pups tested for hearing, a procedure which involves sticking electrodes under the skin on their heads, pulsing signals through the needles and feeding the results into a computer-like machine.  The AKC’s sole bow toward eliminating deafness in Dals is to refuse to register any pups who are deaf in either or both ears.

But that doesn’t eliminate the carriers of the defect, and there seems to be a connection between deafness and other physical characteristics.  Some studies have shown that dogs with “patches” are less prone to deafness than those showing perfect spot patterns.  Still, however, a dog with a patch would never win a competition, nor even be bred by those breeders hewing to AKC standards.

*

The latest program, called the Dalmatian Heritage Project, has tried to introduce a low-acid gene into the breed.  Eight or nine generations ago, a Dalmatian bitch was bred to a pointer and about half of the resulting litter carried the low-acid gene.  The pups without the gene were sold as pets and the rest kept for breeding with the help of a volunteer bunch of breeder-caretakers and puppy raisers, much like the breeding programs of Guide Dogs for the Blind and Canine Companions for Independence.

No more pointer blood was introduced into the line and the descendants of the original litter have been bred only with pure-blood Dalmatians.  Thus, the first litter would have been 50% Dalmatian, the second generation 75% Dalmatian, the third generation 87.5% Dalmatian and so on.  By the eighth generation, these dogs are more than 99.6% Dalmatian.

But the AKC still won’t recognize them.  They’re not “purebred.”

*

Marianne and I became involved with the project because of our great interest in the breed.  And I admit that it sounded like a marvelous deal at first.  Its web site, www.dalmatianheritage.com, paints a glowing picture of its lofty goals, explains the genetic problems and proposed solutions in both technical and non-technical terms and is full of pictures of happy families with their cute Dalmatian puppies.

But the Dalmatian Heritage Project has distinct problems of its own, some similar to the “miniature Dalmatian” attempt and some simply a matter of believability.  Its literature claims that

We select parent dogs from among those that have the best chance of producing puppies that:

1. Have normal urinary metabolism
2. Have normal hearing
3. Are friendly and confident

However, one of these statements is false, one is misleading and only one has any validity.

The project is producing Dals with normal uric acid levels.  But its program for breeding dogs with normal hearing is exactly the same as the AKC, and could have been drafted by any middle-school science student: don’t breed dogs that are unilaterally or bilaterally deaf.

I suppose that makes a bit of sense, but I wouldn’t pat myself on the back for having thought of it.

It is claim No. 3, above, however, that is the sheerest advertising hype, as Marianne and I know first-hand.

*

What we didn’t know in the beginning was that internal politics – and, very probably, a disagreement over the direction the project was taking – had led to all of the original committee members and consultants dropping out.  The project was left with but a skeleton staff – some say a staff of only one, housed temporarily on an acre of land in Hayward, California.

Denise Howell, the project coordinator, was having trouble placing the last female from her most recent litter, a bitch that was destined to be a breeder.  She described the dog as “a difficult puppy” and we agreed to provide a foster home for her until a permanent home could be found.

I fell in love immediately and couldn’t bear to part with her, so we agreed to co-own her with Denise, to breed her and to help place her puppies.  We named her Bonnie Chuck, after my two closest friends, who had both recently died of cancer within weeks of each other.

Bonnie didn’t give us any problems at first, but her first and only litter did.  Even at six and eight weeks, three of her eight pups were exhibiting fairly severe fear issues, which were confirmed when we had their temperaments tested by a highly skilled doggie shrink.  According to the owners with whom we placed them, they have never overcome these innate tendencies.  The problem seemed so serious that we all agreed Bonnie would have no more litters.

When Bonnie began demonstrating her own wacko behavior, we remembered what Denise had told us a couple of years before: “We’re breeding for low uric acid first and will breed for temperament later.”

So much for the claim of “friendly and confident” puppies.

It started with a fear of reflections – of windows, skylights and even clock faces.  And it went from an easy acceptance of other dogs to outright hostility.  She turned her back on Brendan Mahoney, the 90-pound Labrador that had practically raised her and with whom she always used to sleep, and gradually wouldn’t have anything to do with him.

After Bonnie attacked my mother-in-law’s small dog twice, attacked a visiting eight-week-old puppy, started snapping and snarling at our other dogs, ripped a two-inch gash in Brendan’s cheek in a scuffle over a bone, caused us $1,700 in vet bills when she escaped and mauled a cat, bit a young boy and finally snapped at my face for no apparent reason…we decided enough was enough.  The dog is a danger to the public.

Marianne e-mailed Denise that we were planning to have Bonnie euthanized (even though it was breaking our hearts to come to this decision.)  Denise wrote to us demanding that we return Bonnie to her, pursuant to the contract we had signed when we adopted her.  I wrote back to Denise that giving Bonnie back to her was not an option.  Get an attorney, lady.

In the meantime, we’ve postponed sending my baby over the “rainbow bridge” in favor of more testing and further soul searching.

And that’s where we stand.  Awaiting more expert information and advice on Bonnie.  Awaiting the process server with the lawsuit filed by Denise.  Awaiting another dangerous incident…

While skiing with my step-daughter and son-in-law a couple of years ago, we stopped to take a rest and grab a beer.  It was a warm, clear spring day, the sun on the snow was blinding and a temporary barbecue and drink area had been set up on the lodge’s sun deck.  I grabbed a beer from an iced tub and stood in line at the cash register.

It was one of those registers like they have at a fast-food restaurant, with pictures of the various items on its keypad.  (We don’t want the help to actually have to memorize the price of the items they’re selling.)  It also had a digital LCD readout, which was impossible to read in the bright light.

I showed my beer to the college-age kid manning the register; he punched the correct picture on the keypad and then shaded the LCD display with his hand so he could read it.

“Three, seventy-five,” he announced, and I handed him a five.

The kid punched in five dollars and then shaded the display again with his hand so he could find out what the correct change was.

Welcome to the wonderful world of California public education.

*

At some point back in the Cretaceous Period, the California legislature hit upon the brilliant idea that education was an investment in the future.  The better-educated are our children, so the folklore goes, the more able will be our workforce.  The more able our workforce, the better will be California products, the higher will be our wages, the more taxes we can collect to pour back into education and round and round we go.

And for a while, California did prosper, at least through the dot-com boom, attracting a highly educated workforce and becoming an economic powerhouse because of it.  Never mind that most of the intellects fueling the boom were products of elite private universities like Stanford or were imports from places like India and Japan.

It was a damned good idea and solid reasoning.  But for all but the top highschool students from mostly the top high schools (almost by definition located in the state’s wealthier enclaves), it was largely lip service.

*

Long before (long, long before) Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and the California legislature began robbing the educational coffers to balance the state’s budget, the average California school district saw its secondary schools cut from six instruction periods per day to five, its core curriculum watered down and most elective courses, including music, speech, journalism, etc., axed.

In fact, as long as I can remember, California schools have been in a period of decline.  When I was in elementary school in a military town in Oklahoma (granted, we were awash in federal funds), when a student transferred in from California, s/he was automatically put back one grade.

*

We live in a relatively good school district.  The students’ annual test scores are well above the state-wide average, yet “relatively” is still the operative word.  Its schools can only be considered “good” when compared with the over-all, poorly performing schools in the rest of the state, and particularly when compared to neighboring school districts such as Oakland and Hayward, both of which make a mockery of education.

When my step-daughter was in middle school, her mother and I realized that she needed to go to a private high school rather than stay in public school for the next four years.  We investigated two of these nearby and finally settled on one.  This school had a track record of sending 96% of its graduating seniors on to four-year colleges or universities.  Castro Valley High School hovered around 18%.

We made the mistake of mentioning this to a school board member at a community function, and he immediately started blustering.  “Now, just…just…just wait just a minute,” he stammered.  “Why, only two or three years ago, we had a student admitted to an Ivy League college.”

Wow, and bada boom.  One student, two or three years ago.  That certainly makes all the difference.  And I suppose the fact that Castro Valley High School’s own Rachel Maddow, who went to Stanford, became a Rhodes Scholar and now hosts her own commentary show on CNN makes up for the majority of her classmates who attended a year or two at a community college – at best – before dropping out to become hairdressers or advertising salesmen.

*

I was astonished when my wife confessed to me that she had never read a Shakespeare play.  And no Dickens.  No Emily Dickenson.  No Walt Whitman.  No Carl Sandburg.  No T.S. Eliot.  Maybe one Poe short story and maybe one or two of Robert Frost’s shorter and more familiar poems.  And she was an A student.

In my Oklahoma high school (and I use Oklahoma for comparison not only because I am familiar with it, but also because it’s a benighted state, its citizens are suspicious of education and its legislature is perpetually at war with its major public university), we read a couple of Dickens’ works (even the C-level students read “Great Expectations”), “Julius Caesar,” “Romeo and Juliet” and “MacBeth,” and a broad selection of American prose and poetry.  What we did not read was Shel Silverstein or Khalil Gibran’s dreadfully sappy “The Prophet.”  How can you consider it an education if you’ve never read a single one of Shakespeare’s works?  If you don’t know Balaam’s ass from J. Alfred Prufrock?

*

Maybe that’s why California’s public universities have to offer remedial English classes, taken by huge numbers of freshmen – mostly California-educated freshmen – who must take the course without college credit.  “Bonehead English,” as it is commonly known, teaches college-age kids what they should have learned in high school: how to write a coherent sentence, a little bit about the great literature of the western world and, all too often, how to spell.

*

When my step-daughter was in the fifth grade, her principal was applying for some sort of state grant and wrote a grant proposal, which he sent home with the members of the Student Council to study.  She, of course, didn’t understand it and asked me to look it over.  I found it incredibly poorly written, full of grammatical errors, hackneyed phrases and misspellings.

I marked it up with a red pencil, gave it a big C-minus and sent it back to school with her.

Shortly afterward, her mid-term grades came out.  She was down in almost every subject and the grade for “effort” had slipped in every single subject.  We asked for a conference with her teacher, who told us that she was spending too much time out of the classroom on Student Council activities and that hardly a day went by when she did not miss at least one lesson due to absences from class.  She said Kristi was using Student Council as an excuse and that she had been late for class on several occasions with the excuse that “Mr. Lyen (the principal) wanted to see me,” when that was not true.

We asked for a meeting, during which the teacher, the assistant principal, Marianne and I all agreed that there was plenty of time for Student Council activities before and after school, at lunch and at recess, and that Kristi would remain in class at all other times.  Principal Taylor Lyen had been invited to this meeting, but declined to come.

A few days later, we attended a school open house, where we ran into Lyen.  Marianne asked if he had spoken to the assistant principal about the meeting.  He hadn’t.  When she tried to explain to him the consensus that had been reached, he interrupted her with, “I don’t agree.  You’ll kill her spirit.”

He then went into a long diatribe, contending that a child conniving her way out of the classroom was of more educational value than anything she could learn in the classroom.

“We’re teaching life skills, here,” he spewed before he stomped away.  “Long division is an archaic concept and spelling counts for nothing!”

*

Archaic concept.  Well.  I know that even the most disadvantaged kids have calculators today, but I’ve often found myself without one handy when I had a problem to be solved.  More importantly, however, long division teaches logic and reasoning.  And spelling “counts for nothing?”  If you want to be a plumber or a hairdresser, maybe.  But don’t get me started.

I thought the situation had pretty much hit bottom, but we had a long ways to go yet before our minor triumph.

*

Lyen called Kristi’s father and arranged a meeting, telling him that we were “murdering her soul.”

Father, when he picked up Kristi for his visitation the next weekend, told Marianne that “I’ve heard about all the terrible things you’re doing to Kristi.  You’re murdering her soul.”

Father contacted his attorney, claiming that what I was doing to Kristi was “intellectual abuse.”  Whatever that is.  Father’s attorney wrote to Marianne’s attorney saying that he was “shocked” to read the letters that had recently gone back and forth between myself and Lyen and adding that “Mr. Dimick needs to understand that he is not the father of this child and he needs to maintain a role consistent with the fact that he is the stepfather and not the natural father.”

I replied that I was sure that when he was given copies of these letters, “you were not given the letter of apology which Taylor wrote to us on the orders of the superintendent.”

*

Lyen was called on the carpet by the school superintendent for first, voicing his out-of-line sentiments about education in such a manner to the parents of one of his students and, second, for deliberately attempting to stir up trouble between a student’s parents because of a personal vendetta.

Although a letter of reprimand was placed in his personnel file, Taylor (“Long division is an archaic concept,” “Spelling counts for nothing,” “She’ll learn more by conning her way out of class than by staying in it”) Lyen is still teaching in the Castro Valley School District.  The kids under his tutelage are still absorbing his strange ideas.  Castro Valley High School graduates still can’t make change in their heads nor, for the most part, spell “Castro Valley” correctly two times out of three.

Kristi, fortunately, learned to spell, to write in complete sentences and to think critically.  In high school, she actually read some Shakespeare and several other worthwhile books and plays.  Since graduating from UC Santa Cruz, she has risen rapidly in the corporate world and, at age 29, is making a hell of a lot more money than I was at her age – even adjusted for inflation.

*

When Kristi was a junior or senior in high school, she attended a Chamber of Commerce function with me, where we spotted Taylor Lyen across the room.  She went up to him and announced proudly, “My soul is doing just fine, thank you.”

(When last we left Willie Brown, former Speaker of the California Assembly, showman, wearer of $1,000 hats and $6,000 suits, friend to the rich, confidante of San Francisco kingmaker Herb Caen, collector of embarrassingly large amounts of campaign contributions and doler-out of political favors, he had just sponsored the most significant piece of legislation in his nearly 40 years as an elected official, AB3300, the “Trial Court Delay Reduction Act.”

(As we rejoin our hero, we learn of the evils that previously existed in the California judicial system and how his simple sleight-of-hand made those evils seem to disappear.)

California law has long had two time periods during which a judge can dismiss (i.e., kick out of court) a case because it seems to be going nowhere.

Two years after a suit is filed, the defendant can make a motion to have it tossed out because the plaintiff is just sitting on the case and not making any efforts to move it along to trial.  The ruling on this motion is up to the judge and, in the past, the statute was rarely – if ever – used.

But there is also a drop-dead date: If a case has not come to trial within five years of being filed, absent an agreement by both sides to extend this deadline, it is automatically dismissed.

This is not a particularly bad set of rules although, admittedly, some plaintiffs’ attorneys and some defendants’ attorneys sometimes – sometimes – took advantage of the system.

But let’s say you were in an automobile accident and suffered severe soft-tissue injury (usually to one or more of the cervical, thoracic or lumbar disks, but occasionally a severe muscle tear or sprain or strain.)  (A soft-tissue injury is, broadly, one that doesn’t show up on an X-ray.)  Studies show that approximately 90 percent of soft-tissue injuries are resolved (either heal completely or stabilize) within a year.  Approximately 90 percent of the rest are resolved within two years.  The remainder of them can take from three years to infinity.

You file suit against the driver who ran the stop light and hit you, but you’re not in a position to talk settlement or go to trial because you haven’t yet recovered from your injuries.  And once you accept that settlement check or the jury awards you damages, you can’t ever go back for more money.  If at all possible, you don’t want to resolve the case until you have finished treating with your doctors.

So you are in no great hurry.  And the defendant is certainly in no hurry to shell out money or go to trial. The longer you (and thousands just like you) stay out of court, the less crowded the courts will be.  Nobody is harmed by the delay.  So you’d think the two sides should be able to agree to take their time and not rush to judgment.

But you’d be wrong.

Or say there’s a business dispute between former partners A and B.  They’ve been negotiating for quite some time and the matter may eventually be settled, but because of the applicable statute of limitations, A has to file suit against B.  Enter C, who says he may buy the partnership assets for enough money that everybody will be happy and the lawsuit will just go away.  But lining up financing is going to take a while.

You’d think that A, having stopped the statute of limitations from running by filing his lawsuit, might choose not even to have B served with the summons and complaint unless negotiations break down.  Or maybe that A does have B served, but agrees that B will not have to file a formal answer to the complaint unless negotiations break down.  No public interests would be harmed and there would be absolutely no burden on the courts.

That’s the way things used to work and they worked pretty well, too.  So you might think so, but in Willie Brown’s world, you’d be wrong.

In Willie’s world, the trial courts are jammed to overflowing.  (True.)  Justice delayed is justice denied.  (True.)  It’s all the fault of those pesky lawyers, and people who desperately want to go to trial have to wait for years because of lawyers’ delaying tactics.  (False.)

It is true that the trial courts were (and are) overcrowded.  It’s a matter of funding.  There simply aren’t enough of them to handle the load and the legislature won’t provide enough money to build more courthouses and to hire more judges.  Every county in California needs at least 25 percent more judges and some of them need more than that.

Enter the Speedy Trial Act, which has as its underlying principle “that litigation, from commencement to resolution, should require only that time reasonably necessary for pleadings, discovery, preparation, and court events, and that any additional elapsed time is delay and should be eliminated.”

What’s that?  Where’s the time to negotiate?  Where’s the breathing space?  Where’s the time for the clients to find the money to pay the attorneys?  What about those lawsuits that we know will settle, but only had to be filed because the statute of limitations was about to run out?  What about the concept that it’s my case and I should decide how it proceeds?

Not important.  Someone else will make those decisions for you.  You, the litigant, are but a necessary evil and we wish you would just go away.  According to Brown & Co., 75% of all larger cases must go to trial within one year of being filed, 85% within eighteen months and 100% within two years.  For smaller cases, 90% must go to trial within one year, 98% within eighteen months and 100% within two years.

*

Ask yourself at this point:

If you had to pay your lawyer between $20,000 and $50,000 to go to trial (depending on the complexity of the case; the sky, of course, being the limit), could you come up with this money within one year?  Or would you, if possible, rather proceed a bit more slowly and only have to raise this amount within three or four years?

If you’re going to need another couple of surgeries, do you want to be forced to rely on some doctor’s best guess as to what the surgeries will cost next year or do you want the jury to know exactly what they did cost?  (The amount of money you hope to get from the defendant depends almost exclusively on the amount of your medical bills.)

If you are an attorney, how many (or, better still, how few) cases can you handle at any one time, knowing that every case that you file must be concluded within a single year?  If you’re forced to handle fewer cases at a time, what happens to all of those clients you have to turn away?  If you can only deal with so many clients at a time, how do you pay your overhead?  (Obviously, you raise your hourly rate.)

So if neither the little-guy litigant nor his attorney benefits from these new rules, who does?

Think insurance companies who will probably have to pay smaller judgments because the plaintiff’s attorney was rushed into trial.  Think rich folks, who can afford to pay thousands and thousands of dollars to their attorneys.  Think big developers, who are much freer now to run rough-shod over the little guys because the little guys can’t find an attorney who can afford to take their case.

Think Willie Brown, who gets the credit for “solving” a monetary problem without spending a single extra dollar.

Just don’t think you get any benefit out of it.

*

But how do we ensure that cases will be resolved so speedily?  Naturally, we set deadlines for every step in the litigation process.  Although – within limits – local courts are allowed to set their own timetables so long as they achieve the overall objective, the limits are fairly narrow and the following are typical:

– The plaintiff must serve the complaint on all defendants and file his proof of service with the court within 60 days of filing the complaint.

– The defendant has always had a minimum of 30 days to file an answer to the complaint, but the plaintiff may now agree to allow the defendant no more than an extra 15 days.  (So much for our litigants A, B and C, above.  Like it or not, they’re being pushed to trial like a Mack truck pushing a Volkswagen Beetle.)

– Approximately every 60 days after that, both attorneys must show up at a Case Management Conference after having prepared and filed a Case Management Conference Statement outlining all of the issues of the case and explaining that they’re hurrying just as fast as they can.  The time spent on this nonsense could more productively be spent actually working on the client’s case, rather than kowtowing to a judge so s/he can feel even more important.  And the time spent on this nonsense must, of course, be billed to the client.

Most courts now have one, two or even three judges who do nothing all day, every day, but conduct Case Management Conferences.  Now there’s a sure-fire way to unclog the courts: take a couple of judges away from conducting trials and put them to work pushing more cases to trial in a courthouse with fewer judges available to hear them.

It’s no wonder that most responsible attorneys emphasize compromise and settlement and advise their clients to exhaust every conceivable remedy to avoid getting snared in the judicial system.

*

But what if an attorney isn’t ready in time or doesn’t meet one of the many deadlines?  Ah, the judges come armed with remedies, called “sanctions,” ranging from kicking your case out altogether to preventing you from introducing certain evidence (a nice way to ensure a fair trial) to monetary fines.

As the law puts it, “Judges shall have all the powers to impose sanctions authorized by law, including the power to dismiss actions or strike pleadings….  Judges are encouraged to impose sanctions to achieve the purposes of” the Speedy Trial Act.

And in some counties, judges have clasped this legislative mandate fondly to their bosoms.  When Alameda County first put AB3300 into effect, it assigned the task of drafting the local rules to two of the most anal-retentive judges on the county bench.  As explained to attorneys in a series of informative presentations,

Any attorney not serving the summons and complaint within 60 days of filing will be sanctioned…Any attorney attempting to grant an extension of time for the defendant to file an answer will be sanctioned…Any attorney not filing a timely Case Management Conference Statement will be sanctioned…Any attorney not taking depositions when the judge says he should take depositions will be sanctioned…Any attorney who publicly expresses disdain for AB3300 shall be sanctioned [I made that one up]…Any attorney not…

And on and on and on.  It wasn’t at all funny, but I couldn’t help but smirk and quip that it reminded me of the scene in “Cool Hand Luke” when the warden was explaining the rules of conduct to the new inmates:

Any man loses his spoon spends a night in the box.  Any man playing grab-ass or fighting in the building spends a night in the box.  Any man not in his bunk at eight spends the night in the box.  Any man with dirty pants on sitting on the bunks spends a night in the box.  Any man loud talking spends a night in the box.

*

Now, really.  Wouldn’t it make a lot more sense to have this mechanism available to attorneys and litigants?  If one attorney is dragging his feet, the other could unilaterally opt in to the speedy trial system and the judge would put the other attorney’s feet to the fire.  On the other hand, if all parties agreed, they could opt out of the speedy trial system and go back to the old rules.  After all, it’s their case.  It’s not the judge’s case.  It’s not Willie Brown’s case.

Damn it.  I’m the one who lost his leg in the automobile accident.  What I want from you, judge, is a venue and a fair trial.  If I want to wait until next year to go to trial, and if I’m not taking up any of your time by doing so, get your nose out of my case!

But that ain’t gonna happen.  The insurance companies, the big developers and the rich folks have too much to lose.  I can just picture the television ad now: the grieving widow, a stand-in for all of California’s “little people” who are at the mercy of those rascally lawyers, sobs that her case would take years to go to trial if AB3300 were amended.  The ad would be paid for, of course, by Allstate, Prudential, State Farm et al.

But it’s not only the big boys who love the Speedy Trial Act.  Despite its self-defeating flaws and its disdain for the litigants, judges tend to love it also.  And it’s not only because of the extra power that it gives them.  A Court Commissioner (they’re hired by county courts to sit as judges without actually being judges) explained to me that he and his colleagues like it because “we [judges and commissioners, that is] were being blamed for all the delays in getting to trial.”

Okay, I think I understand now.  The legislature won’t provide money for enough courtrooms, so the special interests blame the judges for the slowness in getting to trial and the poor judges get their tender feelings hurt at this unfairness and if the blame is shifted to those pesky attorneys the judges can sleep easier at night, even though nothing has really been accomplished.

Welcome to WillieWorld.  As I said earlier, Willie Lewis Brown, Jr., was a masterful politician.

Given San Francisco’s colorful – and often lawless and corrupt – history, former mayor Willie Brown may not be the most powerful politician the city has ever known.  But on a state-wide basis, he was arguably the most powerful politician in California history. 

It wasn’t his longevity (eight years as mayor of San Francisco, 30 years in the California Assembly and – thanks to term limits – a never-to-be-broken record 15 years as Speaker) that gave him his power.  Rather, it was his innate grasp of deal making, his patient ruthlessness and his use of financial backers that made him a force to be feared and respected.

Nor is it the transformation of the San Francisco skyline and the Manhattanization of a hitherto lovely town that will mark his legacy, but rather one of the greatest public cons of them all, Assembly Bill 3300, formally known as the “Trial Court Delay Reduction Act,” but commonly referred to as the “Speedy Trial Act.”  It was a thank-you present, so to speak, to Willie Brown’s big boy playmates and a gut punch to a California public that still doesn’t know what hit it.  

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Willie Lewis Brown, Jr., has made much of his humble roots in Mineola, Texas, where Jim Crow thrived and even the local cemetery was segregated.  According to his official on-line biography, his “only hope of rising in the world was to leave East Texas for San Francisco, California, where an admired uncle had made a home for himself.”

He evidently fancied Stanford University, but settled for San Francisco State, working his way through college and law school at a series of menial jobs.

But he ended up playing with the big boys.

After law school, Brown started an inner-city practice, ran unsuccessfully for the California Assembly in 1962 and was finally elected in 1964.  I wasn’t around these parts back then, but he allegedly ran afoul of then-Speaker Jesse “Big Daddy” Unruh, and spent the next couple of years of his Assembly career out in the cold, cementing friendships, demonstrating party loyalty and preparing for tomorrow.

After nearly ten years in the Assembly, he put his name in for Speaker when Unruh stepped down.  He was roundly defeated and would not be elected to that post for six more years.  But once again he spent those years productively: courting powerful development interests throughout the state and particularly in his home base of San Francisco, and building up a lucrative law practice devoted largely to using his legal skills and political contacts to smooth the way for multi-million-dollar development projects.

Brown’s efforts on behalf of the big boys paid off handsomely.  On a legislative salary equal to that of a corporate middle manager, he commuted between San Francisco and Sacramento in speedy Italian cars and wore $6,000 speedy Italian suits.  Even today, members of the California Assembly only earn about $116,000 per year plus a modest per diem and you’ll catch damned few of them wearing Brionis.

In 1980, backed by a formidable fund-raising capacity and his ability to spread the wealth around to the re-election committees of those who sided with him, he was finally elected Speaker.   For the next 15 years, until made ineligible by a new term-limits law, Willie ruled the California Assembly, doling out choice committee assignments and developers’ money to his friends and punishing his enemies the way he had been punished as a junior legislator (when he had challenged Unruh a few years before, he had been banished to an office the size of a broom closet.)

He referred to himself as “the Ayatollah of the Legislature,” and others referred to the California legislature as a “barely disguised swap meet,” where Brown would collect “campaign contributions” from business interests in exchange for shepherding or blocking bills, and capitol lobbyists were routinely referred to as the “third house” in the legislature.

But for all his power, that’s all it was: power.  Brown himself admits, in his semi-autobiography, “Basic Brown,” that "[s]ome have criticized my years as speaker as having been without an agenda."  This is unfair criticism, of course, as his agenda was very clear: power as its own end.

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During his 30 years in the Assembly, he neither sponsored nor shepherded much in the way of legislation beneficial to anyone other than his rich friends.  So was it a conscious legacy he was after when he sponsored AB 3300, a solution in search of a problem?  Or was it, more probably, more payback to the monied interests?  Nobody knows but Willie, and he’s not telling.

(To be continued.)