Monday, July 30, 2007
Page 7
PERSPECTIVES (Column)
Defenses of Pirozzi Appointment Are Lame, Governor’s Office Statement Is Sham
By ROGER M. GRACE
Defenses being voiced of the appointment of realtor Elia Pirozzi to the San Bernardino Superior Court evoke the memory of a meeting of the California Women Lawyers I attended about 30 years ago. The CWL president bemoaned the hostility toward the newly appointed state chief justice, Rose Bird, proclaiming that the “only” conceivable reason for opposition was that Bird was a woman.
That was nonsense. There were sound reasons for the uproar, reasons that had nothing to do with Bird’s gender...like her lack of credentials, in terms of experience, for any appellate court appointment, and her unfitness, by virtue of vindictiveness and inability to get along with people, for a leadership role.
Now we are hearing allegations that those who would criticize the appointment of Pirozzi do so because he’s a GOP conservative. That’s balderdash of the same variety.
It was Monday of last week when the State Bar of California made a public announcement that Pirozzi, named to the bench in May, “was appointed despite a ‘not qualified’ evaluation rating by the bar’s Judicial Nominees Evaluation Commission (JNE).”
In the next day’s news account, the Los Angeles Times quotes former state Sen. Jim Brulte, a San Bernardino Republican, as saying:
“[Pirozzi] is an activist, conservative Republican who believes in smaller government. I believe their [rating] had nothing to do with qualifications to be a judge and had everything to do with philosophy of government.”
Brulte is quoted in last Tuesday’s San Bernardino Sun and by the Inland Valley Daily Bulletin as declaring:
“The State Bar is a group of liberal lawyers. This was about making sure that someone who carried the Republican banner high and loudly was punished.”
In like vein are comments by Steve Baric, president of the California Republican Lawyers Assn., being widely circulated by e-mail. Baric proclaims:
“Although unfortunate, it is not uncommon for the JNE commission to be used for political purposes by liberals....As for the JNE commission’s rating, it should either be ignored or seen for what it is—a political hit piece.”
The allegation that liberal political bias accounts for the rock-bottom JNE rating of Pirozzi is a slur on the integrity of the members of that commission who give much time to evaluating applicants for judicial office. My wife, a conservative Republican, was on JNE a few years ago; she did not happen to mention to me that an objective of the group was to deter the appointment of conservative Republicans, and I somehow doubt that she discerned any such aim.
If JNE does have that mission, I’m certain that will come as a surprise to, well, for example, Wendy H. Borcherdt, a current public member. She was for six years an assistant to President Ronald Reagan (a Republican); headed Reagan’s political action committee, Citizens for the Republic, in the 1986, 1988, and 1990 elections; was finance director of the California Republican Party in the early 1990s; and has served as a member of the state and county Republican central committees. That’s a partial list of her roles in GOP activities. Is she a conspirator against appointments of solid Republicans?
The existence of an institutional objective to downgrade applicants based on their adherence to the Republican philosophy would also surprise Leslie Harden, a conservative who since 1991 has been a staff attorney to California Supreme Court Justice Marvin Baxter. Baxter was appointments secretary to Gov. George Deukmejian, a Republican. Harden is vice chair of the commission, and has been chosen as next year’s chair.
Frederick A. Mandabach is also someone who is not likely to be a knowing participant in an anti-GOP conspiracy. It was Deukmejian who appointed him to the San Bernardino Municipal Court, and then to the San Bernardino Superior Court.
Alice Salvo, a past president of the San Fernando Valley Bar Assn., is on JNE. She’s a Republican. I know that not because she publicizes it but because she and her husband, Mel Stein, are friends of my wife and mine. It happened to come up once in conversation.
I understand that Beverly Hills attorney Samuel C. Landis, a partner in Segal, Cohen & Landis, is also a Republican. I don’t know that for sure, however. Party affiliations are not listed on the JNE roster appearing on the State Bar website.
All of the Republicans or presumed Republicans on the commission surely would be surprised to learn that JNE has a goal of shooting down Republican applicants for judgeships. Democrats on the commission would be also astonished to find that out.
It is, of course, not so. The commission is apolitical, as it should be.
Court mediator Cecil D. Green, a public member of JNE, is a Republican. He tells me:
“I don’t think there’s any anti-Republican bias [on JNE]. I don’t think there’s any pro-Democratic bias.
“We don’t discuss politics.”
Another public member, Marcia Herman, a volunteer mediator in Los Angeles, similarly asserts:
“JNE is absolutely not a biased organization.”
Political affiliations of applicants are not even discussed, she says.
Retired San Bernardino Superior Court Judge Leroy A. Simmons responded quite thoughtfully to an emailed query. (I’ve edited his e-mail to break it into paragraphs, simply to increase readability.) He writes:
You may be aware that the application which the candidate files with the governor, and comes to the JNE Commission, does call for the political party affiliation of the applicant. In that manner, the commissioners gain knowledge of the political registrations of the candidate. Notwithstanding, I have never heard any mention of political considerations in the deliberative process. I believe that any such attempt by a commission would be ruled out of order instantly by the Chairman as being outside the Commission’s statutory mandate. The discussions focus on professional experience in the actual practice of law, judicial temperament, work ethics, bias (which would include racial, sexual, etc., as well as political, I presume). I doubt that you could find a collection of attorneys, judges, and public members, all of whom have political affiliations, that could be more politically neutral.
I
learned today that the commissioner with whom I am presently working was for 6
years the special assistant to President Reagan in the White House. She is a
dedicated Republican but makes no mention whatever of her political
inclinations in the evaluative process.
I am a retired Superior Court judge, appointed to that court in 1981 by then governor Jerry Brown. You can probably guess my political inclinations are very different from those of the former special assistant to the president. However, not a word, however subtle, is exchanged between us that could give anyone any suspicion that the candidate was being evaluated politically by either of us. The politics of the appointment process are properly left to the governor. The only legitimate function of the Commission is an assessment of the professional qualities of the applicant.
While I am fairly new to the commission, it quickly became apparent that the body functions totally without political considerations. I have no idea the source of the commission critic’s information about the internal workings of the commission, but it there is apparent that those who criticize the commission in this manner are the very ones who would have candidate evaluations assessed for their politics.
To suggest that this collection of intelligent, hard working volunteers makes assessments based on political positions in utterly ludicrous.
“Utterly ludicrous” also describes other events surrounding the appointment.
Following the disclosure of the JNE rating, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, who made Pirozzi a judge despite a “not qualified” rating by the body officially charged with evaluating applicants for judgeships, did not view the matter to be significant enough to warrant a personal statement by him.
Here is a Republican governor giving a job to a recent chairman of the San Bernardino Republican County Central Committee, the job of a judge of the San Bernardino Superior Court, despite an “NQ” JNE rating (said to have been on a 29-1 vote), and apparently contrary to advice from his own judicial appointments secretary. He was appointing a lawyer who was primarily a real estate broker who handled some transactional matters for private clients, but did not appear in court.
Newspapers seeking comment from the Governor’s Office on the State Bar’s disclosure received an e-mailed statement, one not attributable to the governor, but to a press aide, Aaron McLear. It says, merely:
“Judge Pirozzi is qualified to serve in this position - he had been serving as a judge pro tem over the past year, a position that he was selected for by his peers in the legal community. He has practiced law for nearly two decades in the Inland Empire, which has given him strong community ties and a vast knowledge of the pressing issues in San Bernardino.”
While “strong community ties and a vast knowledge of the pressing issues in San Bernardino” might be relevant to the qualifications of a candidate for a city council, this hardly relates to aptitude for the bench. That, however, is the least troubling aspect of the statement.
• It tells of Pirozzi being in law practice but does not address the extent of his practice.
• Reference to the new judge having been a “judge pro tem over the past year” would be bound to create the illusion to laypersons that he had been filling a presumably fulltime judicial position for a year. Pirozzi was not a Superior Court commissioner; he was, chiefly, a real estate broker, volunteering some time as a pro tem judge.
• Reference to his selection by “peers in the legal community” dishonestly implies an election by members of the San Bernardino bar. There was no such election.
Who actually makes the selection among applicants?
“I’m the one who approves them to serve as a pro tem,” San Bernardino Superior Court Presiding Judge Larry Allen says.
There is no selection by “peers”?
“They’re approved by me,” he repeats.
Pro tems generally handle small claims and traffic cases, and the like. As to what Pirozzi attended to, and how many hours he spent on the bench as a temporary judge, Allen couldn’t answer. I talked with him on Friday, and the person who had the records was out of the office.
“We don’t have them at our fingertips,” he says.
Someone who could answer off the top of his head is, of course, Pirozzi. But Pirozzi is not responding to press inquiries.
When he accepted a judgeship, knowing that he had been rated “not qualified” by JNE, and knowing that, by statute, the State Bar Board of Governors could vote to make that ranking public, Pirozzi should have been prepared to offer some explanation to his new employers—the people of this state—as to why he believed he was, in fact, fit for judicial office. What emerges is that he does not possess a sense of responsibility to the public sufficient to prompt him to communicate with his employers even in the form of a press statement by him, let alone by talking with members of the press, traditionally the surrogates of the public in gathering information and comments.
He was found “not qualified” in late 2005. He then joined the temporary judges program. If he thought the experience he gained from that rendered him fit, now, for a judgeship, he could have asked that his name be resubmitted to JNE. Whether he or the Governor’s Office or both sensed that this added experience was not sufficient to alter the rating, there was no resubmission, and he was appointed in May, with JNE’s late-disclosed charge of unfitness countered Monday by the trumpeting of his year-long service as a judge pro tem.
I’ve previously discussed dishonesty in connection with the May 23 press release from the Governor’s Office implying, falsely, that law practice was Pirozzi’s only occupation.
McLear’s July 23 statement rationalizing the appointment was clearly an effort to flimflam the public.
It is disheartening to learn that Schwarzenegger (for whom I voted in the recall election, in last year’s GOP gubernatorial primary, and in the general election) is the proprietor of a state Bureau of Lies.
State Sen. Bob Dutton, R-Rancho Cucamonga, is quoted in last Wednesday’s issue of the MetNews and in a related newspaper, the San Bernardino Bulletin, as saying, in the course of defending the appointment of Pirozzi:
“I wish people would stop playing politics with appointments.”
And who is it who played politics with the particular judicial appointment in issue? Whoever it was Dutton had in mind, the answer is Schwarzenegger.
Placing a realtor on the Superior Court hardly rises to the level of outrageousness of Jerry Brown’s award of the post of chief justice to a political crony whose highest position in law had been that of a deputy public defender. But Schwarzenegger displays, as Brown did, low regard for the public’s need to have a judiciary comprised of the most able persons available.
Copyright 2007, Metropolitan News Company