Without a Doubt - [56]

Judge Mills had about six to nine names to choose from. These were drawn from a pool of judges who were available for so-called long-cause cases, complex cases, usually murder trials, that were expected to go longer than a month. The lawyers on both sides get to look over the list of judges to see if there’s any candidate so objectionable that one side or the other might have to “paper” him. “Papering” means filing an affidavit of protest. It’s a little like a peremptory challenge; you can reject an appointment without offering a reason. The only problem is that you’re obliged to take the next name you’re given.

There were at least two candidates so awful they made the hair on my neck stand on end. I would definitely have papered them. And then there were three or four others who would have been terrific. But Lance Ito? He’d never, ever occurred to me.

“You’ve gotta be kidding,” I whispered to Bill. Why, I wondered, does the judiciary never pick its brightest stars for these cases?

Lance was certainly no bright star. When he was chosen for the Simpson case, he was presiding over the master calendar court, which sends cases out to be tried. It was a useful but mundane assignment. The judge in calendar either tries to get the sides to plea-bargain or sends the case out for trial. It’s strictly an administrative position, and one that takes a judge out of the loop of trial work. It’s certainly not the sort of assignment that would prepare one for dealing with the pressures of the Simpson case.

Lance always struck me as an overgrown adolescent. He was the only judge I knew who wore running shoes under his robes. I’d worked with him briefly in the D.A.‘s office-he’d been a prosecutor during the eighties. His reputation as a gun enthusiast preceded him. According to office lore, he’d been looking over a handgun with another D.A. when somehow the piece went off and fired a bullet into the ceiling-which happened to be the floor of the Public Defender’s Office.

Lance was one of those guys who can sniff out a new source of power in the office and always manage to attach themselves to the unit du jour. He got himself assigned to the Hard Core Gang Unit when it was a hot political baby. He prided himself on political correctness. His wife, Captain Margaret York, was the highest-ranking female officer on the LAPD. I could never figure that pair out. It became clearer and clearer to me as the trial went on that when it came to gender equality, Lance was stuck in a tar pit.

In his seven years on the bench, Ito had shown himself to be a typical ex-prosecutor judge. Don’t get me wrong. Some old prosecutors go on to the bench and turn out to be terrific judges, fair and decisive. A number of them, however, treat the D.A.s who appear before them very badly. If the prosecutor is any good, the judge feels competitive. The ex-prosecutor judge is usually so eager to show that he has no lingering loyalties to the D.A.‘s office that he’ll kiss the toes of the defense.

I hadn’t argued a case before Ito, but Bill had: the Keating case. I could remember Bill grousing about Ito at the time. He thought Ito had bent over backward to accommodate the defense and dismissed a lot of counts he shouldn’t have. But in the end, Bill and his team won a guilty verdict. It’s not unusual for a D.A. to be tweaked by a judge’s day-to-day rulings, only to recall him as a fine and thoughtful jurist when the outcome is favorable. Bill felt Ito had done a tolerably good job on Keating, which was by anyone’s reckoning a complicated long-cause trial. Keating, however, was strictly white-collar crime; accordingly, everyone kept his gloves on. The Simpson case was shaping up to be a sort of break-your-bottles-and-go-at-it street brawl. We would need a judge who could step in and keep the peace. I didn’t believe Lance had the fortitude for that.

My first inclination was to refuse him. But Judge Mills added a complication. He noted that Ito was married to a captain on the LAPD.

“In the event that either side desires him to do so,” he explained, “no affidavit will be required on the request of either side. He will recuse himself from handling this matter.”

Thanks a lot. Now, if we refused him on the grounds that his wife was a cop, what kind of message would that send? It would telegraph to our prospective jury pool that we didn’t think much of the LAPD, or that Lance had some inside information about the LAPD that would hurt us. The only politic option was to decline Judge Mills’s offer, use our one challenge to boot him, and hope for a better draw. Of course, then we’d have to accept the next name to come up. No arguments; no appeals.

I’d have papered him in a hot second if I hadn’t known there were a couple of worse judges in the building. (Although, looking back, it’s hard to see how they could have been much worse.) Instead, I turned to Bill, who knew Ito better than I did.

“What’s your gut tell you?”

He sighed and gave me a thumbs-up.

I wish that one of us had been endowed with some mystical gift of prescience that would have warned us off this train wreck. But you make your decision with the best information you have at the time.