‘We have this fantasy that one day all the cases will be done.’ : Good Cases, Ocean Air Lure Jurists to the Beach

Who wouldn’t want to work at 1725 Main St., Santa Monica, a stone’s throw from the Pacific?

There are some drawbacks to working at the Santa Monica Courthouse. It is run down, crowded and vulnerable to security breaches.

But Superior Court judges will wait for years to transfer to the bench by the beach, where fresh air, good cases and the prospect of a short commute recently lured three veteran jurists from other jurisdictions.

They are: Joel Rudof, from the Superior Court in Van Nuys, who will specialize in pretrial settlements of civil suits; Jack M. Newman, from the Central District downtown, an expert on procedure whose full-time assignment is hearing pretrial motions, and Robert T. Altman, also from the Central District, a former prosecutor who heard his first civil case last month but is expected to concentrate on criminal trials.

Altman and Rudof are Westside residents who relish the chance to work close to home, and Newman spends much of his free time on the Westside working on charitable causes. Rudof, 66, even commutes by bicycle. On the bench, his judicial robe conceals the casual cyclist’s jacket underneath.

Relentless Pressure

But the pace at Santa Monica Superior Court is hardly laid-back. With the court system jammed countywide, there is relentless pressure to settle out of court or send cases out for arbitration.

If that fails, civil suits generally must go to trial within five years or be dismissed, and judges are pressed to hear as many cases as possible. The caseload is so great that hotel conference rooms have been booked through next fall so that retired judges working part time can hold court in them.

“There is no downtime between cases. We are constantly zapping away at trials,” said Presiding Judge David M. Rothman. “It would be nice if you could be leisurely and give everybody tremendous time to cogitate, but we don’t have that luxury.”

He said his new colleagues were eminent in their specialties and welcome additions to his roster of overburdened judges.

Altman, 49, a tennis player, married and the father of two teen-age daughters, comes from a assignment that was as high-pressured as any in the Los Angeles Superior Courts.

For two years he heard major criminal cases without a jury. The cases involved murder, rape, child molestation, complex fraud and other crimes in which both sides felt they were better off if the defendants waived their right to a jury trial.

Without a jury, the cases moved quickly, but the pace was grueling.

“The program became too popular, at least for me,” Altman said. His calendar was booked two months in advance, and he had to finish each trial in the time allotted for it or else reschedule his entire calendar.

Grueling Pace

“I had to get done faster and faster in the day. I went through three clerks,” he said. “The pressure was unbelievable. When I went home at night I couldn’t slow down.”

When the chance came to move to the court’s West District at the beginning of May, Altman, a Cheviot Hills resident, grabbed it.

He had worked in the building in the 1970s as a deputy district attorney. He successfully prosecuted Eddy Wein, the so-called “watch stem rapist.”

Wein had been sentenced to death in the 1950s, but his sentence was reduced to life in prison. Twenty years later, one woman was killed and another was attacked by a man who used an unusual technique: knocking on a door, dropping his timepiece if a woman answered and overpowering her with a knife to the neck when she bent down to help him find it.

A retired detective remembered that this had been Wein’s distinctive modus operandi two decades earlier, but he thought Wein had been executed. Wein had been paroled six months earlier, however, and he was quickly arrested.

“We had to find the victims from the ‘50s to testify against him. It was really dramatic,” Altman said.

Quick Adjustments

After 18 years immersed in criminal law--11 as a prosecutor and seven as a judge--Altman had to make some quick adjustments during his first civil trial, shortly after he moved to Santa Monica. At one point, he called on counsel for “the people” instead of the plaintiff to make closing arguments.

But Altman, a graduate of UCLA and Harvard Law School, said he was eager to master a new branch of jurisprudence. Despite his devotion to criminal law, he said he hoped to continue hearing some civil trials.

“We get cases that would cross a rabbi’s eyes,” he said.

In his 13 years on the bench, nine of them in Superior Court, Jack M. Newman has heard some puzzling and highly publicized cases, most notably perhaps that of Elizabeth Bouvia, a quadriplegic whose desire to die raised thorny questions of medical ethics.

Register Voters

He angered County Supervisor Pete Schabarum when he ordered county officials to deputize thousands of employees to register low-income and minority voters.

Schabarum said the decision by the former Democratic Party activist was politically motivated, but Newman, who once distributed handbills for Adlai Stevenson, denied it.

“One has to do one’s best to understand what the law is and to follow it,” he said. That case is pending before the state Supreme Court.

Newman has figured in many high-profile cases in the downtown courthouse because it was frequently his assignment to rule on orders and injunctions that required immediate action.

He also has heard appeals from lower courts, tried criminal cases and acted as a juvenile court judge in the years since his elevation from the Municipal Court in 1980.

“There are aggravations in the legal process,” Newman told a courtroom filled with lawyers waiting for his decisions recently. “Sometimes people drop lawsuits or settle them for less than they’re worth. Some attorneys stop practicing law because of it. Some of them are fortunate enough to become judges and don’t need clients.”

Newman, 49, a graduate of UCLA and UCLA Law School, lives in the Los Feliz area but spends much of his free time on the Westside because of his involvement in Jewish community affairs, something he attributes to his father’s activism in a tailors’ union.

He is president of the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith, vice chairman of the Community Relations Commission of the Jewish Federation Council and a member of the board of the Federation Council, an umbrella group representing more than 400 Jewish organizations in the city.

“I go to a lot of meetings at 6505 (Wilshire Blvd., headquarters of the Federation Council) and I can get there and back in 15 minutes each way,” he said soon after transferring to Santa Monica in April.

“It seems like a pleasant place to be. The only disadvantage is not having windows in my chambers, but that’s more psychological than practical.”

Newman’s chambers are squeezed into what was once a jury room. He has to share a courtroom with Rothman, the presiding judge. Rothman proposed the sharing arrangement as a means of getting an extra judge into the crowded building.

83 Cases Heard

“We have this fantasy that one day all the cases will be done,” Rothman said with a sigh.

That has yet to happen, but Santa Monica’s 15 Superior Court judges heard 83 civil and criminal cases between Jan. 1 and the end of April this year, compared to 54 during the same period the year before.

“Not bad, eh? I was kind of impressed with that,” Rothman said.

One of his procedural changes involves the assignment of Rudof, who transferred from Van Nuys in January, to concentrate on pretrial settlements of civil cases, Rothman said.

Rudof, a Santa Monica resident and one-time professor at the University of the San Fernando Valley College of Law, specialized in workers’ compensation during a long career in private practice.

An eight-year veteran of the Superior Court, he said he expects to be handling 15 to 25 cases at a time, bringing plaintiffs and defendants together in an effort to work out settlements without going to trial.

“We discuss with the parties to see if there is any give or take,” he said. Plaintiffs generally think they are going to walk away with more money than experience shows they are likely to, he said.

“If we can get rid of a 30-day trial by spending three, four or five hours or perhaps even a day on the case, it’s judicially economical to spend the time.”

Rudof is a golfer, tennis player and classical music fan. After his first wife died, he remarried two years ago and boasts of a joint brood of five grandchildren.

Unlike Altman and Newman, both born in New York, Rudof is a Los Angeles native, a graduate of Fairfax High School who left UCLA one semester short of graduation to serve in the Army during World War II. He entered USC Law School after his discharge from the service.

After 30 years as a solo practitioner and a partner in small law firms, a career during which he handled no criminal cases, his first assignment as a Superior Court judge was a complicated criminal matter that kept him “burning some midnight oil learning how to do it,” he said.

Complaints Over Facility

“But it’s not that unusual,” he said. “A courtroom was open and someone had to handle the case. A competent judge is like a good athlete. If you’re a good athlete you can succeed at just about any sport.”

Like many workers at the Santa Monica Courthouse, Rudof complained of the shabby state of the facility, calling it “ a shande far di shchenim “--a Yiddish phrase meaning “a shame before the neighbors.”

The clerk’s office is so cramped that half its records are being moved upstairs into what has been a law library. A portion of the library is being displaced to another building.

Paint is peeling on the wall in the lobby where a plaque proudly lists the names of the county’s elected officials at the time the building was built in 1964.

Lawyers lean against the walls of the chairless and benchless corridor outside Rudof’s office, waiting for their settlement conferences.

Unlocked doors that lead almost directly from courtrooms to the outdoors offer potential avenues of escape for criminal defendants.

But the site retains its appeal, at least for the judges. A fourth judge who is expected to transfer to Santa Monica in the near future declined to be interviewed for fear of jinxing his prospects. He had been set to make the move earlier but a more senior colleague exercised his right to bump him at the last minute, he said.