Legal Pad

Why We're Talking About a Judge's Shootout Back in '06

Let met tell you a tale about a judge who’s a real rootin’ tootin’ shootin’ son of a gun.

He’s Harold Neville, retired from Humboldt County Superior Court in the wilds of far northwest California. But he seems to have a bit of the spirit of famed Judge Roy Bean, who called himself the “Law West of the Pecos” back in Texas in the 1800s.

It seems Neville had been fishing with a lady friend on Oct. 29, 2006, when he became alerted to the presence of car thieves, who had stolen one vehicle and were pillaging others, down a one-way road to the Klamath River. Rather than let ‘um get away, Neville — a former Marine and highway patrol officer — blocked the road with his truck, pulled a handgun out of the vehicle’s door and demanded one of the suspects, who was in a stolen Toyota 4Runner SUV 40 yards away, to stand down.

Find out what kind of a shot Neville was, after the jump ...

We Share Our List of 420+ Judicial Appointees So You Can Follow At Home

The guv, left, with the chief justice (not on our list).

We recently put together some stats on the governor’s judicial picks for an Exhibits feature page on CalLaw.com, which broke out stats on things like party affiliation and gender. In the process, we put together a huge (downloadable) spreadsheet that we thought might be of interest to other court watchers, now that we’re done with it. So we're sharing it, after the jump. Save it! Sort it! Add to it!

Plus, we'll add some more stats and demographic info — both official and unofficial — that we didn’t get to incorporate in Exhibits. Feeder jobs! Appellate seats filled! Ethnic minority numbers!

All that the judicial wonks out there are hoping for, and more, after the jump …

AOC Comes Out With First in Series of Class Action Studies (It's So 2005)

The number of class actions filed in California state courts climbed by about 39 percent between 2000 and 2005, but the passage of the federal Class Action Fairness Act in 2005 likely means that local superior courts now see fewer class actions come through their doors, according to a report released Wednesday by the state Administrative Office of the Courts.

The report is the first of four that the AOC hopes to publish about class action litigation trends in California.

We pull out some of the interesting bits about these old class actions, after the jump ...

Fewer Bad Apples in Judge Pool

The number of would-be judges labeled “not qualified” by the Commission on Judicial Nominees Evaluation last year dropped by more than 50 percent from 2007, according to figures released by the State Bar late Monday.

Just 15 of 259 applicants received the dreaded “not qualified” rating. Thirty-three received the label in 2007.

The JNE numbers detail the cumulative gender and ethnicities of lawyers applying for judgeships in 2008. They also break down the applicants’ ratings – extremely well qualified, well qualified, qualified and not qualified -- by gender and ethnic subgroups.

State law requires JNE to release the data annually. The Judicial Council and the governor’s office released similar figures on judicial applicants and appointments earlier this week.

This year’s JNE numbers are in the chart at right — click to enlarge.

—  Cheryl Miller

How Can Both Minority and Non-Minority Judge Counts Be Up? More Labeling

Here’s a curious bit of judicial diversity news: In a report (.pdf) issued Friday, the Judicial Council reports that the number of minority judges has increased over the last two years. But oddly, so have the number of Caucasians.

African-American, Asian American and Latino jurists now comprise 16.8 percent of the bench in California, up from 15.1 percent in 2007. But the percentage of white judges has also increased from 70.1 percent two years ago to 72.6 percent today.

So what gives? The answer appears to lie in the decreasing number of judges who don’t provide information about their race to the Council. The percentage of such racial decline-to-states dropped from 9.9 percent in 2007 to 5.3 percent this year.

The council’s report follows a similar one that the governor issued about his 2008 appointments on Thursday. A third analysis by the Commission on Judicial Nominees Evaluation is expected Monday.

—  Cheryl Miller

One Lawyer Gets Novel Pay, Another Gets Bar-Slapped

We can’t decide which of the lawyers below had a more disappointing day. … (Okay, we can, but it was a close contest.)

• In our favorite piece of Internets reading today, a columnist in Southern California informs us of a Los Angeles Superior Court class action with a pretty unique pay scheme. Apparently, this mediated settlement netted class members $10 gift cards to shop at the clothing-store chain that was sued. So the plaintiff lawyer’s mediated $125,000 fee has to be paid out in the form of 12,500 $10 gift cards. (You can probably guess how the name plaintiff is getting paid, too … ) [Metropolitan News-Enterprise]
• And then the San Jose Mercury News is reporting that State Bar officials have issued a public reproval against Peter Waite, a homicide prosecutor accused of hiding expert testimony from a defense lawyer in the sanity phase of a 1999 trial. (According to the Merc, the defense lawyer found out on his own, in enough time to include the testimony in the trial anyway.) [San Jose Mercury News, and we’ll throw in Waite's State Bar listing for good measure]

—  Pam Smith