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by–R.J. Latronico
Editors Note: Chief Justice
George shared so much compelling information in this
face-to-face interview, we decided to eliminate our typical Q
& A format. By doing this we have enabled Chief Justice
George to speak directly to his Central Valley constituents.
Imagine being face to face with the Chief Justice of
the California Supreme Court-Ronald George, in the privacy of
his chambers, in a non-adversarial role, talking about the
Central Valley-the good and the bad. Come with me as I uncover
the man behind the robe. He’s someone that all of us should be
proud to know.
Imagine being face to face with the
Chief Justice of the California Supreme Court-Ronald George,
in the privacy of his chambers, in a non-adversarial role,
talking about the Central Valley-the good and the bad. Come
with me as I uncover the man behind the robe. He’s someone
that all of us should be proud to know.
I hail from Los Angeles originally, but since the
California Supreme Court is headquartered in San Francisco, I
reside here most of the time.
But I have vacation
property along the Kaweah River in Three Rivers, so with my
wife and our three sons we try to get back there as often as
we can. Our place is in the Middle Fork. We started going
there when the boys were just infants. Their real exposure to
the outdoors came from there: learning how to swim in the
river, how to catch trout, hiking up in the park in both
summer and winter. We were there this winter between Christmas
and New Year’s, and had a wonderful hike up to Tharp’s Log and
Crescent Meadow. It’s still nice there, it hasn’t been
spoiled. And I love to swim, when the weather is warmer, right
in the river.
I have actually visited every county in
California–I’m the first Chief Justice who has. I made that a
goal in my first year. In this state, the Chief Justice of the
Supreme Court is Chief Justice of the whole state, so I
considered it my obligation to really know the conditions of
our courts in all 58 counties.
It was eye-opening–there
are amazing things all over the state. One of the most
important things I learned is that the quality of justice
varied from county to county–and it should not.
The
public’s access to justice depended in large part upon the
willingness of various counties to adequately fund their
courts in the face of competing demands for other services.
My first goal that year was to get emergency funding
from the state legislature and then switch to a system of
funding the courts from the state instead of from the
counties. I also saw that there were so many duplications of
services–and decided that the taxpayers’ money might be better
used by combining municipal and superior courts. We were able
to get a Constitutional amendment passed by the legislature
for the June ’98 election–and the voters approved it by
two-thirds.
So we went from 220 municipal and superior
courts to just 58 superior courts–one in each county. This
achieved a lot of efficiencies and new services for our
residents. That might seem like an impossible task to you,
seeing that we’re trying to increase access to the courts and
here we are closing them. But what has happened in many areas,
including the Central Valley, is that although you had a lot
of municipal courts around, some of the most important
services were being provided only in the county seat, in the
Superior Court.
So let’s say a woman wanted a domestic
violence restraining order: she might have to drive a couple
hundred miles and then be told that domestic violence
restraining orders were issued just on Wednesday mornings–and
here it was Thursday. Most of the former municipal courts have
been kept open: now they offer Superior Court services, family
law matters, marital dissolution, child support, child
custody, and domestic violence restraining orders. In many
counties these weren’t available before, except at the county
seat. So, actually, we have expanded services.
Now let
me add one other thing: we need new judgeships. We have
legislation that we’re proposing this year–and it has
bipartisan support–to add 150 new judicial positions in the
state.
The lion’s share of new judgeships will go to
the Central Valley along with the inland empire counties of
Riverside and San Bernardino. They’re the fastest growing
parts of the state, but there hasn’t been a corresponding
growth or increase in the number of judgeships.
Do you
want to know the most important topic facing judges in the
Central Valley? It’s a major issue that affects the whole
system: providing access to justice for persons who are
representing themselves. This is the norm in 80 percent to 90
percent of family law cases dealing with marital dissolution,
child support, child custody and domestic violence. So, people
who cannot afford counsel must represent themselves.
To help these people, we have set up self-help
centers, including the first self-help center for the Spanish
speaking community. Our award-winning self-help web site has
had millions of hits in English and Spanish versions, and
portions are available in Chinese, Japanese, and Korean.
One of the greatest challenges of the Central Valley is
the increasingly multicultural make-up of California’s
population. You would be amazed to hear that in any given year
we interpret more than 100 languages in our court system. They
run the gamut from A to Z–from Albanian to Zapotec!
I’m often asked about the Hillside Strangler case over
which I presided when I was a trial judge. That case had quite
an impact on me and my family and my court staff as well. The
jury trial proceedings alone lasted more than two years. It
was a major preoccupation.
As a judge, your day is
often filled with very grim, untypical human behavior, but you
don’t want to bring that home to your spouse and family. You
have to keep your balance, you have to maintain a neutral
viewpoint. I used to be prosecutor so I had to make the
transition to sitting back and letting the attorneys try their
own cases, and to act impartially as a judge–as opposed to
being an advocate.
Jury reform is another major
priority for me. In addition to what the local courts have
done to improve service for their jurors—free transportation
on public transit, discounts on lunches—there are three major
structural reforms we’ve been able to
achieve.
We’ve tripled what jurors are
paid, from $5 to $15 a day, but I’d like to see it go up to
$40 a day.
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We legislated one-day or one-trial jury service, with
jurors on-call at home or work. Once you’re in the courthouse,
if you’re not sent from the jury room to a courtroom with jury
selection in progress, then you go home after one day—you’ve
completed your service for the year. Of course when you are
sent to a courtroom you have to go through the jury selection
process until you’re either rejected or accepted. Under the
former system what people saw as totally unjustified was being
kept in a jury assembly room for maybe two weeks, and never
going to a courtroom. I think that gave people a rather
negative view of the workings of the judicial system. People
resent wasted time.
I appointed a task force to write
new jury instructions that trial judges give to jurors to
guide them in applying the law as they determine the facts in
a given case. So this task force just concluded its work.
After eight years, they came up with brand new instructions,
written in plain language for both civil and criminal matters.
It’s an amazing endeavor. That task force was headed by
Justice Carol Corrigan, who just became the newest member of
the California Supreme Court.
I’ll give you my
favorite example: the standard instruction that dealt with the
credibility, the believability of witnesses, and how to
determine whom to believe. The old instructions read, in part:
“Innocent mis-recollection is not uncommon.” The new version
states the same principle in plain language: “People sometimes
forget things.” And to set a good example, I have shown up for
jury duty myself, both under the old system and under the new
system of one-day or one trial, and I can assure you it’s a
vast improvement.
To assure that old facilities will
be brought up to standard, we persuaded the Legislature to
pass the Trial Court Facilities Act of 2002. This set in
motion a several-years process whereby ownership and
management responsibility of all 451 courthouses in the state
are being shifted from the counties to the state under
judicial branch management. The counties, by the way,
legitimately felt that in view of the other changes, that
they’re not really in the court business anymore.
It’s
a lengthy process, because each transfer has to be negotiated
individually. Not only is there a question of funding, but
there’s also the question of bringing the facilities up to a
safe level. Many more of the facilities than we expected need
seismic safety upgrades. And Tulare, for instance, had a
possible problem with toxic mold. Many facilities weren’t
designed to be secure–we’ve read about major problems in
Atlanta and Chicago. We’ve had instances in California where
people have been injured or killed in our courthouses.
So, in addition to some of the filing fees going into
our new courthouse construction and management fund, instead
of going to the counties, we knew we would need a bond issue
of billions to complete the upgrading and acquisition and
construction of new facilities. And that’s very, very true in
the Central Valley as well.
I met with Governor
Schwarzenegger when I heard that he was thinking of an
infrastructure bond. I urged him, and the state Legislature as
well, to include the courts … that they’re just as much a part
of our infrastructure as our streets and highways and bridges.
And the governor agreed. So we hope to stay in this mix of
various infrastructure proposals for the upcoming bond issues
that have been proposed.
The proposed judicial branch
budget is presented simultaneously to the Legislature and the
Governor, which is a major benefit. Why? Because, as a
co-equal branch of government, the judiciary should be
accountable for the $3.7 billion it spends providing access to
justice throughout the state.
As a co-equal branch of
government, we’re glad that we now can present our needs
directly to the Legislature instead of having them filtered
through the Governor’s office and the Department of Finance,
which properly can and does comment on them.
I’m
pleased to have this kind of interview, to be able to present
this kind of information to the public. The media seem to
skirt over judicial issues, but they’re the public’s eyes and
ears for the judicial system–which is so important in the
daily lives of our citizens. People look at the county seat
and think, okay, that’s government. But it’s really just one
little cog in the machinery of government of which the
judicial system is an important part.
My wife and I
love to travel, especially on exotic trips. We went to
Antarctica a couple of years ago … Iceland last summer … and
recently New Zealand. Only one of my three sons is in law,
doing business litigation in Los Angeles. The other two are in
the entertainment industry, one on the creative side, one on
the business side. We still try to get up to Three Rivers two
or three times a year, depending on our busy schedules.
For more information, visit the Supreme Court / Court of
Appeals web site:
http://www.courtinfo.ca.gov/ |
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