Vote in Carla Keehn in place of Lisa Schall for Judicial Office 20, and Brad Weinreb for Office 25, but keep Prager and Popkins

 Update April 2016:

Carla Keehn is challenging Keri Greer Katz, daughter of judge Michael Greer, in 2016 election for Superior Court Judge

 Original post:

Superior Court Judge; Office 9 • Ronald S. Prager

Superior Court Judge; Office 19 • Michael J. Popkins

Superior Court Judge; Office 20 • Carla Keehn: This race receives special attention. Keehn is running against the incumbent Lisa Schall. The problem with Schall is that during her term as judge she has been admonished three times by the state Commission on Judicial Performance. After 30 years on the bench it is time for a change. Vote for Keehn

Superior Court Judge; Office 25 • Brad Weinreb

Brad Weinreb, a state deputy attorney general for more than 20 years, was rated by the Bar as “qualified.” He has extensive experience in major criminal cases and claims one of the highest active caseloads in death penalty cases. He won the endorsement of Goldsmith, Gore, Chula Vista Police Chief David Bejarano, county Public Defender Henry Coker, numerous organizations and some 50 current judges. Both his opponents, Michele Hagan and Ken Gosselin, received the lowest rating of “lacking qualifications” from the Bar. And Gosselin has been accused of misleading voters about his education and experience.

Superior Court Judge; Office 44 • Joseph Adelizzi (SDER choice to replace incumbent Judge Jacqueline Stern)

Judge has been admonished three times
No jurist in the state has a less favorable record
By Greg Moran
U-T San Diego
May 12, 2014

The campaign website for San Diego Superior Court Judge Lisa Schall touts her three decades of experience on the bench, including assignments in every division of law, from criminal courts to probate matters and family law.

What it doesn’t talk about is Schall’s record of discipline with the state agency that oversees judges.

No other active judge among the state’s 1,827 judges on the Superior Court, appeals court and Supreme Court bench has been publicly disciplined more times than Schall has, a review of disciplinary records from the Commission on Judicial Performance shows. She has received two public admonishments and one private admonishment.

Only one other judge, in Contra Costa, has a similar record.

Schall said the record involves three incidents over a nearly-30-year career on the bench, that she has learned from her mistakes, and that her work record has earned her the continuing support of the legal community.

The record shows Schall has been publicly admonished twice, most recently in March 2008 when she pleaded guilty to an alcohol-related driving charge. A public admonishment is the third most-serious level of punishment the commission can hand out, behind only public censure and removal from the bench.

She was stopped while driving the wrong way on Centre City Parkway in Escondido in September 2007 and found to have a blood-alcohol level of 0.09. That is just over the legal limit.

The arrest came just months before she was up for re-election to her fourth term and was not made public at the time. Court records show the case was delayed for six months, and Schall pleaded guilty to a lesser offense — one week after the filing period for a candidate to run against her had closed.

Under state election law, if a sitting judge does not draw a challenger during the filing period, they are deemed automatically re-elected to the office for another term.

Both the judge and her attorney, William Wolfe, said she was not given any special consideration and that Schall did not seek to delay the disposition of the case until after the filing period.

Shall said this week she was dealing with a divorce and caring for her elderly parents at the time of the DUI arrest. She said that is not an excuse, and has apologized to colleagues and family since.

“I took ownership of that,” she said. “I didn’t try to hide it or cover it up.”

Schall was also publicly admonished in 1999 for abusing her power and not following the law when she jailed a woman for five days for contempt of court. The woman was disruptive in the courtroom during a hearing on a restraining order and was taken out of the courtroom.

When the woman said to Schall’s bailiff that she would “go off” if not allowed to tell her story, Schall cited her for contempt without holding a hearing or making factual findings — and when the woman was not in the courtroom.

In 1995 Schall received a private admonishment from the commission for what commission records describe as “her embroilment in a juvenile dependency matter.” Schall said during a child welfare case she was told an appellate lawyer for one parent had been revealing confidential testimony from the court proceedings. She held a hearing with the appellate lawyer and others to find out what had happened, and the commission concluded that was wrong.

...The disciplinary commission has doled out public admonishments just 75 times since 1995 to 22 judges, records show. Several judges who received two public admonishments either retired or were removed by the commission after the second...

Is the public served when attorneys and litigants do favors for judges? Let's take the politics out of choosing judges

See blog post: Chief Justice John Roberts: Judge Brent Benjamin doesn't have to recuse himself just because of a measly $3 million campaign contribution

Electing judges is a bad idea, but appointing judges is almost as bad. Why not create a pool of highly-rated attorneys, created by the Bar Association (we don't want to eliminate politics completely, right?), and then use a lottery to choose judges from that pool as positions become available?

Seriously, why not? The only reason not to do this is to keep politics in the courtroom.

But for now, we're stuck with judicial elections in San Diego. Let's choose the best candidates. Federal prosecutor Carla Keehn is running against Judge Lisa Schall in June 2014.


MATT TAIBBI'S NEW BOOK ABOUT OUR TWO-TIERED JUSTICE SYSTEM



The Divide
American Injustice in the Age of the Wealth Gap
Matt Taibbi and Molly Crabapple
PBS
April 6, 2014

...On how he discovered 'the divide'

I was covering these gigantic Wall Street white-collar-criminal scandals, and I became interested in the concept of why nobody was going to jail, why we didn't have criminal prosecutions. And then it occurred to me that it's impossible to really talk about the gravity of that problem unless you know who is going to jail in the United States, and how those people go to jail and how that works.

What I ended up finding is that it's incredibly easy for people who don't have money to go to jail for just about anything. There's almost an inverse relationship between the ease with which you can put a poor person in jail for, say, welfare fraud, and the difficulty that prosecutors face when they try to put someone from a too-big-to-fail bank in jail for a more serious kind of fraud.

On media coverage of white-collar crime

Over time I think a kind of Stockholm Syndrome develops, it's kind of the same thing that happens with campaign reporters and candidates: You start to sort of sympathize with the people you cover in this weird subterranean, psychological way.

'A Very Sordid Story'

Matt Taibbi On The Fairfax Financial Case

In this audio clip, NPR's Kelly McEvers asks Matt Taibbi about the most salacious case in his book, The Divide. Taibbi tells and the short-sellers who Fairfax alleges took revenge when a deal didn't go through as expected. The company sued in 2006.

Taibbi says it's a great example of the judicial divide between the rich and poor. It's easy to think hedge fund managers can't be criminals, he says, because they're often seen as polite and refined.

"[But] in many cases, they're really not," Taibbi says. "I mean, in this case, they're just as streety and gross as any other kind of criminal."

I think what ends up happening is these stories get written about, but they get written without outrage, or without the right tone, and they are also not written for the right audiences. They're written for Wall Street audiences who want to find out how this lawsuit turned out. They may not want to see those people thrown in jail, they just might be interested in seeing how far the government is willing to go this week in putting white-collar offenders in jail.

On comparing banks and people

The HSBC case was . This is a bank that admitted to washing over $850 million for a pair of Central and South American drug cartels. They admit to this behavior, they pay a fine, no individual has to do a day in jail. All I really wanted to say was, here are our actors at the very top of our illegal narcotics business who are getting a walk from the government, a complete and total walk ...

I went to court that day, I asked around and said, "What's the dumbest drug case you saw today?" I found an attorney who was willing to put me in touch with a number of people who had been busted and thrown in jail for having a joint in their pocket...


Retired Judge Linda Quinn is working with school attorney Dan Shinoff
of Stutz Artiano Shinoff & Holtz on a fundraiser for Judge Lisa Schall.

See all posts re Judge Lisa Schall.

See all posts re Judge Gary Kreep.

Too much collegiality among judges at the San Diego Superior Court?

UPDATE: Bonnie Dumanis is no longer on Judge Lisa Schall's list of endorsers. Here's the earliest list I can find. Bonnie Dumanis was no longer on the list on March 21, 2014 when I downloaded a new version of the list from Schall's website.


I understand that San Diego Superior Court judges don't want to be unseated in elections. In fact, I agree that judges should not be subject to elections. I'd like to see a lottery of highly qualified applicants for judicial positions. (The appointment process is almost as political as elections.)

The San Diego Superior Court judges are all interested in protecting the status quo. They've all endorsed Schall.

But the upcoming election battle between sitting judge Lisa Schall and challenger Carla Keehn seems to offer an opportunity for judges and lawyers in San Diego to make some changes to a system that has produced so many abuses. . One of those abuses is the injunction against this website that Mr. Shinoff's law firm got from Judge Judith Hayes. That injunction was thrown out by the Court of Appeal.

If you look down at the bottom of Judge Schall's list of endorsements as of March 21, 2014, below the bigshot right-wingers and retired judges, you'll see the endorsements by local "professionals". Two facts are noteworthy:

1. the list is very short;

2. Judge Schall is endorsed by not one, but TWO, of the lawyers for Manuel Paul and other school officials who have been charged with (and in some cases pleaded guilty to) public corruption--(Daniel Shinoff and James Pokorny). Why do these lawyers support Schall? Perhaps Shinoff is grateful to Schall for dismissing the Sarquilla case. Or maybe he figures this is a chance to curry some favor with ALL the judges of the Superior Court. He figured out what can happen to people opposing a sitting judge. (See more on Mr. Shinoff at the bottom of this post.)


School lawyer Dan Shinoff
Stutz Artiano Shinoff & Holtz

School lawyer Dan Shinoff and James Pokorny
are two of the seven "professionals" who have
endorsed Judge Lisa Schall over challenger Carla Keehn.
Pokorny (not pictured) is the criminal lawyer for
several of Shinoff's clients.

Judge Lisa Schall's
Professional Endorsements:

Mr. Daniel Shinoff [civil attorney for several school officials before and after they were charged with public corruption]
Ms. Lori Clark Viviano (child custody attorney)
Mr. Douglas Brust [attorney Douglas V. Brust, I assume]
Ms. Sharon Blanchet [another family law attorney; she is a co-defendant with Schall in this case]
Dr. Nolan Bellisario [a dentist--how many people with that name could be living in San Diego?]
Mr. Bruce Beals [yet another family law attorney]
Mr. James Pokorny[criminal defense attorney for several local school officials, many if not most of whom were/are Daniel Shinoff clients]
Mr. Casey Gwinn, President, Family Justice Center Alliance

Meanwhile, federal prosecutor Carla Keehn is endorsed by the following on March 21, 2014:

Carla Keehn's
Professional Endorsements

Greg Vega, Esq.
Alex Kreit, Esq.
Alex Landon, Esq.
Bridget Kennedy, Esq.
Charles Rees, Esq.
Craig Leff, Esq.
Daniel Drosman, Esq.
Daniel Smith, Esq.
David Lamb, Esq.
Ellis Johnston, Esq.
Eric Alan Isaacson, Esq.
Eric Mitnick, Esq.
Ezekiel E. Cortez, Esq.
Francisco Sanchez, Esq.
Jason Forge, Esq.
Jedd Bogage,Esq.
Joseph Daley, Esq.
Linda Hughes, Esq.
Lisa A. Damiani, Esq.
Mark Strazzeri
Mayra Garcia, Esq.
Michael E. Burke, Esq.
Michael Stein, Esq.
Paul Turner, Esq.
Rafi Rokach
Sharon Roberts
Sylvia Baiz, Esq.
Ted Pintar, Esq.
Jacqueline Crowle, Esq.
William Mathew Brown, Esq.
(partial list)

More on Lisa Schall's supporter Dan Shinoff:
Mr. Shinoff's law firm tried valiantly to get the Court of Appeal to agree that I, a retired school teacher, should be forbidden from speaking his name, or the name of his firm. Stutz Artiano Shinoff & Holtz law firm has spent over 6 years trying to shut down my little blog that gets 300 hits on a good day. Why would a large firm of lawyers that rakes in millions from local school districts try to get the Court of Appeal to approve an obviously unconstitutional prior restraint by San Diego Superior Court Judge Judith Hayes? The Court of Appeal declined to uphold the preposterous injunction. On the other hand, Shinoff's firm must have been pleased when the American Bar Association published a glaringly incorrect report about the case.

U.S. Attorney: Members Felt Filner 'Embarrassed Himself' at Temple Forum

It's okay to lie, but not okay to call someone a liar? I think Laura Duffy should also have apologized to Filner for Carl DeMaio's making a false statement about Filner's pension.

U.S. Attorney: Members Felt Filner 'Embarrassed Himself' at Temple Forum
October 18, 2012
By SCOTT LEWIS
Voice of San Diego

U.S. Attorney Laura Duffy, the federal government's top law enforcement official in San Diego, was not very happy with U.S. Rep. Bob Filner Sunday.

Filner appeared with his rival for the mayor's office Carl DeMaio at Temple Emanu-El Sunday in a forum designed to let a number of candidates speak and take questions from the audience. Duffy, as a member of the temple, helped organize the event. She was not working in her capacity as head of the Justice Department's presence in San Diego.

The candidates had been told not to treat it as a debate. Filner, Duffy told me, "had issues."

"I know the event that was intended and it went far afield from what he was invited to do and I was sorry to see that happen," she told me.

Wherever Filner took it, DeMaio helped him get there. DeMaio challenged Filner to say he would not take a city pension if elected mayor. DeMaio said it would be a $120,000 pension and cited a Voice of San Diego report, which actually shows the majority of that pension would not come from the city.

DeMaio didn't mention that part.

It set Filner off.

"I wanted this to be a civil debate, but he's a liar. He knows he's a liar," Filner said from the podium at the temple. DeMaio's team posted a video of the exchange here.

Duffy sent an email apologizing to DeMaio's campaign, which the campaign then passed on to reporters. It was underneath an email with story ideas and links to that YouTube video and others.

Campaign Manager Ryan Clumpner claims forwarding the email to reporters was inadvertent. It showed Duffy was not pleased with Filner in the apology she sent DeMaio's team.

"Our apologies that Filner had to be admonished about his uncivil 'debate-style' remarks," Duffy wrote in the email to a DeMaio aide, Tommy Knepper. "If it is any consultation (sic), I heard more than one temple member express their view that he embarrassed himself and that they thought Carl appeared far more mature and capable of addressing the challenges San Diego faces."

If Filner was guilty of making “’debate-style’ remarks,” it’s hard to see how DeMaio didn’t also bend the rules (though he kept a cooler head)...