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DAILY JOURNAL NEWSWIRE ARTICLE
© 2002 The Daily Journal Corporation.
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February 12, 2002
LONGTIME CYCLE OF BENCH BULLYING
Judges Who Use Their Authority to Dominate, Control Others Perpetuate Patterns of Abuse
Forum Column
By Stephen Yagman
As the long era of judges who abuse lawyers and litigants enters its twilight, it is useful to understand what makes bench bullies. An interesting and perhaps universalizable model of abusive judges can be made using the Los Angeles federal bench as a model.
The bench of the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California long has been the subject of derisive chatter among lawyers both in Los Angeles and around the United States as a place where there have been a fair number of judges who are both lunatic and abusive. Most of them have died or have gotten too addled to continue vigorously their reigns of terror, but a few remain to carry on. They are old white men who, when they claimed their birthrights and became judges, also began to suffer from the delusion that the word "judge" was on their birth certificates.
Some prime examples of consistently abusive judges are Aloyisius Andrew Hauk, Manuel Lawrence Real and Lawrence Tupper Lydick, now deceased. They share strikingly similar formative characteristics, as well as life experiences and religion, all of which provide some clue to their often deranged antics on the bench. Some examples Hauk shouting from the bench about "Iranian ignoramuses and Cuban faggots," and later being barred by the federal Court of Appeals from handling any civil rights cases due to his hatred of civil rights plaintiffs and their lawyers; Lydick accusing a well-respected attorney of "practicing dog pound law" and Real threatening to have arrested a lawyer who failed to appear in court but who sent his partner in his stead because he had a broken back and then, when the lawyer arrived, in excruciating pain, simply continuing the matter.
All of these three judges grew up in strict Catholic homes during the Depression, served in the military during World War II, and themselves as young lawyers suffered abuse at the hands of their predecessor abusers on the Central District bench. Two came from the same large, conservative law firm, Adams, Duque & Hazeltine, and one was a small-time, sole practitioner who parlayed President Lyndon B. Johnson's and Attorney General Ramsey Clark's misbelief that he was Hispanic, in the sense he was Latin American, to become the first Latino U.S. Attorney and then judge in the Central District. In fact, his parents had come to San Pedro from Malaga, Spain. For the first time, with judgeship in pocket, he sternly admonished a lawyer that the correct pronunciation of his name was "Reel" and not "Re-al."
What they all shared in common served simply as a historical backdrop to the proscenium arch through which they passed and which made them the horrible and monstrous judicial bullies they all turned out to be.
Pulitzer Prize-winning author Richard Rhodes' 1999 study, "Why They Kill," provides a plausible, persuasive explanation of what builds bench bullies. In it, Rhodes examines the work of maverick criminologist Dr. Lonnie Athens, himself the child of a violent family, which challenges conventional theories about violent behavior. By interviewing violent criminals in prison, Athens identified a pattern of social development common to all seriously violent people and posited a four-stage process he called "violentization."
Interestingly, it fits like a glove on federal bench bullies Hauk, Lydick and Real, as well as other bench bullies we all know. And, if the glove fits, they shouldn't be on the bench.
The first step in the violentization process is brutalization. One is forced by violence or the threat of violence to submit to an aggressive authority figure, such as a parent, a neighborhood bully or even a judge. One witnesses the violent subjugation of intimates or oneself, and the authority figure coaches, if unintentionally, one to use violence to settle disputes or as a means to an end.
Our examples, Hauk, Lydick and Real all were bullied by stern parents or autocratic, big-firm lawyers, the Catholic Church and by the bullying federal judges of their own years as young lawyers. Despite their adult bravado, they all were frightened young lawyers who were brutalized by their seniors. Their experiences coached them to be abusive.
The second step is belligerency. The dispirited subject, determined to prevent his further violent subjugation, heeds his coach or mentor and himself resorts to bullying. Real tells a story of Judge Pierson Hall forcing Real to go to trial one evening at 600, and when Real protests it is late and he is not ready, Hall dismisses Real's case.
The stories of our three subjects, Hauk, Lydick and Real, being perpetual bullies abound in the Los Angeles legal community. And they all got away with it because the public didn't know about it and local lawyers were afraid to say anything about it. It became acceptable bench behavior.
The third stage is violent performances. Our subjects found that bullying succeeded, and read it as respect and fear in the eyes of their victims. People who came into their courts were both apprehensive and fearful, and they left with stories that made others apprehensive and fearful.
Fourth is virulency. Exultant, but not in the joyous sense, our bullies are determined to continue to use bullying as a means of dealing with people in their courts, and bonded with others of the same ilk, like Judges Charlie Carr, David W. Williams, both deceased, Robert J. Kelleher, William Duffy Keller, Edward Rafeedie and Dickran M. Tevrizian Jr., and more recently snippy, rude, control-freak like judges like Alvin Howard Matz, alone among the newer judges in his bad personality. Many of them used to share lunches at the old federal cafeteria at 300 North Spring Street in a room they commandeered as a judges' lunchroom, by their mere presence intimidating common folk from entering or using the otherwise public room.
Both Athens and Rhodes posit that all four stages must be fully experienced in sequence and completed to produce a brutal individual and that intervening to interrupt the process can prevent its completion. Thus, trying to stop judges from bullying lawyers in the first place and publicizing their abuses can interrupt the process of future judges, who themselves are victims of judicial bullying, becoming bullies. As to judges who start out as or who are becoming bullies, a remedy is to show them no respect or fear, thus interrupting the second stage of violent performances and preventing the beginning of the fourth stage of virulency. Judges who encounter resistance to bullying do not become exultant when they find it doesn't work and do not progress to virulency.
Although Athens and Rhodes support their theories with abundant historical evidence to explain the violent behavior of Perry Smith, the killer in Truman Capote's "In Cold Blood," Mike Tyson, the "preppy rapist" Alex Kelly and Lee Harvey Oswald, their hypotheses generally apply to all bullies, including bench bullies.
Contrary to popular belief, judicial bullying behavior is not idiosyncratic or impulsive or unconsciously motivated and predetermined. Rather, it is a continuing, though somewhat diminishing, dilemma of a kind of judicial violence that still, in the 21st century, plagues our legal system.
As better psychosocially developed lawyers have become judges, many of them women, the tyrant model of judges has begun to disappear, and probing a judicial candidate for the historical and behavioral clues that identify potential bench bullies will lead to their extinction.
Stephen Yagman is a Venice Beach federal civil rights lawyer who writes "Against the Wind" for the Daily Journal.
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