HON. Annie M. Gutierrez
Judge

Superior Court of California County of Imperial

  PROFILE  

Career Highlights: Appointed by Gov. Gray Davis to Imperial Superior Court, 2002; assistant U.S. attorney, El Centro, 1995-2002; deputy district attorney, Imperial County, 1995; criminal justice consultant, Zambia, 1995; deputy alternate public defender, San Diego, 1992-94; litigation and trial consultant, 1986-92; partner, Campillo & Gutierrez, 1981-86; district director, INS, Mexico City, 1978-81; domestic policy adviser to President Carter, 1977-78; executive secretary, California Agricultural Labor Relations Board, 1975-77; sole practitioner, El Centro, 1972 -75

By Don Ray
Daily Journal Staff Writer

     EL CENTRO — Imperial Superior Court Judge Annie M. Gutierrez has never worked in Antarctica.
     But she’s worked on every other continent, and she’s worn a lot of hats.
     Gutierrez has helped the poor with sanitation and health issues from Mexico to South America, she’s trained prosecutors and defense attorneys in Africa, and she’s worked alongside scientists in the rain forests of Australia, the deserts of Peru, the Sea of Cortez and at study sites throughout Europe and Asia.
     She’s tracked down smugglers in Mexico, interviewed political prisoners in Cuba, overseen the union elections of farmworkers in the San Joaquin Valley and even advised the president of the United States on civil rights issues and domestic policy.
     Today, Gutierrez presides over criminal matters on the first floor of the old courthouse in El Centro, 14 miles north of Mexico and 52 feet below sea level.
     In that very courthouse, Gutierrez first gained a reputation as a fierce advocate for victims of police brutality, and as a prosecutor, she brought down big-time smugglers and drug dealers.
     That experience is obvious, attorneys said, in the way she runs her courtroom.
     “She’s patient, smart and savvy,” San Diego attorney Donald L. Levine said.
     “Her experience as a trial attorney shows up as a judge because she steps in only when it’s necessary and lets the attorneys try their cases,” Levine said.
     Deputy District Attorney Jonathan L. Willis said he was instantly impressed with Gutierrez’s knowledge of the law, especially when it comes to evidence.
     Plus, Willis said, she shows a great respect for attorneys and defendants alike, especially defendants without an attorney.
     “Some of the judges I’ve seen in other venues will take an air of pomposity,” Willis said, “but that’s not Annie Gutierrez. Annie is very much the opposite of an authoritarian figure.”
     His advice to attorneys new to her courtroom is not to be long-winded.
     “Make your arguments short and sweet,” Willis said, “and you don’t need to lecture her ’cause she’ll know the law.”
     Gutierrez came to know the law more out of necessity and opportunity than desire. Her only dream as a child was to help her father on the farm. The uneducated Basque sheepherder had emigrated from Spain when he was 16.
     “I was going to help him raise the sheep until he couldn’t do it any longer,” Gutierrez said, “and then I would keep doing it.”
     When she was born, family legend has it, her father was so upset she wasn’t a boy that he told everyone he was going home to feed the chickens.
     “Having heard that story many, many times, I guess in my mind I had to prove to him that I could be as good as any boy,” Gutierrez said, “so I was at his side constantly.”
     When she was 11, folks at the local 4H club noticed her ovine obsession, recruited her and challenged her to compete against other young aggies.
     Gutierrez answered the challenge with an insatiable appetite for knowledge and a competitive determination that eventually earned her the nation’s highest 4H award.
     As her successes piled up, she talked her way into getting her own 4H radio program and began competing in student speaking competitions through the Toastmasters, she said.
     She began winning, even though she had never taken a speech class.
     Her teachers convinced Gutierrez and her parents that she should go to college and leave raising sheep to her father. Besides, she said, colleges were offering her scholarships because of her accomplishments and her high marks.
     Pomona College President E. Wilson Lyon heard one of her scholarship acceptance speeches and was so impressed that he opened his doors to her.
     That summer, Gutierrez went with a church group to the remote village of Tlaxcala, Mexico, where she taught school and ran a latrine-building program.
     Seeing such poverty re-ignited memories of similar conditions she had witnessed when she was 10 on a family trip to Spain following the civil war there.
     While she was in college, she traveled to Central and South America as a consultant for the U.S. Technical Assistance Program. She trained locals in health, sanitation and community development.
     She graduated with honors in 1960 with a bachelor’s degree in international relations and, a year later, got her master’s degree in international relations and economics from Claremont Graduate School.
     That year, President Kennedy took office and formed the Peace Corps. Gutierrez was one of its early staff members.
     She developed and managed programs for five South American countries, she said, and then directed field-training programs in Puerto Rico for volunteers.
     She worked closely with the agency’s director, Sargent Shriver.
     “He was one of the finest human beings I have ever known and the best boss one could ever hope for,” Gutierrez said.
     By the time she had returned to the Imperial Valley, she was married and had a daughter. When Gutierrez’s husband became disabled, she looked for work.
     “The one job I thought I would like was the judgeship in the Westmorland Judicial District,” Gutierrez said.
     She passed the required written test to qualify for a position as a lay judge in the community, but the county supervisors turned her down because she might become pregnant, she said.
     At the same time, the newly enacted Economic Opportunities Act had earmarked money for community development for low-income areas.
     Gutierrez said she had heard rumors that the county supervisors were planning to divert some of the money for sewers in the wealthier neighborhoods.
     “That was something I could really hit them with,” she said. “I told them, ‘OK, you go ahead and appoint me to the judgeship, and I’ll leave you alone on the other thing. Or we’ll just see.’”
     They gave her the judgeship.
     In her spare time, she became active in organizing a community action committee to properly use the money that might have been diverted from the poor neighborhoods.
     “Within months, we were building self-help housing,” Gutierrez said, “just like we were doing in Latin America. They were unable to stop it, and it turned out really good.”
     She made some enemies, she said, but she couldn’t ignore the mental images of poverty and discrimination in Spain, Mexico and even in her own neighborhood when she was a child.
     After Gutierrez spent 3½ years as a lay judge, a lawyer friend encouraged her to go to law school and offered to share her résumé with people he knew.
     “A while later, I got a phone call,” she said. “It was the dean of Stanford. He said, ‘If you want to come to Stanford, you can come.’”
     Gutierrez accepted the offer and re-channeled her energies into opening the doors for other Latino law students.
     “She cared about civil rights and justice,” recalled fellow law student Luis Nogales. “And she was fearless.”
     “Annie just thought that it was the right thing to do,” said Nogales, managing partner of Nogales Investment Managers, “and she never flinched.”
     After Gutierrez graduated and passed the State Bar Exam, she returned to Imperial County and opened her own practice.
     Before long, she was representing farmworkers and other low-income residents who were victims of brutality and other abuses at the hands of local police officers.
     And, time after time, she was winning. She gained a reputation as an advocate for the poor who would stand up to anyone, regardless of their wealth, power or position, Nogales said.
     And, he says, she’s still that way today.
     “She’s not impressed,” he said.
     In 1975, Gutierrez became the first executive secretary of the California Agricultural Labor Relations Board, which lawmakers created to give farmworkers the right to organize.
     She had to set up an office from scratch, she said, and bring together a staff of 300 attorneys and others who would have to organize hundreds of union elections in the fields — elections that had to happen before the strawberry crops could be harvested.
     “I have never had a more challenging job,” she said.
     Gutierrez was well-known in Washington, so when Jimmy Carter became president, he brought her to the White House as his associate director for justice and civil rights.
     She briefed him on issues, incidents and events, wrote speeches and served as the White House liaison to the Justice Department and the Civil Rights Commission.
     After two years, she agreed to move to Mexico City and become a district director of the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service.
     Among other duties, she worked with foreign governments to curb alien smuggling, fraud and trafficking in counterfeit documents.
     After three years, Gutierrez returned to California and practiced law again.
     But she couldn’t turn down a good adventure. So she agreed to become a field manager for the Foundation for Field Research.
     For six months of the year, Gutierrez traveled the world to pave the way for scientific projects in remote research sites — projects such as counting quetzal birds in Guatemala and protecting giant sea turtles in various parts of the world.
     In 1992, Gutierrez began a two-year stint as a deputy alternate public defender in San Diego before she crossed the oceans again — this time for the U.S. Information Agency on assignment in Zambia.
     Her task was to help African public defenders reorganize and improve their operation.
     While she was there, she was able to investigate the case of a man who had been in prison for seven years without ever being able to appear before a judge.
     She traveled to his remote village, conducted interviews and returned to provide evidence to the authorities that the man was innocent of the theft charges. As a result of her investigation, government officials freed the man.
     “That was one of the most exciting things that happened in my life,” she said.
     After that assignment, Gutierrez fulfilled a lifetime dream of backpacking through China, Tibet and Nepal.
     From there, she decided to take the last bus across the highest road in the world before a storm would temporarily close the historic route from China to Pakistan.
     She was the only woman on a bus filled with Pakistani traders. At an overnight stopover, Gutierrez locked herself in a storeroom to thwart unwanted advances.
     By the time the bus arrived in Pakistan, Sunni Muslim soldiers had taken control of the area and were looking for any foreigners, she said.
     The men she had feared the night before ended up hiding her from the armed soldiers — soldiers, they later told her, that surely would have taken her.
     “They said, ‘It would not be good for you,’” she recalls. “So they had protected me.”
     Gutierrez returned to become a deputy district attorney in El Centro but, after seven months, accepted a position as an assistant U.S. attorney there.
     She worked with federal agents to investigate and prosecute complicated drug and alien-smuggling cases, tax cases and RICO cases, she said.
     In 2002, Gov. Gray Davis appointed Gutierrez to the seat she now occupies in El Centro.
     She has a four-acre spread outside of El Centro, where she enjoys working with ceramics and doing things with her mother, who is still active in her 80s. When she can, she also spends time with her two grown children, Angela Marlow and Marc Cocova.
     Gutierrez has not forgotten her roots or her earliest dream; she’s raising a flock of 25 sheep.
     She’s been on light duty lately at the courthouse because she’s recovering from breast cancer surgery. To her, it’s just another challenge — just like every other obstacle she’s encountered.
     You just deal with it, she says. It’s out of her hands.
     She says it’s no coincidence that everything in her life — good and bad — has gone the way it has.
     “I take one day at a time and see what happens next,” she said. “I have the feeling that, obviously, some higher power has been guiding me.”
     Indio public defender Beverly A. Barrett often appeared before Gutierrez in El Centro. Today, she’s proud to be the judge’s friend, she said.
     Barrett pointed out that Gutierrez may weigh only about 90 pounds but she’s far from being a pushover.
     “If stampeding elephants couldn’t kill her in Africa,” Barrett said, “and the Columbian drug cartel couldn’t assassinate her when she was down there training judges and lawyers, then she’s not going to let something like cancer slow her down.”