HON. Judson W. Morris
Judge

Superior Court of California County of Los Angeles

  PROFILE  

Career Highlights: Elevated to Los Angeles Superior Court through unification, 2000; elected to the Pasadena Municipal Court, 1986; deputy district attorney, Los Angeles County, 1977-86; associate, Simon, Loveless & Migdal, 1976-77; deputy district attorney, Los Angeles County, 1975-76

By Don Ray
Daily Journal Staff Writer

     LOS ANGELES — Not long after Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Judson Morris Jr. took the Municipal Court bench, Judge Michael A. Tynan gave him the best advice of his life.
     “He said, ‘Don’t let this job be your life,’” Morris recalled, “‘or it will kill you.’”
     Ever since that day, Morris has been on a relentless pursuit of living.
     He doesn’t come alive only on the weekends, however. Before work each morning, he and his wife, Cheryl Morris, hike a mile and a half — a rise of a thousand feet — up a steep mountain trail.
     When they return home, Morris prepares for another daily ritual, his wife said.
     “Every morning, he goes out and cuts a rose from our garden,” she said, “and he gives it to me as I’m backing out. Then he stands in the driveway, and he waves goodbye to me.”
     After work, it’s not uncommon for Morris to be rehearsing for his role in a community theater presentation or visiting Mount Wilson Observatory for a close-up view of the rings of Saturn through the 60-inch telescope.
     The weekends are reserved for skiing, diving — scuba as well as free diving, photography, golf, tennis, flying gliders and riding horses.
     On Labor Day weekends, he often travels to Hawaii to compete alongside fellow members of the Maui Channel Swim Team for a 9.7-mile relay race between the islands.
     When he has more time, he hikes the Grand Canyon from rim to rim or solos in the 2½-mile Waikiki Rough Water Swim.
     “Life is never dull with him,” Cheryl Morris said.
     Lawyers said that Morris, 62, brings an equal amount of passion and discipline to his Pasadena courtroom. Attorney Walter J. Lack of the Los Angeles firm of Engstrom, Lipscomb & Lack said the taxpayers could not get a better deal with Morris as judge.
     “He’s there early in the morning and stays till late in the afternoon,” Lack said. “He allows the lawyers to completely try their cases in front of the jury.”
     Lack marvels at the judge’s productivity.
     “There’s an obvious reason why he’s in charge of that busy courtroom,” Glendale attorney Daniel A. Nardoni said.
     He said that Morris always listens and gives both sides a fair shake.
     However, even though Nardoni is himself a defense attorney, he believes Morris could be a little bit tougher.
     “It’s good to care about people from the bench,” he said, “but some of these defendants can take advantage of his good personality. I don’t want to see the bad guy take advantage of him.”
     However, Nardoni saw the ever-polite judge reach his limits during a recent murder case.
     “The defense lawyer was just disrespectful and rude to witnesses when he was cross-examining and was even kind of rude to Jud,” Nardoni said. “And, boy, Jud pounced on his ass, and I was happy.”
     Richard P.B. Tyson says Morris ranks up there with the best.
     “You can’t imagine how many judges I’ve come before in 55 years,” Tyson said. “Most of them are dead, drunk or retired — mostly dead.
     “He’s a good listener,” the 86-year-old attorney said. “You don’t have to say, ‘Did you read the paperwork?’ He’s read it. He’s that kind of a guy.”
     Even though Deputy Alternate Public Defender Guy E. O’Brien thinks highly of Morris, he said the judge could score a lot of points if he would update the stories and jokes he tells from the bench.
     “My God,” O’Brien said with a chuckle, “he needs some new material.”
     Los Angeles attorney Robert C. Baker of Baker, Keener & Nahra says he was impressed with Morris when he appeared before him in what Baker called a very contentious trial.
     “Both sides tested it,” Baker said. “We were fairly aggressive. He dealt with it by giving us a warning.”
     If it happened again, the judge would admonish them in front of the jury and remind them again to behave.
     “After you’re taken down in front of a jury,” Baker said, “your manners improve. I never liked being berated in front of my mother, so it absolutely worked.”
     He polled the members of that jury afterward, he said, and found that, to the judge’s credit, they thought Morris was very considerate of their time.
     “He would explain why we were late and why we had conferences outside their presence,” Baker said. “They thought they were more a part of the process.”
     Nardoni says Morris goes out of his way to help defendants get their lives back on track.
     “He’s not a manikin,” Glendale attorney Daniel A. Nardoni said. “He gets personally involved. He’s a judge who cares about people.”
     Morris is not afraid to reveal personal things about himself if it will encourage defendants to seek counseling.
     “I will say in open court, ‘I went. I went for five years,’” Morris said.
     Looking back, he said, going to therapy was the best gift he’d ever given himself.
     “I learned why I was trying to prove to the world that I could live up to my dad’s expectations of me,” he said.
     The only expectation he remembers while he was growing up in the San Fernando Valley was his own dream to become a pilot one day.
     After he graduated from Birmingham High School in 1960, Morris enrolled in college. He admitted that he spent more time surfing than studying.
     The next year, he joined the U.S. Army Reserve and became a military policeman. After six months of active duty, Morris worked as a lifeguard, until he decided to apply to be either a firefighter or a police officer, he said.
     In 1964, he took the first offer and became a Los Angeles County deputy sheriff.
     “I’d been on about a year and a half when the Watts riots broke out,” Morris said.
     “It was in the middle of the riots that I said, ‘You know what? I’m going to go back to school,’” he said.
     He attended Pierce College in Los Angeles so that he could get an associate’s degree and take advantage of a program United Airlines was offering to wannabe pilots.
     However, he took such a liking to a business law class, he said, that the professor encouraged him to pursue a law career.
     Morris enrolled at California State University, Los Angeles, but ended up at Loyola Law School before he got his bachelor’s degree, he said.
     He worked as a deputy sheriff for the four years it took him to complete law school. In 1973, he graduated, but he failed the State Bar Exam on his first two tries. He was sabotaging himself, he said.
     “There was no doubt in my mind that I could not live up to the expectations everybody had of me,” Morris said, “so I was required to fail the bar.
     “I finally went to a shrink who showed me that,” he said, “and then I passed it. She was a person who specialized in helping people get past the bar.”
     Before he passed, Morris had become an investigator for the Los Angeles district attorney. After he passed, he became a hearing officer for the Los Angeles city attorney’s office.
     He helped start the first program of its kind in Los Angeles in which misdemeanor defendants could agree to have their cases heard in an informal setting by a nonjudge.
     Morris returned to the district attorney’s office under John Van de Kamp to set up a similar program.
     Eventually, he took assignments as a trial attorney and spent two years trying sexual-assault cases and another year trying major fraud cases.
     “But I wanted to be a trenches lawyer,” he said, “so I became a floater for two trial groups in downtown L.A.”
     He and a partner took what they called “10-day handoffs” and surprised everyone by winning most of them, he said.
     In 1982, he transferred to the Pasadena Courthouse, where, four years later, he decided to run for an open seat on the Municipal Court.
     The voters elected him in November, but court administrators couldn’t wait for him to begin in January.
     So two weeks after the election, Gov. George Deukmejian appointed him to the seat.
     “I spent 10 years doing muni-court trials, general calendar,” Morris said, “then I spent five years doing long-cause civil and criminal jury trials.”
     During that time, Morris divorced his second wife, underwent the five years of therapy and emerged healthy enough, he said, to get married to the right person for the right reasons.
     “At one time, there were bumper stickers around Pasadena that said, ‘Honk if you’ve been married to Judge Morris,’” he said.
     “I’m happily married now,” he said, “and will always be — for the rest of my life.”
     His family includes an adult daughter and son from his first marriage, seven grandchildren, and his wife’s grown daughter.
     Now that he has what he calls a perfect marriage, a great family and a job he loves, Morris has become a magnet to interesting people, his wife says — people who find him equally interesting.
     His chambers are adorned with photographs and memorabilia that document his lust for life, adventure and meaningful friendships.
     Morris has befriended pilots who trained the astronauts, aerial photographers who have filmed stunning aviation films, and scientists who have tracked the heavens.
     He even became pals with a member of the Moscow Circus when it came to the Southland a few years back.
     In fact, he became more than a friend: Morris performed in the circus, first as a clown and later at the reins of one of the performing horses.
     He’s been a card-carrying member of the Screen Actors Guild since he was in the distant background of a Sears commercial some years back. He hasn’t used the card since.
     “I’ve been an out-of-work actor for 12 years,” he said, laughing. “Some actors wait tables. I sit on the bench.”
     He was sitting on the bench three years ago, after unification, he said, when he agreed to take over the preliminary-hearing calendar for just a year.
     “I don’t want to go back! I’m going to retire here,” he said. “Because every day I get to congratulate somebody, and I get to pat them on the back. I enjoy that.”
     “It’s the difference between getting off the bench after sentencing someone to life without possibility of parole” Morris said, “and dismissing some guy’s case who’s now bright and shiny and his life is cleaned up.”
     “Because of that positive stuff,” he said, “I’m never going to leave it.”
     Morris believes strongly in the American system of justice, he said, but recently he has become concerned that, since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, Americans have been allowing the government to take away some of their constitutionally guaranteed freedoms.
     He said he never forgets what he learned in political sciences class: A free society is in grave danger when crime is feared more than tyranny.
     “I’m the most absolute, patriotic American on the face of the earth,” he said, “and what’s going on scares me because we are more afraid of crime than we are of tyranny.
     “We’re willing to give up a lot of rights to get the bad guy. ‘Don’t let them hurt me. Don’t let them blow me up,’ you know?”
     He said it conjures up Orwellian images in his head of Big Brother in the year 1984.
     “And that scares me,” Morris said.