Judicial Profile

HON. Martin L. Goetsch
Commissioner

Superior Court of California County of Los Angeles

        If he had a judicial magic wand, Los Angeles Superior Court Commissioner Martin L. Goetsch might just make his own job disappear.
        It's not that Goetsch doesn't love his work. It's that he believes most civil disputes should never end up in court.
        "This is like cutting my own throat - taking away my own job," he said, "but I wish there was something prior to filing lawsuits that parties could go through and get a resolution before they ever even have to file a lawsuit."
        After they file their cases, Goetsch can order the parties to participate in pretrial mediation, but by then, he says, they've invested a great deal financially and emotionally in the cases. And, he said, they get more entrenched in wanting the court to give them justice.
        "I wish that more people would seek some kind of alternative dispute resolution before filing a lawsuit," Goetsch said. "There's no structured avenue for people to do that."
        Goetsch has no magic wand.
        Once the dispute gets to his Pomona courtroom, however, the commissioner still has some tricks up his sleeve. One is to see whether he can get the bigger picture - see past the emotions.
        "Usually, I try to study people and listen and try to find the common thread," Goetsch said. "And the truth is usually somewhere in both parties."
        That's when a solution might magically appear, he said.
        "I tell people, 'If we can find a way for you to both agree on something, you're both going to leave happy,'" Goetsch said. "'If I have to decide this for you, one of you is going to go away very unhappy.'"
        Glendora attorney George L. Liddle says that Goetsch requires both parties in landlord-tenant cases to meet in the hallway, before they appear before him, to see whether they can settle it.
        If they can't, the commissioner often looks for settlement opportunities during the hearing.
        "If somebody's case looks like it's taking on water," Liddle said, "he'll say, 'Maybe you'd like to take the opportunity to take it outside and settle it on your own.'
        "It's his way of telegraphing to you that your case may not be so strong."
        Plaintiffs' attorneys appreciate that, Liddle says, because, in unlawful-detainer cases, it's best for everybody if defendants believe they got a fair shake, especially when they are still occupying the property in question.
        "Settlement is always better than trying the case," Liddle said. "If I can find some way of shaking the defendant's hand, he's less likely to go break out all the windows."
        When the commissioner's first plan doesn't work, he often can reach into the statutory hat and pull out a legal remedy - one that settles the dispute in cases where only a crystal ball would otherwise reveal the truth.
        Goetsch recently encountered one such case where a landlord was trying to recover what he said were months of unpaid rent from a tenant who had recently vacated. West v. Miedema, 04U01165 (L.A. Super. Ct. 2004).
        The former tenant insisted that she and her roommate had paid the rent. The landlord was adamant they had not.
        Goetsch said he was more inclined to believe the two women.
        "[The landlord] was less subdued than they," the commissioner said, "but their faces told an angry story."
        But the former tenant couldn't produce any receipts for the rent she claimed they had paid. She was, however, able to show the commissioner photographs of the mold that, she said, caused them to move out and break the lease.
        "The photos of the mold were horrible," Goetsch said. "I've never seen mold like it."
        It was the mold, he said, that became the wild card he could play when it was clear he couldn't possibly get to the truth about the rent.
        "I don't have to decide this because I can let them out of this - because of the mold," Goetsch said. "I can give the plaintiff a judgment of no money by finding in the judgment that, because of the mold in the property, the actual rental value of the property is zero."
        Attorneys who frequent his courtroom generally give him high marks for taking the time - as much time as it takes - to give everyone a chance to be heard.
        "He's very amicable and patient with both sides," said San Bernardino attorney Leslie S. Born. "With some judges, you feel like you're almost afraid to say something and rub the wrong way. He's the kind of judge you can put your cards on the table, and I feel like I get a good shake."
        Chino attorney Ella M. Murphy said that he cares about everyone in his courtroom. Recently, Murphy said, he showed great concern and flexibility when one of the parties missed an appearance because of a family medical emergency.
        "He did everything to help my client as well as the defendant," Murphy said.
        "He's a true gentleman," she said.
        "He certainly listens to everybody," said attorney Gregory A. Paiva of Ontario. "He gives them the opportunity to speak, and he allows them to say whatever they want to say. He allows them to speak as long as they can."
        Paiva says Goetsch even allows pro per defendants to question the plaintiffs' own witnesses.
        Goetsch is, hands down, his favorite commissioner, Paiva says, but he points out the downside of Goetsch's willingness to listen. Paiva recently sat for 45 minutes, he said, as Goetsch listened to the parties in another case tell their stories.
        "And my case took about a minute and a half," Paiva said. "I agree everybody should be heard, but there are limits."
        Attorneys say Goetsch is more likely than others to take cases under submission and research the law before he makes a decision.
        "If he takes something under submission, he makes his decision promptly," Murphy said.
        "Nobody leaves confused," Born said. "He says, 'I ruled this way because ...'
        "He's not my star or anything," she said, "but I can't think of anybody I like better."
        Goetsch, 59, says his perception of peaceful problem solving and absolute honesty came when he packed up and joined the Peace Corps a couple of years after high school.
        He had spent most of his carefree life up to that time riding horses in and around his family's 10-acre farm in Alta Loma, not far from where he works today. His father was an entomologist battling bugs in the nearby orange groves and grape vineyards.
        Even though Goetsch didn't put much energy into high school, he was good at math, he said, so he decided to be an engineer.
        Goetsch went to work as a surveyor for the U.S. Forest Service for two years but yearned for even more adventure, the kind of youthful adventure his father had described to him.
        "Dad worked as a cabin boy on a ship that went around Cape Horn," he said. "People were standing on the walls of the cabin instead of the floors - waves going over the top of the ship and things like that."
        Goetsch's Peace Corps adventure took him - beyond the back of beyond - to the Indian Ocean shores of Tanganyika, now called Tanzania, in east Africa. Again, he worked on a surveying team.
        His team surveyed roads, then built bridges and culverts.
        "We went out and lived in tents in the really back country," Goetsch said.
        It was so remote that one night they awoke to his partner's little dog barking, so he opened the tent flap.
        "There was a leopard right between our two tents - a regular, spotted adult leopard," he said.
        Goetsch surveyed the situation, he said, and decided the best action was no action at all.
        "I closed the tent and got back in my sleeping bag, pulled it over my head and figured whatever happens, happens," Goetsch recalled. "What am I going to do against a leopard?"
        The big cat was gone by morning. It turned out to have been the right decision, he said. But Goetsch still laughs when he tells about how he chose to curl up in the fetal position.
        They also saw elephants, lions, crocodiles, snakes - even cheetahs - but they were most impressed with the people they met and the life lessons they learned from them, Goetsch said.
        "The Africans had a remarkable and, to me, unknown honesty that was just absolutely wonderful," he said. "It made dealing with anybody so easy - just totally honest in everything.
        "They wouldn't say something nice just to be nice," Goetsch said, "but on the other hand, when they said something nice, you knew they meant it."
        It was a world away from the life he had known, he said. But after two years, he returned to California, took two more years of classes at Napa Junior College, got married and transferred to a place even more foreign to him than Africa: the University of California, Berkeley.
        It was 1968 and he was in the unofficial capital of the anti-Vietnam War movement.
        "Now this rural bumpkin from Southern California is in the middle of the center of the urban antagonism of the '60s," Goetsch said.
        "Probably the biggest contribution to my education as an adult human being," he said, "was being in Berkeley from '68 to '70, not for the academics but for what was going on."
        He shakes his head when he recalls the images of young people standing on the corner calling out, "'Hash? Heroin, anyone?'
        "That was certainly an eye-opener for me," Goetsch said. "I never got involved in any of the drugs at all, but it was certainly available everywhere."
        The anti-war demonstrations were everyday occurrences, he said, so common that it took something really big to get people's attention.
        "We were sitting in class," he recalled. "We heard footsteps running down the hall, and one of those big, heavy, ceramic ashtrays came flying through the glass door.
        "Somebody was protesting something. The professor just looked over at it and paused for a few seconds - it appeared nothing else was going to happen - and continued with the class."
        Goetsch was an engineering student but had to change his major quickly when his student exemption expired and he received his draft notice.
        To buy time, he enlisted in the Air Force to be a pilot under a plan that would allow him to finish college before reporting for duty - that is, if he could graduate within three months.
        "In order to defer the draft," he said, "I had to qualify for pilot training, which meant I had to have a degree."
        He quickly changed his major to production management, a program he could complete sooner than the engineering program, he said.
        During flight school, someone else was able to secure the only fighter pilot assignment, so Goetsch took an assignment in Texas as a forward air controller flying a small and slow O2 airplane. It had one propeller pulling from the front and another pushing from behind.
        He spent his four-year hitch flying around the United States helping with Air Force and Army training exercises and, every once in a while, flying slowly over landmarks such as the Grand Canyon, Hoover Dam and Yosemite Valley.
        He returned to California and continued flying for the state Air National Guard at the Ontario Airport while he attended law school at La Verne University. He later worked in the contracts management department at General Dynamics in Pomona and later at a division of Xerox.
        Next, he combined his engineering and legal training to work in a hybrid position for TRW in its environmental division before he went into private practice doing mostly real estate and business law.
        By this time, he had divorced and remarried. After five years with TRW, his second wife, Marlene Goetsch, convinced him to seek a position on the bench, he says.
        So he went through the pro tem training in downtown Los Angeles, and soon he was getting assignments in Pomona Municipal Court.
        In 1993, the judges there voted him in as a commissioner. In 2000, he became a Los Angeles Superior Court commissioner through unification.
        In his spare time, Goetsch enjoys spending time with his wife and stepson, Chris Ohman. He says he always looks forward to being able to see his daughter, Kerri Goetsch, his son, Rob Goetsch - they're twins - as well as his two grandchildren.
        Goetsch's daughter works as a clerk for the federal District Court in Las Vegas. His son, who lives in Virginia, is a special agent for the Department of Homeland Security.
        On weekends, Goetsch is, in a sense, retracing his more youthful footsteps. He makes regular trips to America's version of "beyond the back of beyond." He, his wife and stepson pack up the modified 1994 Jeep Cherokee and venture out into the nearby deserts and mountains.
        And Goetsch is taking up flying again.
        "I guess you could call it my second childhood," he said.
        In the courtroom, though, he draws on his varied life experiences and influences as he strives to get past the obstacles to resolving disputes, he says.
        Goetsch surveys the situations, builds bridges between people, encourages honesty, listens to all parties and tries to engineer a peaceful outcome.
        There's no magic to it, he says.