Judicial Profile

HON. Michael P. Linfield
Judge

Superior Court of California County of Los Angeles

By Don Ray
Daily Journal Staff Writer

     The stories in West Covina’s Department 10 are often the same. The defendants are usually men. The charge is usually domestic violence. And for many, the recurring thought is, “Will he throw the book at me?”
     They have no way of knowing a critical chapter is about to unfold in their lives. They will soon learn that they’re standing before a judge who’s not sure that punishment is always the best answer.
     While domestic-violence statutes offer Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Michael P. Linfield limited options, he tries to orchestrate a scenario that best suits all of the story’s characters.
     That includes the wife or domestic partner, the children and even future generations of children — as well as the defendant himself. Indeed, Linfield said, violence at home today can foreshadow violence decades down the line.
     “Domestic violence is an issue of power and control,” he said. “It’s not a bar fight where you were just angry. It’s not genetic. It’s learned from generation to generation.
     “And if I can break that cycle, I’m doing a good job.”
     While the vast majority of the misdemeanor cases Linfield hears involve men accused of violence against women, experts in the field acknowledge that, in as many as 5 percent of the cases, it’s the man who is the victim of the woman in his life.
     The statutes allow the judge either to send the convicted abuser to jail for up to a year or order him or her to attend weekly domestic-violence classes.
     Linfield believes the classes offer a better chance for a happy ending, or at least they cut down on the violence while the defendant is taking the classes. The judge said he requires defendants to come in and report their progress.
     Typically, he said, they tell him they’re learning to control their anger. He asks them how.
     “‘I’ve learned to take a timeout,’” is the recurring theme, Linfield said.
     “I hear this at least two or three times a day with defendants, and it’s a revelation to them,” he said. “It’s the first time in their life they’ve learned that, when you get upset, you can take a timeout.
     “For some of these defendants, it really is like a whole world’s opened up. They’ve never learned as either a person or a man that they can just calm down.”
     However, Linfield said he isn’t sure this new knowledge will make a difference.
     “I’ve analyzed an 8-foot-tall stack of sociology treatises and legal journal articles on the effect of programs to re-educate batterers, and there are simply no statistically valid long-term studies to show whether they’re effective,” he said. “We just don’t know.”
     Deputy District Attorney Duke T. Chau has observed that Linfield’s research takes a lot of work and time.
     “How many judges would take the time to read that kind of stuff?” Chau asked.
     He has appeared often in Department 10 and thinks he has a pretty good read on the judge.
     “What I admire most about him is that he cares about the people — not just the victims, but the defendant,” Chau said.
     “He takes an active role in the therapy of the defendant,” said Deputy Public Defender Gregory T. Gonzales.
     Attorney Stephen M. Lathrop of Lathrop and Villa has been a friend of Linfield since they worked together in private practice, and he admires how the judge treats people with dignity.
     “I don’t care if you’re the garbage man, the chef in a restaurant or an executive,” Lathrop said.
     When he and Linfield are together, Lathrop said, the judge stops and talks to homeless people.
     “It’s really giving them that equal dignity, even though they’re homeless,” Lathrop said. “It’s pretty amazing.”
     The defendants and victims who appear before Linfield have no way of knowing that they’re appearing before a judge who has made it a lifelong cause to fight for equality and justice.
     Lathrop’s law partner and wife, Maria Villa, said she knew and admired Linfield for years before she learned about his lifelong history of seeking justice — especially justice for the downtrodden.
     “I found out about it when he had a picture of Martin Luther King [Jr.] in his office,” she recalled. “He never brags about it.”
     Visitors might not notice that the 12-year-old boy standing, in that photograph, with King and his chief aid, Ralph Abernathy, is Linfield, there with his best friend and junior-high classmate, Jerry Ford. It was taken during a trip they took to Phoenix to march with the civil rights leaders.
     The photo, it turns out, is consistent with a way of life Linfield has always known.
     “It’s part of his moral fiber,” said his friend, attorney Dan L. Stormer. “He has the pedigree of a champion.”
     “Issues of justice were always part of my family,” Linfield said.
     “One of my grandfathers was a lawyer, the other was a rabbi,” he said. “My grandfather the lawyer was up for a judgeship. He was told he could have a judgeship if he could meet a certain contribution — during the Tammany Hall-type days — to whatever the political machine was, and he refused to do it.
     “He never got the judgeship.”
     Linfield said both of his parents followed in their fathers’ footsteps.
     “Mother was a labor organizer when she was a kid in the ’30s,” he said. “I think she was 20, and she shipped out on an ocean liner to help organize the crewmen.
     “She was informed at one point in the middle of the South Atlantic — in no uncertain terms by the captain, who was aware of the organizing — sometimes people fell overboard in the middle of the night and their bodies were never recovered.”
     His mother is now 85 and is still active, he said. She works on the organizing committee of the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor.
     Linfield said it was natural that he embrace, at an early age, the family tradition of seeking justice for the powerless.
     “When I was in junior high school, I worked on the first issue of what I think was the first underground paper in Los Angeles,” he said. “It was called ‘Insight.’”
     He got straight A’s in school, Linfield said, so it gave him the freedom to do political work. His grades allowed him to attend UCLA while he was still a high-school senior.
     A year after he graduated, he received his teaching credential and taught at what were the precursors to today’s magnet schools.
     Linfield began his teaching career in West Los Angeles but left the Westside after a year.
     “The kids were going to make it pretty much with me or without me,” he said.
     He transferred to Garfield High School in East Los Angeles at the same time that famed educator Jaime Escalante began teaching mathematics.
     But it soon became clear, Linfield said, that the Eastside kids weren’t going to make it.
     “And there wasn’t much I could do,” he said.
     So Linfield left Garfield and went to work for Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers of America, for a salary of $5 a week, the same amount that the striking farmworkers were getting, including Chavez himself, he said.
     Linfield had met Chavez years earlier when the workers’ rights advocate had slept at his parents’ house.
     “I was sent to Sacramento to set up the legislative offices,” he said. “I was 25. I had no background in legislation or lobbying.”
     Nevertheless, Linfield became the group’s chief lobbyist and even drafted legislation to shore up the newly enacted Agriculture and Labor Relations Act.
     Later, he became the special liaison to Gov. Jerry Brown on pension issues, and he ran the major labor community boycott for the West Coast: the boycott against the J.P. Stevens Co.
     Linfield worked with Crystal Lee Sutton, the textile worker portrayed by Sally Field in her 1979 Academy Award-winning performance in “Norma Rae.”
     He was 36 when he decided to go to law school in 1985. He applied to 10 schools and decided on Harvard.
     During his first summer there, instead of working for a New York law firm like the younger students were, he went to Nicaragua and became an intern to the chief justice of its Supreme Court.
     “I did human rights research,” Linfield said. “This was in the middle of the Contra war.
     “We were funding the Contras to overthrow the Nicaraguan government. The stated reason that our government was supporting the Contras was because the Sandinistas were infringing on human rights or civil liberties.”
     Linfield realized, he said, that these were issues that had never been looked at before.
     “You’re in the middle of a revolution. The Contras were blowing up bridges and electrical plants and all sorts of things,” he said. “How does one evaluate civil liberties in wartime?”
     He said no one had ever evaluated civil liberties in the United States during wartime.
     “So I wrote my third-year paper on the history of civil liberties in the United States during wartime and compared that to what was happening in Nicaragua,” Linfield said.
     He published his work as a book in 1990, a year after he graduated from law school. The book, “Freedom Under Fire; U.S. Civil Liberties in Times of War,” became a popular resource when the United States invaded Iraq, he said.
     In 1989, Linfield went to work for Alschuler, Grossman & Pines, where he did litigation and appellate cases. Three years later, he opened his own practice and focused on employment, wrongful termination, consumer fraud and appellate work.
     During that time, his 94-year-old great-aunt came to him with a complaint about her bank, Great Western Savings & Loan.
     Linfield said she went there to roll over her CD, but they talked her into investing in a risky bond fund, and she ended up losing money.
     Linfield took the bank to court and, before he was done, he found that his aunt wasn’t alone. It became a class action that resulted in an award of $18.2 million to 45,000 bank customers. Rosenthal v. Great Western Financial Security Corp., 14 Cal.4th 394 (1996).
     In another action, he filed several lawsuits representing Bar and Restaurant Employees Against Tobacco Hazards in its crusade to make sure bar owners did their part to enforce the statewide smoking ban.
     In November 2003, Gov. Gray Davis appointed Linfield to the Los Angeles Superior Court. His only assignment has been in the domestic-violence court in West Covina.
     Even though the law allows him little latitude on the misdemeanor cases he hears, he’s not afraid to challenge long-accepted procedures when he believes they compromise a defendant’s right to a fair trial.
     One example involves the victim’s advocate program.
     “When I took over this court a year ago, the procedure was for the judge to meet with the victim’s advocate — and that’s it,” Linfield said. “But the victim’s advocate works for the DA’s office.
     “So it struck me that there’s a problem here — and that’s the way it’s done in every other court. But I think there’s an issue of ex parte contact.
     “I just said, ‘I won’t do that,’ and I bring in the PD and the DA and the victim’s advocate. If one attorney came in and said, ‘I want to talk to you about my case,’ I’d say, ‘No. Bring in the other attorney.’”
     “The victim advocate does work for the district attorney’s office,” said Joseph T. Kang, a deputy public defender. “She’s coming from the prosecutorial aspect. He’s being fair. He wants to be sure everybody gets heard.”
     “I think he’s doing what he’s supposed to be doing,” said Toyia Reed, a victim services representative who appears before Linfield. “I think he’s taking the initiative to take extra care.”
     Linfield said he measures his success one person at a time. He keeps the proof of one such success story in his desk drawer.
     It’s a letter he received from a defendant who had recently completed the required domestic-violence class. In the letter, the defendant credits Linfield’s respect, kindness, compassion and concern for his success. The man recalled a particular day in court when everyone else had brought in good reports.
     “I could really tell how proud you were of all of them,” the man wrote in the letter. “But when it came to me, I could tell that wasn’t the case.
     “But I told myself that the next time I stood before you, I was going to make you proud of me. I refuse to let you down, as well as myself.
     “Well, as you can see, I did it and I want you to know that I have worked very hard and I’m proud of myself. Most of all, by meeting you, I know that I am somebody. Thanks for everything.”
     Linfield is leaving the domestic-violence court behind in January. His new assignment will be closer — maybe even within bicycling distance, he says — to his home, where he enjoys tennis, playing classical guitar and spending more time with his 11-year-old daughter, Elizabeth. Linfield shares custody of her with his ex-wife.
     He says he’s excited to be taking on a family law assignment in downtown Los Angeles. And he’s sure his experience hearing domestic-violence cases will come in handy when he gets there.
     “Clearly, domestic violence is an issue in family court,” Linfield said. “In family law, the criteria are always what’s best for the child.”
     In the end, it’s all about justice, he said.
     “Tzedek, tzedek, tirdof tzedek,” he says quoting Deuteronomy 16:20 in Hebrew. “Justice, justice, you shall seek justice.”