Judges and Judiciary
Jun. 26, 2002
Judge Weathered Firestorm From Simpson Custody Case
SANTA ANA - Though Orange County Superior Court Judge Nancy Wieben Stock has been on the bench for more than 12 years, her enduring image was sealed Dec. 7, 1996.
Nancy Wieben Stock
Superior Court Judge
Orange County
Career highlights: Appointed by Gov. George Deukmejian, Orange Superior Court, 1990; chief of the Santa Ana branch office, U.S. attorney's office, 1987-90; chief of major crimes, U.S. attorney's office, Los Angeles, 1986-87; assistant U.S. attorney, U.S. attorney's office, Los Angeles, 1978-90; associate, Friedmann & Menke, 1976-78
Law school: University of California, Davis, School of Law, 1976
Age: 50
That night, "Saturday Night Live" cast member Ana Gasteyer impersonated Stock during a parody of the O.J. Simpson child custody trial.
A bewigged Gasteyer, known for her satirical portrayals of Martha Stewart and Hillary Clinton on the late-night NBC television show, and her castmate Tim Meadows, shared a laugh as Stock and O.J. Simpson, respectively, during the opening sketch that night.
The show aired not long before Stock decided to return the kids of O.J. and Nicole Brown Simpson to their father - cementing in the public eye Stock's image.
Nearly six years, numerous articles, endless talk-show round tables and one failed recall attempt later, Stock said she's tired of discussing a case that ceased to offer new insights long ago.
"I am tired of it coming back to the extent that we're still going back in time," she said.
Seated in her flower-bedecked office in the smells-like-new-paint Lamoreaux Justice Center in Orange, Stock can barely conceal her enthusiasm for family law and the 15 judicial officers she oversees as the newly-appointed supervising judge for the family law court.
"I feel like I'm kind of the prodigal daughter," she laughed. "It really has been an interesting path because I've come full circle."
Stock's last stint at family court was from 1990 to 1993. She worked a general civil calendar and a felony calendar before she returned to where she had started as a judge.
She enjoys encouraging adults to "take the baby steps" necessary to become better parents. She also enjoys making the family court a more efficient, less frightening place.
This year, with the help of Presiding Judge Frederick P. Horn and family court staff, she hopes to combine selected family law cases into a single-judge court and to formalize the training and selection of child custody evaluators.
"I know that it sounds a little Pollyannaish that we are saving lives here or that we are healing the wounded," Stock said. "But this is the strongest, most qualified panel of judicial officers that we've ever had in Orange County. Our philosophy is one face, one family, one file."
The 50-year-old jurist spends much of her week overseeing dispositions, deciding dissolution matters and handling family support and domestic violence calendars.
Though armed with a 22-item list of priority projects to complete and committee meetings to attend, she finds room to do more.
Stock chairs the court commissioner selection committee and sits on the grand jury committee, the court technology committee and the South Justice Center steering committee.
She is a University of California, Davis, Foundation board trustee, a member of the YWCA Central Orange County community advisory committee and an active participant in three prayer groups, including the Lamoreaux Judges Prayer Group.
The only thing missing is more time for her husband and two kids, Stock said, but she added, "There is no reason for me to be here except that I want to be here."
Attorneys need to actively participate in Stock's courtroom by resolving to work with each other and by following procedure.
"You kind of hope attorneys exercise a little leadership and experience," she said. "The relationship between the bench and bar in family law is a little unique. Some say too close, but that's a misunderstanding.
"Family law should be oriented toward settlement at all times. We look to our family law practitioners to step up to the plate to take a leadership role."
Stock said attorneys must be ready to cajole, educate, humor and empathize with their clients, while retaining a formal style in open court. In that vein, attorneys must know the relevant case cites, keep the record of the proceedings clear, refrain from chatting and wear a jacket.
Stock also would like to see attorneys develop better manners. For instance, she believes attorneys need to inform not just the court but each other if they are running late.
"She's extremely courteous to counsel," said Ed Hall, a criminal defense attorney who appeared in front of Stock on an assault case when she presided over felony trials. "She expects counsel to be prepared on cases. Lawyers don't chat. In Judge Stock's court, that kind of stuff didn't happen."
Stock said a judge also must retain the human touch.
For litigants, "so much of being in court is having a feeling that your voice is heard," she added.
Stock tries to get parents to refocus on their children and stop thinking of themselves as losers.
"Co-parenting is possible in America without being under the same roof," she said. "So much of being a parent is having a feeling that your voice is heard. You see some people who just want to stick it to each other."
Such issues were certainly at the heart of Stock's most well-known decision. In 1996, Stock was on the Orange County Superior Court felony trials panel while a case to decide who should be the guardian of O.J. Simpson's daughter, Sydney, and son, Justin, was continuing in front of a probate commissioner. After 10 days of testimony, the parties could not resolve the dispute voluntarily.
Then-Presiding Judge Ted Millard took the case from Orange County Superior Court Commissioner Thomas Schulte and handed it to Stock - a decision an appeals court later questioned.
Millard, now retired, said the media attention was "overwhelming," but he felt Stock had the experience to handle the case.
"It was a case that needed a judge that would go in and move the case along in an expeditious manner," Millard said. "It was just my impression that we should have someone assigned who was responsible to the electorate and not responsible to a small group of judges."
In 1994, while Simpson was jailed on charges of killing his former wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, 35, and her friend, Ronald Goldman, 25, Simpson gave voluntary guardianship of the children to Nicole Simpson's parents, Lou and Juditha Brown.
But 17 months later - after a Los Angeles jury acquitted him of the criminal charges and before a civil panel held him liable for their wrongful deaths - Simpson wanted his children back.
The Browns had no intention of letting Sydney and Justin go home with the former football hero they believed had killed their daughter.
After 14 additional days of testimony, Stock awarded custody to Simpson, stating in her ruling that the Browns "failed to demonstrate by clear and convincing evidence that custody of the minors by their father would be clearly detrimental to [the children's] well being."
That ruling, later reversed by the 4th District Court of Appeal, flung Stock into a media firestorm that didn't let up until after a recall petition circulated by a women's political organization died from a lack of signatures.
Simpson's attorney, Bernard Leckie of Meserve Mumper & Hughes in Irvine, said he was shocked by the public's reaction to what he believes was a courageous decision.
"That made me just really upset, particularly with a judicial system where a judge has the courage to take a case like that when it's assigned to her," Leckie said. "To criticize her for not going along with public opinion and to try and remove her from the bench ... it is just sickening to see that happen because it was totally unjustified.
"Most judges would not have enjoyed to be in the case because you're going to be under scrutiny. Whatever you do, you're going to be in the spotlight, whether you like it or not."
Stock said she can't talk about the case because it is under seal. But, she found a silver lining in the support of jurists from across the state who also had received hate mail or bad press.
"I found their stories to be enormously inspiring," she said. "As a trial court judge, we are often where the rubber meets the road."
Stock said she would have left the bench if fear and doubt from the incident had corrupted the solid foundation she spent years building.
"For me, I have been referred to by various individuals as case-hardened, but as a judge, each and every case informs you. Your life experiences inform your decisions. Those are the kinds of cases that either ... break you - and in that case you're in the wrong profession - or ... strengthen you."
"This is a tough judge," Scott Sanders, an Orange County deputy public defender, said. "This is not a soft judge by any stretch. That was a decision that took a lot of courage. I gained a lot of respect for her. I think a lot of people did at that point."
But civil litigator Natasha Roit, the attorney for the Browns, said the particulars of the case still disturb her.
Two weeks before trial, the Browns asked Roit to take over the case. When Roit asked Stock for more time to review the issues, Stock denied her request, Roit said.
"The quote was that this was already the longest custody case in Orange County," Roit said. "I couldn't get an extra day."
The Los Angeles attorney said that Stock repeatedly rebuffed her efforts to introduce evidence from Simpson's murder trial.
"I offered to do it any way she wanted," Roit said. "She said the only way was to bring in live witnesses."
But on the day the witnesses arrived to testify, Roit said, Stock wouldn't hear from them.
"That's the kind of strange stuff that was going on," Roit said. "I will never to this day understand a custody decision which takes into account battery and doesn't take into account murder."
Robert B. Hutson, presiding judge of the Orange County Superior Court juvenile panel, disagreed with Roit's assessment of Stock's decisions.
"That doesn't sound characteristically like the person I know," Hutson said of Stock. "It's not consistent with rulings she's made in the past with unrelated cases."
Hutson said it was neither Stock's habit nor custom to make arbitrary or inconsistent rulings on sensitive cases, such as the Simpson custody matter. The support she received from the local bar in the face of criticism regarding that ruling spoke volumes about Stock's standing in the Orange County legal community, Hutson said.
Marjorie Fuller, court-appointed attorney for the children, said it wasn't appropriate to retry Simpson for murder during a guardianship case.
"We would have had to redo that case," she said. "And I said my kids can't deal with that."
The 4th District Court of Appeal overturned Stock's ruling in 1998. In making their decision, the court ruled the murder evidence deserved consideration, as did entries from Nicole Brown Simpson's diary allegedly detailing Simpson's violent tendencies.
The state Supreme Court declined to hear the case, upholding the appellate decision. Before a new trial could be held, Simpson and the Browns reached a settlement allowing Simpson to regain custody.
"I think the appellate court was a little critical," Millard said. "The appellate court has different wisdom, and they're not out there in the trenches. [Stock's] a person of the highest character and integrity you can find. She had overwhelming support among her colleagues and the legal profession in Southern California. And she wouldn't get that if she was off the wall."
Leckie said that Simpson's adult children even testified that Simpson was a great father.
"I think she's an excellent judge and decided the case with the evidence that was before the court and not on the basis of public opinion," Leckie said. "There really was no evidence that [Simpson] wasn't a good parent and father. She's a very fine person and an excellent judge, and she didn't bow to public pressure."
Leckie, incidentally, sued Simpson in Orange County Superior Court for more than $204,000 in unpaid legal fees stemming from the custody case. Meserve Mumper & Hughes v. Simpson, 02CC04749, (Orange County Super. Ct., filed March 25, 2002).
Fuller said she never found evidence Simpson wasn't a good father, even though the public believed otherwise.
"My opinion is that Judge Stock knew very well what the public's reaction [to her decision] was going to be," Fuller said. "In the Simpson case, Judge Stock did what I think judges are supposed to do, which is take a difficult case and make a decision that she believed to be the correct decision in accordance with the law, regardless of whether it would be the popular decision."
Stock told one very interesting story about that period in her life. An attorney she knew was in Munich, Germany, on business in 1996 and was shocked to see a huge billboard with an advertisement for a television news show towering over the city.
On the billboard was a life-size picture of Stock.
Here are some of Judge Stock's recent cases and the lawyers involved:
• People v. Guerrero, 01SF0162
Prosecution: Dan Hess, Orange County deputy district attorney
Defense: Lisa Kopelman, Orange County deputy public defender
• People v. Peoples, 98WF2617
Prosecution: Cameron Talley, Orange County deputy district attorney
Defense: April Gilbert, Orange County deputy public defender
• People v. Chanley, 99CF1859
Prosecution: Erin Rowe, Orange County deputy district attorney
Defense: Ed Hall, Orange County criminal defense attorney
• People v. Brownlee, 00NF3194
Prosecution: Ebrahim Baytieh, Orange County deputy district attorney
Defense: Scott Sanders, Orange County deputy public defender
• People v. Fitzpatrick, 00WF2308
Prosecution: Erin Rowe, Orange County deputy district attorney
Defense: Mark Brown, Orange County deputy public defender
Jenna Bordelon
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