Judges and Judiciary
Aug. 7, 2002
Judge Brings Intellectual Edge
LOS ANGELES - When Presiding Judge James A. Bascue picked up the phone to give newly enrobed Judge David M. Mintz his court assignment in January 2001, it was one of those good news, bad news calls.
David M. Mintz
Superior Court Judge
Los Angeles
Career highlights: Elected, Los Angeles Superior Court, Nov. 7, 2000; deputy district attorney, Los Angeles County, 1984-2001
Education: Hastings College of the Law, 1984
Age: 48
"He called me up and said, 'The good news is, Welcome to the court. The bad news is, You have a long way to commute to your courtroom,'" Mintz remembered.
At the time, Mintz was a Los Angeles county prosecutor assigned to the San Fernando court, not all that far from his home in West Hills.
Today, he commutes an hour and 10 minutes each way to preside over felony trials in Lancaster, the northernmost courthouse in Los Angeles County.
His previous assignments in 17 years with the Los Angeles County district attorney's office - the major narcotics division, major frauds division, Inglewood juvenile and outposts at the Van Nuys, Compton and San Fernando courthouses - demanded endurance, but rarely on the highway.
The drive's not so bad, he said. It's against the commuter tide. And this year, he's been able to carpool with two other judges: John P. Doyle, who moved to one of Lancaster's two misdemeanor courts from Van Nuys in January, and Martin Herscovitz, appointed by Gov. Gray Davis in October. Mintz and Herscovitz are assigned to Lancaster's two felony courts.
"The Itinerant Judges," as Herscovitz has dubbed the trio, try to leave the tiny Lancaster courthouse parking lot as close to 5 p.m. each day as possible, so afternoon sessions rarely go overtime in their courtrooms.
Some afternoons the carpool functions as group therapy as well as transportation, Doyle noted.
"Mintz is a very funny guy. He's a joke teller," Doyle said. "He has an unflappable, even-tempered disposition that I marvel at and admire."
If Mintz doesn't keep them laughing, Doyle may start picking the two veteran prosecutors' legal minds.
"When there's talking, I'm wearing them out with questions about criminal law and procedure," said Doyle, a former civil litigator.
"They were both very senior deputy district attorneys," he said, "and they know criminal law inside out. It's just a plus for all of us to have that car pool."
The long ride from Antelope Valley to their homes "Down Below" is a small price to pay for the opportunity to hit the ground running felony courts as their first judicial assignments, Mintz and Herscovitz agree.
Most new judges, as Doyle can attest, spend a year or so in grinding traffic courts and other high-volume small-claims or misdemeanor courts before ever getting a shot at felony or general civil courts.
"Down Below" is how the half-million residents of the wide-open high-desert communities of Lancaster and Palmdale refer to the city of Los Angeles and its nearer suburbs.
Lancaster is 70 miles north of downtown Los Angeles up Interstates 101, 170 and 5 and state highway 14. Originally bedroom communities for Edwards Air Force Base and aerospace companies associated with it, Antelope Valley has evolved into a bedroom community for Angelenos looking for affordable real estate and home lives apart from the urban crush.
Many families who moved there in recent years, Mintz said, were trying to save their children from gangs, drugs and a perverse inner-city ethos that violence breeds respect. For too many of these families, the move came too late.
Though they exiled their children from their home gangs, novice thugs gravitated to one another, reinforced tough-boy values and found grudges to avenge even in Antelope Valley, the judge said.
In one case tried in Mintz's court recently, two gang members, recently paroled from three-year prison terms for a bungled armed robbery, had romance in mind when they drove to the home of a couple of girls. The romance sizzled when the parolees spotted a member of a rival gang in front of the house. People v. Zaval, MA022420 (L.A. Super. Ct. 2002).
"My two defendants start exchanging words. It escalates. The passenger gets out of the car and shoots the victim," said Carlos Chung, the deputy district attorney who prosecuted the case.
Chung, the district attorney's hard-core gang division deputy assigned to Antelope Valley, tried another case in Mintz's court recently that illustrates the atypical gang associations that seem to occur only there. People v. Hickman, MA023306 (L.A. Super. Ct. 2002).
In that case, three gang members - two Bloods and a Crip - collaborated on a heist of the Granicy Feed Store. The store has some local cachet because the two grandmothers who operate the combination feed store and gift shop were prosecuted a few years ago and convicted of misdemeanor failure to track sales of iodine properly as required by drug enforcement statutes.
Iodine is an ingredient commonly used to manufacture crystal methamphetamine, and the combination of grandmothers and crystal meth made for widespread news coverage.
"They go over to the feed store and commit an armed robbery, and in the course of that, one of them beats up or roughs up one of the grandmothers," Chung said. "As they were fleeing, Mr. [Laronnie] Hickman took a shot at Armitta Granicy."
M. David Hauchin, the Sherman Oaks criminal defense attorney who represented Hickman, made a defense motion to dismiss the gang allegation at the preliminary hearing, and Mintz granted it.
The gang allegation under Penal Code Section 186 increases prison terms significantly for activities that promote a gang's criminal objectives, reputation or membership. Critics say prosecutors overuse the charge and judges rubber-stamp their allegations.
"There is a proof problem with these kinds of things. You have to show prior acts, and they just couldn't do it with these guys," Hauchin said. "He just didn't see it. You can count on Mintz to do the right thing."
Despite losing his gang allegation, Chung was very pleased with how Mintz handled the case.
"He is really knowledgeable in the law," Chung said. "He is always fair in how he treats both sides. If he rules for me or against me, I usually don't have too much of a problem because I feel like he's based his reasons on the law and he's made the fairest judgment he believes he can make.
"Overall, I'd say he is very - I can't think of a better word than very fair."
Mintz can't think of a better thing to have said about him.
When he decided to run for an open Los Angeles Municipal Court seat, his No. 1 aspiration, he said, was to be so fair that every lawyer leaving his courtroom - win, lose or draw - knew his case had been fairly judged.
"I thought I could be the type of judge who would cause the parties to believe that, when they represented a case, they would be treated fairly, their arguments would be considered, evaluated, and, whether or not they agreed with the ruling, they would come away from my courtroom feeling that I'd given full consideration to their arguments and gave their work the respect that I liked to see given to my work as an advocate," Mintz said.
Mintz filed in 1999 for a Los Angeles Municipal Court seat opened by the retirement of Judge L.C. Nunley, but by the time of the primary election in March 2000, unification had converted the post to a seat on the Superior Court bench.
Unlike his colleague in the district attorney's office - Christopher G. Esters, who is the juvenile delinquency judge for Antelope Valley now - Mintz did not win at the primary level.
He and Beverly Hills sole practitioner Vicki M. Roberts eliminated Commissioner John Ladner in the spring vote, kicking off one of the most colorful judicial contests Los Angeles had seen in years.
The flamboyant Roberts got celebrity endorsements, which she posted on her Web site along with photos she had taken with them at awards shows and fund-raisers. Her media-spin savvy didn't impress the Los Angeles County Bar Association's Judicial Nominees Evaluating Committee, which ranked her "not qualified" for the bench.
Roberts called the evaluation "a complete character assassination," blasted the committee's criticism of her as "inappropriate apparel for the courtroom" and filed suit against the bar association for fraud Roberts v. Los Angeles County Bar Association, BC224606 (L.A. Super. Ct.).
Mintz got the committee's highest rating, "well qualified." He waged a more subtle campaign, focused on telling voters, especially those in the legal community, about his work ethic, track record and philosophy. He narrowly defeated Roberts, taking 53 percent of the votes.
It was a soft but firm sell with a decidedly intellectual edge, derived in part from Mintz's eight years as adjunct professor of trial advocacy at Pepperdine University School of Law.
During his 16 years with the district attorney's office, he earned friends among his peers for his scholarly depth.
"Dave was always a very good resource; he has a really deep and wide knowledge of the law," said Deputy District Attorney John F. Nantroup, who worked with Mintz at the San Fernando office. "He would always know the area of law that you were working on. It's always nice to have someone like that down the hall that you can go bounce an idea off of."
The fact that Mintz also had the strength to do the kind of sparring that clinched tough cases earned his peers' respect.
His courtroom wins include a 28-year sentence for Danny Trujillo, whom Mintz described as the leader of one of the largest cocaine distribution organizations in Los Angeles. Trujillo was arrested in a hotel room in Universal City with several hundred kilos of cocaine and a half-million dollars in cash.
Those facts on the surface might appear conclusive, but it took a two-month trial in Van Nuys to prevail on complex nuances about Trujillo's actual connection to the room and what constituted possession between Trujillo and various codefendants.
His second-favorite win, Mintz said, was convicting Anna Gilinets of the Christmas murder of her boyfriend, because he failed to buy her a present. Then she staged the death scene to look like suicide, placing the gun in his hand just like in the movies.
It was a cliché that almost worked, too, Mintz said. Homicide investigators noticed a detail or two that didn't fit, and Mintz tied the loose ends of the mystery together for the jurors, who convicted Gilinets of murder.
"He's a very bright guy - that coupled with the fact that he's very capable of doing the legal sparring, like that necessary on search and seizure," Nantroup said of Mintz. "He is soft-spoken, but his presentation is very well-reasoned, so it's kind of hard to argue with."
Mintz defines professionalism in law as a commitment, and he frames that commitment in the context of law study.
"When a judge is appointed or elected, he or she automatically gets a certain amount of respect from lawyers in a courtroom because he or she represents the court as an institution," Mintz reflected recently.
"Personal respect for a judge is something that is a lot harder to come by," he said. "That's something that I think has to be earned on a daily basis over a period of years.
"A lot of the judges that I saw in my 17 years as a prosecutor - judges whom I respected, who had a lot of the qualities that I aspire to - those are basically the judges who feel that the law is something they have to study as a commitment for a career because the law is always changing.
"I think the judge or lawyer who doesn't consider himself a law student can't be very effective."
Here are some of Judge Mintz's recent cases and the lawyers involved:
People v. Flores, MA022568
Prosecution: John Portillo, Los Angeles County deputy district attorney
Defense: David Hauchin, private practice, Sherman Oaks
People v. Traylor, MA021588
Prosecution: Michael Blake, Los Angeles County deputy district attorney
Defense: Thomas Frederic Kascoutas, private practice, Valencia
People v. Salas, MA022671
Prosecution: Carlos Chung, Los Angeles County deputy district attorney
Defense: Dennis Vincent, private practice, Lancaster
People v. Hickman, MA023306
Prosecution: Carlos Chung, Los Angeles County deputy district attorney
Defense: David Hauchin, private practice, Sherman Oaks
People v. Zaval, MA022420
Prosecution: Carlos Chung, Los Angeles County deputy district attorney
Defense: Arnold Notkoff, Notkoff & Curran, Beverly Hills
Ed Kimble
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