Editorial: A fair judge does his duty

Carmel Pinecone
Posted March 24, 2006

READERS OF The Carmel Pine Cone know U.S. District Court Judge James Ware. Five years ago, he presided over the Clint Eastwood ADA trial. In that notorious case, a highly sympathetic figure — an attractive, soft-spoken young woman in a wheelchair — claimed Eastwood violated her civil rights by failing to make legally required improvements at Mission Ranch to accommodate the disabled.

Eastwood, being a wealthy Hollywood movie star, would ordinarily have been easy pickings for the disabled woman, who stood to pick up a million or two in damages. In this country, civil trials are as much about income redistribution as they are about justice.

But Judge Ware wasn’t about to let his courtroom be turned into an Eastwood lynch mob. With a deft hand, he kept the trial to the legal issues at hand, ensured that no bias or prejudice crept into the proceedings, and prevented the disabled woman’s attorneys from playing to the jury’s emotions. In the end, Eastwood won because it was plain to the jurors that the woman’s case was based on lies. But also because Judge Ware did his job so well.

This week, he had an entirely different sort of case from Monterey County to contend with. But one which was equally emotional and equally likely to be decided on some irrelevant or tangential grounds.

Last fall, when LandWatch and some of its key supporters — disgruntled at the county’s slow progress at enacting a new general plan and dissatisfied with the direction the county was taking — announced they would circulate a petition to put their own version of a general plan before voters, nobody dreamt that federal law would require the petition be offered in Spanish.

Unluckily for LandWatch, an appeals court ruling on that very subject was handed down even as their signature-gatherers hit the streets. Not only official election materials — such as voters pamphlets and the ballots themselves — have to be prepared in languages spoken by more than five percent of a county’s residents, but also recall petitions and the like, the appeals court ruled. It was the first time the issue had been decided by a higher court, and nobody could be blamed for not seeing it coming. Nevertheless, because the decision was from the 9th Circuit, Judge Ware was required to adhere to it — even applying it retroactively to the LandWatch case. And that’s exactly what he did.

Even a quick reading of the appeals court ruling in controlling case, Padilla vs. Lever, makes it obvious that the 9th Circuit is very unlikely to overturn Judge Ware’s decision. His well earned reputation for fairness give his ruling this week even more legitimacy.

Thus, LandWatch’s promise to take Ware’s ruling to a higher court is a mistake and will just end up being a waste of time and money for everybody. It certainly seems unfair for their petition to be overturned on grounds nobody could have foreseen. But that’s all water under the bridge now. LandWatch’s only choice is to recirculate the petition in the required languages, or give up taking their fight to the ballot box and turn their attention back to the board of supervisors.