Judge Gray: Nice but No Nonsense : Orange County officials give grudging respect to the federal jurist although he has continually been after them on jail issue.

A Los Angeles legal journal said he “may be the nicest jurist on the federal bench,” but that hasn’t stopped U.S. District Judge William P. Gray from riding Orange County hard during the past decade.

When overcrowding swarmed the county men’s jail, Gray--who was named to the federal bench by Democrat Lyndon B. Johnson--ruled that the county facility violated prisoners’ rights. And when the county did not make as much progress as the judge wanted, he slapped local officials with a contempt charge.

The judge has pulled few punches. On controversial “rubber room” isolation cells used in Orange County jails, for instance, Gray said, “There’s something basically inhumane and almost medieval about putting a person naked in one of your rubber rooms. . . .” The judge ordered sheriff’s officials to modify their use of such rooms.

Gray’s involvement in Orange County law enforcement has taken him other directions as well: A pair of private investigators sued Sheriff Brad Gates for the way he managed his gun permit policy, and Gray presided over a long trial that ended this month with the plaintiffs accepting a $616,000 settlement.

Still, the 78-year-old jurist has won a grudging respect from many county officials.

“He’s been pretty straight with us, pretty reasonable,” said Dan Wooldridge, an aide to Supervisor Don R. Roth.

Gray, who also handles many cases dealing with jail conditions in Los Angeles County, was born in Los Angeles in 1912 and received his undergraduate degree from UCLA in 1934. He worked two years to save money for Harvard Law School, from which he was graduated in 1939. He served as president of the State Bar of California from 1962-63, and in 1966 Johnson named him to the federal bench.

In 1958, when he was still in private practice, Gray was asked to act as a special assistant to the U.S. attorney general in a case against several oil companies regarding the Long Beach Naval Shipyard.

Drilling by 400 oil producers had caused the area to subside by about a foot a year, and Gray won a settlement from the oil companies.

Ironically, his ties to oil companies last year became the subject of a controversy for the judge. Attorneys for the state and the city of Long Beach asked that he be removed from a massive price-fixing suit against six major oil companies because the judge accepted free trips to Florida and attended seminars partly funded by the same companies named in the litigation.

But U.S. District Judge Robert M. Tagasuki refused in June to remove Gray from the case, ruling that the free trips were not improper.

The Los Angeles Daily Journal, the legal newspaper that lauded Gray’s niceness, went on to quote lawyers who described him as “a prince of a judge” and “delightful.” Others, however, criticized him for being too lenient.

“His judgment is just not as realistic as the other judges,” said one prosecutor.