Public Defender, Judge at Odds Over Conduct

During a recess in a murder trial last month, Deputy Public Defender Jeffrey Gilliam answered an emergency page from his wife, who was eight months pregnant.

Using the court clerk’s phone, he heard her, frightened and crying, tell him that the baby was in serious trouble and that she was being rushed from her Tarzana doctor’s office across the street to the hospital for an emergency caesarean section.

Gilliam promised he would be out of court and on his way immediately. But his departure was delayed for 20 to 30 minutes by Superior Court Judge Curtis Rappe who, in a heated confrontation, would not let him leave the courtroom until Gilliam got a decision from his client on a plea bargain that had been tentatively concluded earlier in the day.

Rappe, 57, a 1987 appointee of Gov. George Deukmejian, strongly defends his action. But his version of events is contradicted by other witnesses, including the prosecutor in the murder trial, on key points.

The incident is at least the third conflict between Rappe and deputy public defenders over the last four years. As a result, Public Defender Michael Judge says he is investigating problems between his lawyers and Rappe.

Judge says many of his lawyers believe that Rappe has a strong pro-prosecution bias and that their relationships with him are more stressful than with other judges. He said they feel the strained ties “go beyond the bounds of what normally arises in a relationship with a judge in that it often gets personal on his part.”

In the Gilliam case, the events began on the morning of July 5 shortly before Rappe convened court. Gilliam, 44, a deputy public defender for 14 years, was representing Adrian Valle, who was accused of torturing, beating and murdering a small child. In the midst of the trial, Gilliam and Deputy Dist. Atty. Stephanie Mire reached a tentative plea bargain calling for Valle to spend 30 years and eight months in prison. Without the deal, Valle was facing a possible sentence of life plus a second sentence of 25 years to life.

To go over the final details of the deal with Valle, Gilliam asked Rappe for a brief delay in the ongoing trial. Rappe refused, saying he didn’t want to waste jurors’ time. He told Gilliam to instead firm up the deal at the lunch recess.

Testimony began for the day, with no one suspecting Rappe’s decision had set the stage for the later confrontation.

During an 11:30 a.m. break, Gilliam received the emergency page from his wife, Andrea, and returned her call. When he hung up, Mire heard him say, “She’s in tears and something is wrong,” according to a memo she later submitted to the public defender’s office at its request.

The Tarzana Regional Medical Center was at least an hour away, he said, so he asked the court clerk to alert the judge to his emergency.

When Rappe came out of his chambers moments later, Gilliam told him he had to leave immediately. In an interview, Gilliam recalled telling the judge: “ ‘Your Honor, I’ve got a family emergency. I cannot go forward.’ It was a life or death situation for my wife and my child, and that was my mind-set when I was speaking to him.

“I told him I just wanted to put it over to the next morning.”

Mire did not oppose the request. “There was no way I would oppose it under the circumstances,” she said in a recent interview.

Victoria Caro, the courtroom interpreter, has the same recollection. “There was no question the consensus . . . was that he should have been allowed to go,” she said.

Rappe said in an interview that Gilliam didn’t tell him the delay would be for only one afternoon, a comment contradicted by others, including Alternate Public Defender Anthony Rayburn and Caro.

Rappe said the length of delay was critical. He said he was worried a prolonged absence might require him to declare a mistrial because four jurors had told him they could not serve beyond that day, the eighth day of the trial. He said he couldn’t let Gilliam leave without making an adequate record to protect the case against future claims by Valle of double jeopardy, the constitutional protection against trying a person twice for the same crime.

Rappe continued to insist that Gilliam talk to his client about the plea agreement before leaving the court.

At one point, the judge said that he would resume testimony and continue it all day if Gilliam did not comply with his order, Mire said in her memo.

Gilliam said he took that as a threat but continued to insist that he had to leave immediately.

He said that during the confrontation, he made it clear to the judge that he needed to be with his wife because she was suffering complications in her pregnancy, and that it was a high-risk pregnancy because she is diabetic and had lost another baby near full term a year earlier.

Rappe denies that Gilliam provided all of that information. If he had known those facts, he said, he probably would have let Gilliam go. He also said that Gilliam had never told him his wife was pregnant until that day and that during the courtroom incident, he learned only in vague terms that she had pregnancy complications.

Mire’s memo conflicts with Rappe’s account. The prosecutor wrote that she heard Gilliam tell Rappe that he and has wife had lost a child during birth the previous year and said he also explained the other complications his wife faced.

Mire also wrote that Gilliam told Rappe about his wife’s pregnancy at the beginning of the trial.

In her memo, Mire said she finally urged Gilliam to talk to his client in order to end the stalemate with the judge. Gilliam went to the nearby lockup to consult with his client, returning 10 to 15 minutes later with a confirmed plea agreement.

When Gilliam finally got to the hospital, his wife was waiting to be wheeled into the operating room, he says. The baby, Trevor James, was born healthy that afternoon.

Public Defender Judge has been gathering statements from witnesses to determine whether it will take any action.

Two other courtroom conflicts with deputy public defenders occurred in 1997.

In a robbery trial, Rappe held Deputy Public Defender Oksana Bihun in contempt of court and fined her $500, an action she appealed successfully.

The contempt citation stemmed from an order Rappe issued forbidding her to raise questions about whether the robbery victim, her client’s alleged ex-lover, had a sexual relationship with another man. Bihun wanted to raise the issue to explain why the defendant broke up with the victim and to show that the accusations were little more than retaliation by a spurned lover.

Events leading to the contempt citation started when the victim’s friend said during testimony that his relationship with the victim was more than casual. Although Bihun was forbidden by Rappe’s order to ask him to explain, a smirk crossed the witness’s face, according to court papers in the case. It was more than a “hi and bye” acquaintance, he said, smiling.

The prosecutor objected to the statement. Rappe overruled him. During closing arguments, the prosecutor tried to discredit the witness by alluding to his “smirk” as a backdoor way of saying he had had sex with the victim.

Although that comment appeared to have broached a forbidden subject, Rappe took no action. When Bihun rebutted the prosecutor to shore up the friend’s credibility, Rappe cited her for contempt.

Rappe later explained that his order forbidding testimony on the sexual relations had applied only to Bihun.

Bihun appealed the contempt order and the 2nd Court of Appeal agreed with her that her comment was not out of order. “We are hard-pressed to see how it made even a vague or veiled reference to such a sexual relationship,” the court said. “The prosecution called attention to the sexual relationship--Bihun responded to the People’s argument, and not to the sexual relationship.”

Bihun still seethes at the mention of the contempt citation.

“An attorney representing a client during a trial does not need that kind of harassment,” she said. “It’s very disruptive.”

The same year, a vitriolic exchange erupted between Rappe and Deputy Public Defender Vera Bradford in a post-conviction hearing in a murder case.

The incident was prompted by a lengthy court document filed by Bradford to address unfinished issues from the trial. One issue, Bradford said, was that the official transcript failed to reflect that she had said in court that Rappe was “yelling” at her and that he had spoken to her as if she were “some piece of meat.”

Rappe, producing video and audio excerpts of the trial to challenge her allegations, countered that she was trying to create a record that is “contemptuous” and “perjurious” and that she had engaged in a “pattern of deception” throughout the trial, according to court records.

Bradford angrily denounced the charges as outlandish and outrageous and demanded that Rappe recuse himself from the case. She said he had engaged in a pattern of “inflaming others, inflaming counsel, of being dishonest” and that he had “discredited the bench.”

He refused to recuse himself. The defendant was eventually sentenced to life in prison.