Federal Court in Fresno, Calif., Hands Down Stiff Criminal Sentences
FRESNO, Calif. _ Fresno, Calif.’s federal court has delighted liberals lately with decisions slapping down the auto industry, siding with the homeless and twice favoring fish over farmers.
The high-profile decisions and their far-reaching effects drew the ire of politicians, the wrath of the agriculture industry and general scorn from local conservatives.
One letter to the editor published June 12 in The Bee criticized the homeless settlement and urged U.S. District Judge Oliver W. Wanger to “go by the law, and use some common sense.” Republican California Assembly Member Mike Villines of Clovis called Wanger’s delta smelt ruling an “irresponsible decision.”
But legal experts and records of court decisions suggest that Fresno’s U.S. District Court is anything but liberal.
When it comes to criminal sentencing, for example, the court is the most conservative of California’s four federal judicial districts.
A review of a judicial sentencing database compiled by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, an independent research organization at Syracuse University, shows that over the past four years, the Eastern District of California _ with courthouses in Fresno and Sacramento _ handed out the stiffest prison sentences. When compared to the nation’s 93 other federal judicial districts, the Eastern District of California falls roughly in the middle.
Many Bay Area environmental attorneys think the court leans to the right on civil matters as well _ and is a place to be avoided if possible.
“The Fresno court is very conservative,” said Danielle Fugere, a Bay Area-based attorney with Friends of the Earth, which joined California in defending a lawsuit brought by the automotive industry challenging proposed state emissions standards that would have been the toughest in the nation.
Some in the environmental community felt the auto industry filed the suit in Fresno because it had found a conservative ally in U.S. District Judge Robert Coyle, who in 2002 had ruled in its favor in a case involving zero-emission vehicle mandates.
It’s a feeling they still hold today _ even though Coyle retired and the case moved to U.S. District Judge Anthony W. Ishii, a President Clinton appointee who tossed the industry’s lawsuit late last year.
Wanger, Lawrence J. O’Neill and the recently retired Coyle all formerly practiced law at McCormick, Barstow, Sheppard, Wayte & Carruth, a Fresno firm with well-known Republican party ties.
And Ishii _ who went into law school a Republican and came out a Democrat _ referred to himself as a “Valleycrat” in a profile in a Los Angeles-based legal community publication. The term refers to a person, Republican or Democrat, who shares the moderately conservative views of California’s central San Joaquin Valley.
Some legal experts say it is difficult to measure the political leanings of individual federal district court judges _ or the courthouses where they preside _ because much of their work comes in technical, arcane rulings as a case winds its way through the legal system.
That doesn’t stop lawyers from having plenty of opinions.
The Almanac of the Federal Judiciary, a publication that collects anonymous quotes about judges from criminal defense attorneys and lawyers on both sides of civil lawsuits, said that Ishii was “impartial,”"fair-minded” and “rules straight down the line.”
Similar comments were offered for O’Neill, though they came during his time as a magistrate judge. He was promoted to district judge in February 2007.
Wanger was found to be “evenhanded” but also “stringent at sentencing.”
Criminal defense attorneys found Coyle to be “neutral-to-slightly prosecution oriented” and lawyers said he sentenced “at the middle-to-upper end” of the guidelines.
Fresno attorney Anthony Capozzi said Coyle and fellow U.S. District Judge M.D. Crocker, who retired in 2002 after 43 years on the bench, likely helped foster Fresno’s reputation as a conservative bench.
“Is our court conservative?” Capozzi asked rhetorically. “Yes and no. It depends on the issues.”
As evidence that Wanger, in particular, leans to the right politically and favors farmers over fish, some attorneys point to a case involving Francis Orff and other unhappy Westlands farmers who sought upward of $32 million from the federal government for undelivered irrigation water.
In a February 2005 oral argument before the U.S. Supreme Court, Justice Antonin Scalia referred to “this friendly district judge” in a question to Orff’s attorney. The judge Scalia spoke of, the attorneys said, was Wanger.
Though attorneys for environmental groups declined to comment, Wanger’s reputation was one reason they filed two cases on behalf of endangered fish _ one involving the delta smelt, the other involving salmon and steelhead species _ in California’s Northern District, which is based in San Francisco.
Both times, the state and federal governments argued that the cases should be moved to Wanger’s court in Fresno.
The San Francisco court granted both requests, in part because Wanger has heard more than three dozen water cases and is the acknowledged judicial expert in California, and also because he was already hearing similar cases.
Even after the delta smelt case was moved to Wanger’s docket, environmental attorneys still tried to move the case to U.S. District Judge Lawrence Karlton in Sacramento.
Legal experts said the efforts of both sides show that, reasonable or not, environmentalists believed their case had a better chance of victory in San Francisco, and the state and federal operators of the massive Central Valley Project liked their odds better in Fresno.
That sort of angling, many times based on a court or a judge’s reputation, is constantly at work in the legal world, said John Sims, a professor at the University of the Pacific’s McGeorge School of Law in Sacramento.
” ‘Forum shopping’ sounds bad, but it is what good lawyers do all the time to give their clients effective representation,” he said.
Ironically, Wanger ruled in the environmentalists’ favor in both cases.
And that prompted a grudging nod of respect from Friends of the Earth attorney Fugere.
“Those types of decisions give one hope that judges are doing their jobs,” she said.
Indeed, many who have had dealings with Fresno’s federal court say its judges may be conservative, but are willing to side with liberal organizations when the law is behind them.
Capozzi said the fish rulings show that Wanger followed the law rather than political ideology.
In one ruling, Wanger wrote that Congress _ and not the courts _ gave endangered species “the highest of priorities” in the Endangered Species Act. “It is up to the political branches of government, not the court,” to solve any problems created for farmers and other water users by the act, he wrote.
Besides the fish cases, Wanger approved a settlement in a case brought against Fresno by homeless residents who said the city immediately destroyed belongings during raids without giving them a chance to reclaim anything.
He drew the ire of Fresno Mayor Alan Autry on the homeless decision and from Gov. Schwarzenegger on the smelt ruling. All three are Republicans.
Though federal judges like Wanger have faced criticism for their rulings, they have a safety net in their almost guaranteed lifetime appointment. By contrast, state Superior Court judges must stand for re-election, even after being appointed to the bench, and are occasionally defeated.
“Life tenure for federal judges is really important,” said Sims, the McGeorge law professor.
Even federal judges have to be politically active to be appointed, he said, “but once you are in, you have an ability to take the long view and do what you think is the right thing. Your accountability is to your own sense of standards, the Constitution and the appellate court.”
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(c) 2008, The Fresno Bee (Fresno, Calif.).
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