October 21, 2024 • 14 mins
Katie's Dad, retired Superior Court Judge of Alameda County in California, Larry Goodman, joins Jack for a one-on-one discussion about crime & punishment!
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
We talk a lot about crime and punishment on this
radio show, like a lot of people do in the country.
It's one of the top issues everywhere, all the time.
And Katie, Katie, Katie the news Lady. Her dad was
a judge, he's now a retired judge, and thought it
would be cool to talk to him at some length
(00:22):
about a whole bunch of different stuff. I'm gonna let
Katie introduce her own dad. Okay, Yes, judge in Oakland
for thirty three plus years.
Speaker 2 (00:31):
Thirty three thirty three plus yep.
Speaker 1 (00:33):
Known to some as Judge Larry Goodman, known to others
as LL Dog and Daddy O. So here he is here,
Come here, pops, Judge, thanks for coming back on the
Armstrong and Getty Show. Appreciated how you How you like
in retirement? By the way, not everybody adjusts well to retirement.
Speaker 3 (00:49):
I love it. I love it.
Speaker 2 (00:50):
No adjudgment problem.
Speaker 3 (00:52):
No, Because it got to be a point where remember
Sunday nights when you were in school and you hated
Sunday nights because you had to go to school. Yeah,
never felt that until right before I retired, and it
was like I knew it was time at that point.
Speaker 2 (01:03):
Interesting so you stuck around long enough. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (01:07):
So before I get into some like specific questions I have,
do you think you have an overall takeaway from all
those years of being judge a judge just about society
and order and crime in general in Oakland?
Speaker 3 (01:23):
Yeah, not so much overall. I mean, you see good people,
you see bad people. Oakland is particularly depressing at times,
just because it's it's overwhelming and the kind of cases
I did you just life was so cheap and there
was really no concert. There was consequences, but it didn't
seem to stop anybody from acting out. So but overall,
(01:46):
it's it's it's a job, just like everything else. The
only you feel like you're contributing a little bit by
being part of the judicial system or the justice system.
But outside of that, it's not like any shattering awareness
that I have.
Speaker 1 (01:59):
Now, Well, do you think most people who commit crimes,
particularly bad crimes, it's because of they're just born to
be bad or do you think there's an environment they
came from?
Speaker 3 (02:11):
I think most of them are. It's the environment. I
think it's life is cheap. Would you like to sell
burgers at McDonald's or sell drugs? And if you sell drugs,
you hang more gold, and you drive better cars. So
I think that's what I'll do. But there's a certain
risk involved in that, but I'm willing to take it.
And that's what they see, that's who their role models are,
(02:31):
and that's what they do.
Speaker 1 (02:32):
I don't know if you know the statistics on this,
but were the vast majority of people that would come
before you guilty found guilty?
Speaker 3 (02:39):
Oh? Yeah, I had three three non I tried according
to my clerk, one hundred and seventeen murder trials. I
had three not guilty verdicts.
Speaker 2 (02:48):
Really and in your opinion, do you think they were
not guilty?
Speaker 3 (02:52):
One of them in a death penalty case, he was
definitely guilty.
Speaker 2 (02:55):
The other two and it was found non guilty and
found out not guilty.
Speaker 3 (02:58):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (02:59):
Interesting.
Speaker 3 (03:00):
He killed both his sisters and tried to kill his parents.
But that's a long story for another day. But the
other two they probably did it, but the evidence wasn't
all that great.
Speaker 1 (03:10):
But so most of the time, if specifically a murder
gets to a courtroom, they did it.
Speaker 3 (03:17):
The chances are pretty good. I mean, they've gone through
the charging, the screening before the charging, they've gone through
a grand jury or a preliminary hearing. They've gone through
all the pre trial motions by that time, it's been
reviewed quite a few times, and so it may not
be a murder, it may not be a first degree murder,
it may be a second, it may be a manslaughter.
(03:38):
But they pretty sure that they killed somebody.
Speaker 1 (03:41):
And I suppose because of limited resources and time, you know, money,
all that, you wouldn't pursue it unless you're pretty sure
they were guilty.
Speaker 3 (03:50):
On the prosecution sign In Alameda County, where I worked,
we had used to have not anymore. They had one
of the best DA's offices in the country, and so
there was a lot of checks and balance, and nobody
really went to trial unless they were pretty sure they
had the right person, although I will say I did
one trial. After about three witnesses, the DA came in
and said, you know, I think we got this one wrong.
(04:10):
We're going to dismiss the case.
Speaker 1 (04:12):
Wow, So you weren't in the era or place of
these das who don't want to charge anybody with anything
to try to make some sort of point about society.
Speaker 3 (04:22):
No, that's one of the other reasons I'm glad I'm out,
because i'd be getting in trouble all the time.
Speaker 1 (04:27):
So how would you have handled that as a judge,
or would you have had any role in it whatsoever?
If your local, if you got a gascon or whoever
that just doesn't want to prosecute crime.
Speaker 3 (04:36):
Well, I mean, eventually what happens. I have a friend
of mine who's still sitting on the bench and he's
been challenged by the DA because he wouldn't go along
with all of her issues or all the things she
was trying to do. He kept denying motions to strike
priors or strike that, so they finally filed a blanket challenge.
So he went from criminal into probate.
Speaker 2 (04:58):
Oh so that's interesting. Back to the violent crime.
Speaker 1 (05:03):
So you you've had a lot of violent criminals come
before you do they tend to regret what they did
at the point that they're in a courtroom. And I
don't mean like regret it because they got caught, but
if they could go back, they wish they hadn't done it.
Speaker 3 (05:21):
Very few, very few. I mean, I'm sure some of
them deep inside might have felt that way, but it's
kind of a sign of weakness if they do that.
I most of them kind of maintained the aura of
I'm a criminal and I didn't do it, but you're
gonna and if I did do it, you got to
prove it. But I'm not going to say I did
it and I'm sorry. Once in a while it's sentencing,
(05:43):
they will address the family of the victim and say
I'm sorry, But not up until that point.
Speaker 1 (05:50):
You said, these people live in a world where life
is cheap. Expound on that a little bit. They just
for some reason, it because of their youth or environment.
They just don't get what.
Speaker 3 (06:05):
I don't think. They think that they're going to live
that long because they see a lot of their peers
get shot or get killed, and so it's kind of
like a live why you can go fast and go
hard because you're not going to be here that long.
And so you look at me funny while I'm standing
on the street corner and I come back and I
shoot you, because that's the kind of a unwritten rule
(06:27):
of the streets. You don't disrespect somebody without having consequences,
And people get shot over the dumbest things. Or I'll
shoot at you and I'll hit a twelve year old
girl across the street because I miss. But that's collateral damage,
and I really don't think about it. I just move on.
And that was just kind of the mindset that we
saw a lot of.
Speaker 1 (06:45):
Did you have people come into your courtroom with as
flimsy a reason for killing somebody as you just described.
Speaker 3 (06:51):
Oh sure, Oh yeah, lots of times.
Speaker 2 (06:54):
Okay, give me some examples.
Speaker 3 (06:56):
Well, we had the gun well, I used to call
it the gunfight at the ok Corral. It was the
gunfight ninety eight the needs in Oakland, and one gang
got disrespected by another game because somebody disrespected the guy's car.
He said that car looks like this and looks like that,
and it was his pride and joy. So one group
of kids is in the liquor store buying liquor, and
(07:18):
this other group rolls up and opens fire with semiautomatic
weapons and kills three people. The other gang he finally
gets their guns out and shoots back, and one of
them misses, and the bullet goes across the street and
hits a guy getting gas and bodges in his neck
and he has a stroke and he loses his ability
to talk. And all the people that we did the
(07:39):
trial for, they had no remorse whatsoever. Matter of fact,
I had to keep pulling this one kid out because
he kept disrespecting and saying rude things to the one
of the victims mothers who came to address the court.
Speaker 2 (07:53):
Oh my god, and how old were these people?
Speaker 3 (07:56):
Unfortunately, when he did it, he was seventeen, which is
entitled him to have another resentencing under the new laws
in California. I sentenced him to sixty five years to
life or something like that, but that he was seventeen
when he did the crime, so he was entitled to
be re sentenced. I don't know what he got again,
but do.
Speaker 2 (08:15):
You keep track of people after you sentenced him?
Speaker 3 (08:18):
The only I kept track of two people, and they
weren't even murder cases. They were multiple sexual assault cases.
And one one guy was a retired law enforcement officer
who continually raped his stepdaughter. And he came up for
parole and I was asked to write a letter, and
(08:38):
I'd never done it before, but he actually raped his
step son, who kind of gave him. He gave himself
up to protect his step daughter, and the son ended
up killing himself. So I wrote a letter saying he
should I sentenced him to ninety nine years, but he's
now in his sixty so he's eligible for elder parole
or whatever they call it. And I wrote a letter
(08:59):
saying I sentenced him for that long they didn't ever
getting out, and he didn't know his step son had
killed himself. So once he found that out, he withdrew
his request for a parole and he's still in there.
Speaker 1 (09:08):
So I've always believed that on a lot of the
sexual stuff, their brains don't work right. They were they
were they were, they're born in such a way or whatever,
their brains don't work right, as opposed to the other
thing you were talking about, the you know, you grew
up in an environment where you run with gangs in
the more environmental than your brain doesn't work well.
Speaker 3 (09:27):
The sexual the in home sexual predators like this guy,
Ron Roy Chass, I still remember his name. He's probably
not wired right. But some of them are just mean,
vicious people that it's you know, rape is not about sex,
it's about violence, about control, and so some of these
people are just violent sexual predators who just like to
(09:48):
inflict that kind of pain on people.
Speaker 1 (09:50):
How how do you And this is tough for cops
and prosecutors and people work in prisons, all kinds of
different people. How do you keep your sense of humanity
in that most of us are good and most of
us don't do that.
Speaker 2 (10:09):
When you're encountering these people all the time, it's got
to wear on you.
Speaker 3 (10:13):
Yeah. Well, I was lucky enough to have Patty and
Katie and come home and be able to, you know,
coach Katie and sports and hang out with her and
my wife, and you just kind of leave it at work.
And I don't think I tried real hard not to
bring any of that stuff home, even when it was
a high publicity stuff, when we didn't talk about it,
we didn't watch it on the news or read the newspapers.
(10:34):
You just try to when you leave the office, you
just try to leave it there because it will wear
on you. I mean, I had a couple of cases
that to this day I still don't like to talk
about them. But most of the time you're able to
leave it at work.
Speaker 2 (10:46):
Wow, that's interesting.
Speaker 1 (10:47):
We're talking to Katie's dad, who is a was a
judge for a very long time, is retired.
Speaker 2 (10:53):
Now what do you do? Mostly? You fish? You hunt? Yeah?
You what do you what do you do?
Speaker 3 (10:57):
I work out, I play, guitar, trying to get back
into golf, which will probably shorten my lifespan exactly. We
still have a boat that we keep in Craplifornia that
we go out and stay on for a while.
Speaker 1 (11:12):
To that story, we got to talk about you getting
robbed in our old hometown and what that was like,
because this is just a story about the lawlessness of
some areas of the country.
Speaker 2 (11:23):
You came back the other day, tell us what happened.
Speaker 3 (11:25):
Well, we keep our boat in Alameda because we one
thing we do miss is the ocean and stuff like that.
So we were having some people to go out on
the boat for the Blue Angels. So we were on
our way to the grocery store to get some things.
We go out to the parking lot and I look,
and I said, honey, our tires are gone. And there
was the Toyota Corolla sitting. They brought their own blocks,
(11:48):
so there was blocks under each of the doors, and
they left the lug nuts, but all four tires were gone.
Speaker 2 (11:53):
With the wheels. Yeah, tires.
Speaker 1 (11:56):
So so you're back in California, which you fled because
of the crime and the homelessness and the taxes and
all that sort of stuff. You come back briefly and
your round car gets all four wheels stolen off of it.
Speaker 3 (12:07):
Yeah, I'm like a junkie. I had to come back
from my crime fix. I guess that is.
Speaker 1 (12:10):
An amazing story and so emblematic of why you can't
hardly ever get a U haul in California because there
are so many people fleeing the state.
Speaker 3 (12:20):
And the funny part about is the lady that rented
us the car, she said, now, you'd be careful because
they'll steal everything. And when you go get gas, you
keep your eye open because they'll break the passenger door
window and steal your purse. I mean, she went through
this whole litany of things that were going to happen,
and sure enough, the day after that happened to us.
Speaker 2 (12:36):
Unbelievable.
Speaker 1 (12:38):
Back to you judging and crime and punishment and what
you've learned over all the decades of being in the system.
I've always been I'm a big believer in the US
justice system, and I've always just I've never been afraid
of being falsely accused of anything like that, because I
just feel like the justice system generally works, is that
your assessment after decades of being involved in it the
(13:00):
vast majority of the time, we get it right.
Speaker 3 (13:02):
I think so absolutely. I mean, like I said, we
were always a little bit better than a lot of
places in Alameda County. But yeah, I think for the
most part it works the way it's supposed to.
Speaker 1 (13:13):
And for places that it doesn't work as well, what
would cause that?
Speaker 3 (13:21):
Just an overload of cases. Sometimes things get shuffled through
that shouldn't get shuffled through. There are places where based
upon how you look and how you act, sometimes you
get charged. They're built in prejudices in some places. I
taught at the National Judges College in Reno one day
and the judges from Louisiana, a certain part of Louisiana
(13:43):
came up and we're kind of making fun of us
from California about how long it took us to pick
juris and death penalty cases and everything, and really so
it's just kind of a different mindset.
Speaker 2 (13:53):
Yeah, I should ask you about that.
Speaker 1 (13:55):
California has the death penalty but doesn't actually put anybody
to death. The leading cause of death on death or
in California is old age. We taxpayers spend gazillions of
dollars on this and nobody actually dies are you four
or against the death penalty?
Speaker 3 (14:08):
Oh? I was for it. I sentenced nine people to
death I think, and one of them die to liver failure.
The rest of them will probably outlive me.
Speaker 1 (14:15):
Well, yeah, that's the problem with it. We're not getting it.
Nobody's dying, so I don't like paying for it. I
don't mind capital punishment. I'm against it for the it does.
It's not practical if nobody's dying.
Speaker 2 (14:24):
Standpoint.
Speaker 3 (14:25):
Yeah, if we're not going to do it, we shouldn't
have it.
Speaker 2 (14:27):
Thanks for coming on.
Speaker 1 (14:28):
I just want to ask you some questions about your
experience as a judge, and whenever a big case hits,
we'll go to you for expertise.
Speaker 3 (14:34):
As always, I appreciate it. Thanks Jack, you bet, you
Armstrong and Getty
We talk a lot about crime and punishment on this
radio show, like a lot of people do in the country.
It's one of the top issues everywhere, all the time.
And Katie, Katie, Katie the news Lady. Her dad was
a judge, he's now a retired judge, and thought it
would be cool to talk to him at some length
(00:22):
about a whole bunch of different stuff. I'm gonna let
Katie introduce her own dad. Okay, Yes, judge in Oakland
for thirty three plus years.
Speaker 2 (00:31):
Thirty three thirty three plus yep.
Speaker 1 (00:33):
Known to some as Judge Larry Goodman, known to others
as LL Dog and Daddy O. So here he is here,
Come here, pops, Judge, thanks for coming back on the
Armstrong and Getty Show. Appreciated how you How you like
in retirement? By the way, not everybody adjusts well to retirement.
Speaker 3 (00:49):
I love it. I love it.
Speaker 2 (00:50):
No adjudgment problem.
Speaker 3 (00:52):
No, Because it got to be a point where remember
Sunday nights when you were in school and you hated
Sunday nights because you had to go to school. Yeah,
never felt that until right before I retired, and it
was like I knew it was time at that point.
Speaker 2 (01:03):
Interesting so you stuck around long enough. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (01:07):
So before I get into some like specific questions I have,
do you think you have an overall takeaway from all
those years of being judge a judge just about society
and order and crime in general in Oakland?
Speaker 3 (01:23):
Yeah, not so much overall. I mean, you see good people,
you see bad people. Oakland is particularly depressing at times,
just because it's it's overwhelming and the kind of cases
I did you just life was so cheap and there
was really no concert. There was consequences, but it didn't
seem to stop anybody from acting out. So but overall,
(01:46):
it's it's it's a job, just like everything else. The
only you feel like you're contributing a little bit by
being part of the judicial system or the justice system.
But outside of that, it's not like any shattering awareness
that I have.
Speaker 1 (01:59):
Now, Well, do you think most people who commit crimes,
particularly bad crimes, it's because of they're just born to
be bad or do you think there's an environment they
came from?
Speaker 3 (02:11):
I think most of them are. It's the environment. I
think it's life is cheap. Would you like to sell
burgers at McDonald's or sell drugs? And if you sell drugs,
you hang more gold, and you drive better cars. So
I think that's what I'll do. But there's a certain
risk involved in that, but I'm willing to take it.
And that's what they see, that's who their role models are,
(02:31):
and that's what they do.
Speaker 1 (02:32):
I don't know if you know the statistics on this,
but were the vast majority of people that would come
before you guilty found guilty?
Speaker 3 (02:39):
Oh? Yeah, I had three three non I tried according
to my clerk, one hundred and seventeen murder trials. I
had three not guilty verdicts.
Speaker 2 (02:48):
Really and in your opinion, do you think they were
not guilty?
Speaker 3 (02:52):
One of them in a death penalty case, he was
definitely guilty.
Speaker 2 (02:55):
The other two and it was found non guilty and
found out not guilty.
Speaker 3 (02:58):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (02:59):
Interesting.
Speaker 3 (03:00):
He killed both his sisters and tried to kill his parents.
But that's a long story for another day. But the
other two they probably did it, but the evidence wasn't
all that great.
Speaker 1 (03:10):
But so most of the time, if specifically a murder
gets to a courtroom, they did it.
Speaker 3 (03:17):
The chances are pretty good. I mean, they've gone through
the charging, the screening before the charging, they've gone through
a grand jury or a preliminary hearing. They've gone through
all the pre trial motions by that time, it's been
reviewed quite a few times, and so it may not
be a murder, it may not be a first degree murder,
it may be a second, it may be a manslaughter.
(03:38):
But they pretty sure that they killed somebody.
Speaker 1 (03:41):
And I suppose because of limited resources and time, you know, money,
all that, you wouldn't pursue it unless you're pretty sure
they were guilty.
Speaker 3 (03:50):
On the prosecution sign In Alameda County, where I worked,
we had used to have not anymore. They had one
of the best DA's offices in the country, and so
there was a lot of checks and balance, and nobody
really went to trial unless they were pretty sure they
had the right person, although I will say I did
one trial. After about three witnesses, the DA came in
and said, you know, I think we got this one wrong.
(04:10):
We're going to dismiss the case.
Speaker 1 (04:12):
Wow, So you weren't in the era or place of
these das who don't want to charge anybody with anything
to try to make some sort of point about society.
Speaker 3 (04:22):
No, that's one of the other reasons I'm glad I'm out,
because i'd be getting in trouble all the time.
Speaker 1 (04:27):
So how would you have handled that as a judge,
or would you have had any role in it whatsoever?
If your local, if you got a gascon or whoever
that just doesn't want to prosecute crime.
Speaker 3 (04:36):
Well, I mean, eventually what happens. I have a friend
of mine who's still sitting on the bench and he's
been challenged by the DA because he wouldn't go along
with all of her issues or all the things she
was trying to do. He kept denying motions to strike
priors or strike that, so they finally filed a blanket challenge.
So he went from criminal into probate.
Speaker 2 (04:58):
Oh so that's interesting. Back to the violent crime.
Speaker 1 (05:03):
So you you've had a lot of violent criminals come
before you do they tend to regret what they did
at the point that they're in a courtroom. And I
don't mean like regret it because they got caught, but
if they could go back, they wish they hadn't done it.
Speaker 3 (05:21):
Very few, very few. I mean, I'm sure some of
them deep inside might have felt that way, but it's
kind of a sign of weakness if they do that.
I most of them kind of maintained the aura of
I'm a criminal and I didn't do it, but you're
gonna and if I did do it, you got to
prove it. But I'm not going to say I did
it and I'm sorry. Once in a while it's sentencing,
(05:43):
they will address the family of the victim and say
I'm sorry, But not up until that point.
Speaker 1 (05:50):
You said, these people live in a world where life
is cheap. Expound on that a little bit. They just
for some reason, it because of their youth or environment.
They just don't get what.
Speaker 3 (06:05):
I don't think. They think that they're going to live
that long because they see a lot of their peers
get shot or get killed, and so it's kind of
like a live why you can go fast and go
hard because you're not going to be here that long.
And so you look at me funny while I'm standing
on the street corner and I come back and I
shoot you, because that's the kind of a unwritten rule
(06:27):
of the streets. You don't disrespect somebody without having consequences,
And people get shot over the dumbest things. Or I'll
shoot at you and I'll hit a twelve year old
girl across the street because I miss. But that's collateral damage,
and I really don't think about it. I just move on.
And that was just kind of the mindset that we
saw a lot of.
Speaker 1 (06:45):
Did you have people come into your courtroom with as
flimsy a reason for killing somebody as you just described.
Speaker 3 (06:51):
Oh sure, Oh yeah, lots of times.
Speaker 2 (06:54):
Okay, give me some examples.
Speaker 3 (06:56):
Well, we had the gun well, I used to call
it the gunfight at the ok Corral. It was the
gunfight ninety eight the needs in Oakland, and one gang
got disrespected by another game because somebody disrespected the guy's car.
He said that car looks like this and looks like that,
and it was his pride and joy. So one group
of kids is in the liquor store buying liquor, and
(07:18):
this other group rolls up and opens fire with semiautomatic
weapons and kills three people. The other gang he finally
gets their guns out and shoots back, and one of
them misses, and the bullet goes across the street and
hits a guy getting gas and bodges in his neck
and he has a stroke and he loses his ability
to talk. And all the people that we did the
(07:39):
trial for, they had no remorse whatsoever. Matter of fact,
I had to keep pulling this one kid out because
he kept disrespecting and saying rude things to the one
of the victims mothers who came to address the court.
Speaker 2 (07:53):
Oh my god, and how old were these people?
Speaker 3 (07:56):
Unfortunately, when he did it, he was seventeen, which is
entitled him to have another resentencing under the new laws
in California. I sentenced him to sixty five years to
life or something like that, but that he was seventeen
when he did the crime, so he was entitled to
be re sentenced. I don't know what he got again,
but do.
Speaker 2 (08:15):
You keep track of people after you sentenced him?
Speaker 3 (08:18):
The only I kept track of two people, and they
weren't even murder cases. They were multiple sexual assault cases.
And one one guy was a retired law enforcement officer
who continually raped his stepdaughter. And he came up for
parole and I was asked to write a letter, and
(08:38):
I'd never done it before, but he actually raped his
step son, who kind of gave him. He gave himself
up to protect his step daughter, and the son ended
up killing himself. So I wrote a letter saying he
should I sentenced him to ninety nine years, but he's
now in his sixty so he's eligible for elder parole
or whatever they call it. And I wrote a letter
(08:59):
saying I sentenced him for that long they didn't ever
getting out, and he didn't know his step son had
killed himself. So once he found that out, he withdrew
his request for a parole and he's still in there.
Speaker 1 (09:08):
So I've always believed that on a lot of the
sexual stuff, their brains don't work right. They were they
were they were, they're born in such a way or whatever,
their brains don't work right, as opposed to the other
thing you were talking about, the you know, you grew
up in an environment where you run with gangs in
the more environmental than your brain doesn't work well.
Speaker 3 (09:27):
The sexual the in home sexual predators like this guy,
Ron Roy Chass, I still remember his name. He's probably
not wired right. But some of them are just mean,
vicious people that it's you know, rape is not about sex,
it's about violence, about control, and so some of these
people are just violent sexual predators who just like to
(09:48):
inflict that kind of pain on people.
Speaker 1 (09:50):
How how do you And this is tough for cops
and prosecutors and people work in prisons, all kinds of
different people. How do you keep your sense of humanity
in that most of us are good and most of
us don't do that.
Speaker 2 (10:09):
When you're encountering these people all the time, it's got
to wear on you.
Speaker 3 (10:13):
Yeah. Well, I was lucky enough to have Patty and
Katie and come home and be able to, you know,
coach Katie and sports and hang out with her and
my wife, and you just kind of leave it at work.
And I don't think I tried real hard not to
bring any of that stuff home, even when it was
a high publicity stuff, when we didn't talk about it,
we didn't watch it on the news or read the newspapers.
(10:34):
You just try to when you leave the office, you
just try to leave it there because it will wear
on you. I mean, I had a couple of cases
that to this day I still don't like to talk
about them. But most of the time you're able to
leave it at work.
Speaker 2 (10:46):
Wow, that's interesting.
Speaker 1 (10:47):
We're talking to Katie's dad, who is a was a
judge for a very long time, is retired.
Speaker 2 (10:53):
Now what do you do? Mostly? You fish? You hunt? Yeah?
You what do you what do you do?
Speaker 3 (10:57):
I work out, I play, guitar, trying to get back
into golf, which will probably shorten my lifespan exactly. We
still have a boat that we keep in Craplifornia that
we go out and stay on for a while.
Speaker 1 (11:12):
To that story, we got to talk about you getting
robbed in our old hometown and what that was like,
because this is just a story about the lawlessness of
some areas of the country.
Speaker 2 (11:23):
You came back the other day, tell us what happened.
Speaker 3 (11:25):
Well, we keep our boat in Alameda because we one
thing we do miss is the ocean and stuff like that.
So we were having some people to go out on
the boat for the Blue Angels. So we were on
our way to the grocery store to get some things.
We go out to the parking lot and I look,
and I said, honey, our tires are gone. And there
was the Toyota Corolla sitting. They brought their own blocks,
(11:48):
so there was blocks under each of the doors, and
they left the lug nuts, but all four tires were gone.
Speaker 2 (11:53):
With the wheels. Yeah, tires.
Speaker 1 (11:56):
So so you're back in California, which you fled because
of the crime and the homelessness and the taxes and
all that sort of stuff. You come back briefly and
your round car gets all four wheels stolen off of it.
Speaker 3 (12:07):
Yeah, I'm like a junkie. I had to come back
from my crime fix. I guess that is.
Speaker 1 (12:10):
An amazing story and so emblematic of why you can't
hardly ever get a U haul in California because there
are so many people fleeing the state.
Speaker 3 (12:20):
And the funny part about is the lady that rented
us the car, she said, now, you'd be careful because
they'll steal everything. And when you go get gas, you
keep your eye open because they'll break the passenger door
window and steal your purse. I mean, she went through
this whole litany of things that were going to happen,
and sure enough, the day after that happened to us.
Speaker 2 (12:36):
Unbelievable.
Speaker 1 (12:38):
Back to you judging and crime and punishment and what
you've learned over all the decades of being in the system.
I've always been I'm a big believer in the US
justice system, and I've always just I've never been afraid
of being falsely accused of anything like that, because I
just feel like the justice system generally works, is that
your assessment after decades of being involved in it the
(13:00):
vast majority of the time, we get it right.
Speaker 3 (13:02):
I think so absolutely. I mean, like I said, we
were always a little bit better than a lot of
places in Alameda County. But yeah, I think for the
most part it works the way it's supposed to.
Speaker 1 (13:13):
And for places that it doesn't work as well, what
would cause that?
Speaker 3 (13:21):
Just an overload of cases. Sometimes things get shuffled through
that shouldn't get shuffled through. There are places where based
upon how you look and how you act, sometimes you
get charged. They're built in prejudices in some places. I
taught at the National Judges College in Reno one day
and the judges from Louisiana, a certain part of Louisiana
(13:43):
came up and we're kind of making fun of us
from California about how long it took us to pick
juris and death penalty cases and everything, and really so
it's just kind of a different mindset.
Speaker 2 (13:53):
Yeah, I should ask you about that.
Speaker 1 (13:55):
California has the death penalty but doesn't actually put anybody
to death. The leading cause of death on death or
in California is old age. We taxpayers spend gazillions of
dollars on this and nobody actually dies are you four
or against the death penalty?
Speaker 3 (14:08):
Oh? I was for it. I sentenced nine people to
death I think, and one of them die to liver failure.
The rest of them will probably outlive me.
Speaker 1 (14:15):
Well, yeah, that's the problem with it. We're not getting it.
Nobody's dying, so I don't like paying for it. I
don't mind capital punishment. I'm against it for the it does.
It's not practical if nobody's dying.
Speaker 2 (14:24):
Standpoint.
Speaker 3 (14:25):
Yeah, if we're not going to do it, we shouldn't
have it.
Speaker 2 (14:27):
Thanks for coming on.
Speaker 1 (14:28):
I just want to ask you some questions about your
experience as a judge, and whenever a big case hits,
we'll go to you for expertise.
Speaker 3 (14:34):
As always, I appreciate it. Thanks Jack, you bet, you
Armstrong and Getty
Hosts And Creators
Jack Armstrong
Joe Getty
Popular Podcasts
24/7 News: The Latest
Today’s Latest News In 4 Minutes. Updated Hourly.
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations.
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.