Up to now week, two retired Santa Barbara Superior Court docket judges — James Herman and Bruce Dodds — died. Mixed, Herman and Dodds accounted for 38 years on the bench.
First elected in 1977, Dodds served till 1998 and was recognized for a no-nonsense demeanor that some charged bordered on the gratuitously impolite. However that fashion — coupled with the crystal ball he usually wielded when coping with recalcitrant attorneys — helped Dodds settle instances that many on the time thought couldn’t be settled. Off the bench, Dodds performed a imply sport of tennis and had a full of life humorousness.
In 1995, the Fee on Judicial Efficiency sought to have Dodds censured for impeding an investigation into fellow choose James Slater, who in 1993 deflated the tire of a handicapped van that had been parked in his courthouse parking area. Dodds reportedly walked by as Slater was letting the air out of the offending van’s tire with out saying something. Later Dodds declined efforts by an investigator with the Sheriff’s Workplace to interview him and instructed his workers to do likewise. In the end, Dodds would speak instantly with Slater himself, at which era Slater acknowledged his actions. Dodds appealed his censure to the California Supreme Court docket, which dominated in Dodds’s favor on the grounds that his conduct was merely prejudicial reasonably than willful.
Choose Herman was first appointed to the bench in 2005, after beginning his authorized profession with a stint within the Public Defender’s Workplace after which a protracted profession as a civil litigator. Herman presided over lengthy, technically advanced civil instances, however some prison ones as properly. Most notably, Herman fined Plains All American Pipeline Firm $3.3 million for having brought on the pipeline rupture that led to the Refugio Oil Spill Alongside the coast in 2015. In that listening to, a jury discovered the pipeline firm responsible of prison negligence, and the prosecuting legal professional had sought a nice of $1.2 billion. Herman expressed doubt that the scale of the nice would have a lot deterrent affect on the pipeline firm, however famous it was the utmost quantity he may levy. The indictment, he defined, alleged solely someday of misconduct, not day-after-day that the corporate may have and may have recognized the results of its misconduct.
