Debra Baer
November 19, 2007
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An effort to recall the juvenile court judge who presided over this year's Long Beach Halloween hate crime trial has failed. KPCC's Debra Baer says the organizer gave up even before the deadline to submit signatures.
Debra Baer: Unofficially, the recall began outside the Long Beach courthouse in February at the end of the long trial. The victims' families were outraged. Judge Gibson Lee sentenced nine convicted black teenagers to probation instead of lockup at youth camp for their role in the Halloween beating of three white women.
[Sound of woman crying]
Barbara Schneider: We were just told Long Beach spent millions on this case. If they would have been tried in adult court, they would have gotten 13 years for what they did.
Baer: That's Barbara Schneider, the mother of one of the victims, who was crying at her side after the sentencing. At the time, Schneider called the juvenile justice system a joke.
Schneider: So Long Beach, lock your doors and don't go out on your front lawns, because it's not safe.
Baer: Recall organizers argued that Judge Lee should lose his job because they claimed he'd engaged in a pattern of lenient sentencing. "Not true," the judge wrote in response to the recall petition. He said that evidence, courtroom arguments, and the law guided his decisions in this trial and others during his 21 years on the bench.
Michael Jackson and his group Government for the People ran the recall effort. It got started late; the county registrar didn't certify the petition until summer. By then, the campaign lost momentum from the trial and hit a wall of resistance.
Michael Jackson: The powers that be didn't want to have anything to do with it.
Baer: Jackson says people seemed to want to move on after the polarizing trial.
Jackson: All the politicians in Long Beach were trying to make it go away. And most of the businesses in Long Beach were trying to make it go away, because they didn't want to deal with the issue.
Baer: The deadline is next week. Jackson needs a quarter of a million signatures to qualify the recall for the ballot.
Jackson: We probably got over a thousand, but only a few hundred, say four to five hundred, were valid.
Baer: Jackson blames technical mishaps with his Internet-based campaign. When people downloaded petitions at recalljudgelee.com, they printed the legal size documents on letter size paper, and cut off part of the form.
Jackson: Or if they did it properly and signed it, they didn't sign as a circulator, and without the circulator, the registrar is not going to accept those.
Baer: As early as September, Jackson says, it was looking like a lost cause. Long Beach Bar Association president Marc Allmeroth says he's glad about that.
Marc Allmeroth: Well, the whole affair has been a tragedy for the victims, and it's been such a divisive issue for the city of Long Beach.
Baer: As unpopular as the judge's ruling was to some people, Allmeroth says, he doesn't think it warranted a recall. Besides, there are other options.
Allmeroth: That's what the courts of appeal are for and that's what the council for judicial performance is for. What we didn't want to see is for this to degenerate into a judge bashing. I don't think there's anything that anyone knows about this judge that would warrant this kind of response.
Baer: Judge Lee had no comment on word that the effort to unseat him has failed. The official deadline for signatures is a week from today.
