Outspoken Lawyer’s Fine of $250,000 Overturned

A federal appeals court Wednesday rebuked U.S. District Judge Manuel Real, the chief federal judge in Los Angeles, for levying a $250,000 fine on an outspoken attorney for alleged courtroom misconduct.

In a unanimous decision, the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals overturned the fine slapped two years ago on Stephen Yagman, a civil rights lawyer, declaring that the sanction constituted “an abuse of discretion” on Real’s part.

Moreover, the jurists said, such large fines could have a “chilling” effect on attorneys attempting to aggressively represent their clients’ causes in the courtroom.

The opinion was written by Judge Blaine Anderson of Idaho and concurred in by Charles E. Wiggins of San Francisco, considered two of the 9th Circuit’s most conservative jurists, and by Harry Pregerson of Los Angeles, a liberal.

Rules and sanctions governing courtroom conduct, the jurists said, were not designed “to chill an attorney’s enthusiasm or creativity pursuing factual or legal theories . . . (The fine) poses a direct threat to the balance between sanctioning improper behavior and chilling vigorous advocacy.”

At issue had been Yagman’s courtroom conduct in a $20-million defamation suit that he had brought against two pathologists involved in an autopsy on Ron Settles, a California State University, Long Beach, football player.

After just a few days of trial proceedings in April, 1984, Real threw out the case before Yagman could present his arguments on behalf of a Signal Hill detective and a former police cadet, both of whom, Yagman claimed, had been defamed by the pathologists.

Then Real stunned Yagman, a 42-year-old Brooklyn-born attorney, with the $250,000 fine, considered at the time unusually harsh by many in the legal profession.

Outraged by the fine, Yagman lashed out at Real outside the courtroom, charging that the chief jurist “suffers from mental disorders.”

Such harsh public criticism of a federal judge by a practicing attorney is almost unheard of in the legal profession.

Reached by telephone on Wednesday, Yagman, who describes himself as “an unreconstructed 1960s liberal,” still hadn’t changed his style or his attitude toward Real.

“I think he’s a tyrant who ought to be impeached,” Yagman said.

A spokesman for Real said the judge was out of town and could not be reached for comment.

In its opinion, the 9th Circuit judges held that Real was correct in throwing out the Settles case, which Yagman said he would appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court. Yagman’s clients, they said, “were not denied a fair trial and an impartial judge.”

What’s more, the judges said, by overturning the fine, “we do not condone any of Yagman’s misbehavior . . . we emphathize with (Real’s) desire to punish Yagman’s actions, which they characterized as “poor lawyering.”

Still, they said, the fine cannot stand.

“To allow that punishment, however, to take the form of such a generic, all-encompassing, massive, post-trial retribution, with no indication whatsoever of reasonableness, would send shivers through the bar.”

Instead, they said, if sanctions were to have been imposed against Yagman, they should have been more precisely broken down and levied at each stage of the two-year Settles litigation at points where Real felt Yagman had violated legal conduct.

Former U.S. Atty. Gen. Ramsey Clark, who represented Yagman before the 9th Circuit, said the appellate decision was on the mark.

“The practice of civil rights law is a fairly individualized sort of activity,” Clark said in a telephone interview from his New York office.