Judges Elect 1st Woman to Lead Superior Court

Judith McConnell has been elected presiding judge of the San Diego Superior Court, the first woman to be chosen for the post, court officials announced Thursday.

McConnell, 45, was elected Wednesday by the court’s 71 judges. Now assistant presiding judge, she ran unopposed for the job, and was elected “by acclaim,” she said Thursday.

McConnell took pride in her election, saying: “It’s important for every man and woman in the community to see that women can achieve positions like this.

“It’s particularly important to the women lawyers and law students. I think the women lawyers and law students should have a sense that when they enter the profession, they can achieve whatever their goals are.”

McConnell also said she didn’t expect sex bias from judges, lawyers or the public to hamper programs she might implement.

“If I thought I couldn’t do the job, I wouldn’t have run for it,” she said.

McConnell will take office Jan. 1, succeeding Judge Michael I. Greer. The presiding judge’s duties include assigning judges to cases, proposing rules to speed court business and acting as liaison between the court and other agencies. In the latter role, the presiding judge often acts as a spokesman for the county bench.

The court’s top priority, McConnell said, is to “get the criminal calendar under control.” Though she won’t officially take over until Jan. 1, McConnell said she is dispatching a group to Ventura County Monday to discuss an alternative method used to handle criminal cases there.

That method, called “direct calendaring,” calls for one judge to oversee a case from start to finish. San Diego County cases now follow the traditional system, in which a case may bounce from judge to judge as it proceeds toward a trial, called “master calendaring.”

Hoping to reduce a backlog of San Diego civil cases, McConnell also announced that she has assigned nine judges, including Greer, to begin a direct calendaring system for the about 1,000 civil cases filed before Jan. 1, 1987, and believed awaiting trial.

“I am an avid fan of early and active control of the cases (by judges) from the time they’re filed,” McConnell said.

Civil cases filed after Jan. 1, 1987, are part of a pilot program called “fast-track,” which pushes San Diego County judges to resolve them speedily. Greer has been closely identified with that program, which has been watched by the rest of the state, and McConnell said she shares Greer’s commitment to it.

“The beauty of it is that Mickey Greer and I work very well together, even though we don’t agree all the time,” McConnell said. “We have a lot of respect for each other.”

McConnell’s domain also will include the Juvenile Court, where she was once presiding judge.

“It has been a struggle for us just to keep our heads above water in Juvenile Court,” McConnell said. “It would be nice if we could think of some systemwide way to manage the explosion in child-abuse cases. That’s going to be a focus of mine.”

McConnell also said she plans to push hard for new court facilities. The two power outages Tuesday at the downtown courthouse, the second of which caused court to be canceled for half a day, “points up the critical need for a new County Courthouse downtown,” she said. “It’s time the public and politicians recognized that and did something about it.”

Though McConnell was elected for a single one-year term, the presiding judge traditionally serves for two one-year terms. She will have to stand for re-election next October.

McConnell graduated from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1966 and from Berkeley’s Boalt Hall law school in 1969. She was in private practice for a year and worked as a lawyer for the California Department of Transportation for seven years.

In 1977, she was appointed to Municipal Court. In 1980, she moved to Superior Court and was elected assistant presiding judge last October.