Judge Gray to Retire, End O.C. Jail Oversight : Corrections: After 13 years of protecting inmates’ constitutional rights, jurist will pass the chore to another judge.

SANTA ANA —  U.S. District Judge William P. Gray, who has sternly protected the constitutional rights of Orange County inmates since 1978, will retire next month, ending a long and eventful chapter in the management of the county jail system.

Gray, 79, underwent surgery last December for a benign brain tumor. However, the recovery has weakened him and forced him to struggle to articulate his thoughts.

As a result, he said in an interview Wednesday, he has now decided to “hang up my spikes.”

Gray’s retirement will leave a huge vacuum in Orange County’s prolonged jail-overcrowding debate, during which the judge has cited the Board of Supervisors and Sheriff Brad Gates for contempt. No single person has had so great an impact on the state of the county’s jails, and his rulings over the years have stirred county officials to action.

Gray, who toured Orange County’s jails this week and heard arguments in a new and crucial round of motions in the jail-overcrowding case Wednesday, has been quietly informing his colleagues on the bench of his plans. Late Wednesday, he signed the memorandum making his retirement official, he said.

“It long has been my determination that I should participate as a member of this great court only as long as I can do so according to my maximum capabilities,” Gray wrote to his colleagues. “With this thought thoroughly in mind, I have concluded that the time has come for me to relinquish my judicial responsibilities.”

Gray’s retirement will end a 25-year federal judicial career that began when President Lyndon B. Johnson appointed him to the bench in 1966. In that time, Gray has heard a wide range of civil and criminal cases and has monitored both the Orange County and Los Angeles County jail systems.

“My guess is that Judge Gray has heard as much jail litigation over as long a period of time as any jurist in the country,” Frederick R. Bennett, who often defended Los Angeles County in its jail cases, said in 1986. “I have to say he found the appropriate solutions and applied the appropriate remedies.”

Gray’s absence will transfer the voluminous history of Orange County jail overcrowding to another judge for the first time since Gray was assigned the case in 1975.

But Gray promised that he would see to a smooth transition. “I’ll resolve the matters I have before me now,” he said. “Judge (Gary L.) Taylor will carry on from there.”

In his quarter-century on the bench, Gray has won respect and affection from colleagues and lawyers. He is known as a man who imposes light sentences, which he acknowledges, but he has been tough on the counties whose jail systems he monitors.

Through it all, he has expressed a love for his work.

“I think a judge enjoys a tremendous sense of mission,” he said. “We have a lot of problems in our society. The laborers against management, the environmentalists against developers.

“These problems are going to be resolved one way or another, either by people sitting around a table, with or without their attorneys, or by self-help,” he added. “No society can tolerate people taking violence to resolve their disputes.”

Though he expressed regrets at leaving, Gray said the time had come. As he spoke during an interview, he sometimes struggled to express himself and winced in frustration.

“It just bugs me,” he said, clenching a fist. “I’m having a helluva hard time articulating what I want to say to you. And my golf game’s gone to pot.”

Gray’s involvement with the Orange County jail system began on Sept. 11, 1975, when lawyers for inmates in the Central Men’s Jail filed suit against the county, claiming that overcrowding was so severe that it violated their protection against cruel and unusual punishment.

On May 4, 1978, Gray found in favor of the inmates. In that ruling and in subsequent ones, he stepped in time and again to force a sometimes recalcitrant county to comply with his orders.

In 1985, he found the Board of Supervisors and Sheriff Brad Gates in contempt of court for their operation of the jails. He fined the county $50,000 plus an additional $10 per day for every inmate who was kept in the jail booking area for more than 24 hours without a bed.

He also capped the population at the Central Men’s Jail, a move that forced the county to scramble for ways to accommodate the incoming tide of new prisoners.

In 1986, Gray intervened again, fining Gates another $3,200 for his operations of the Central Men’s Jail.

On occasion, Gray also has had tough words for the county and its sheriff. For instance, in a case brought by inmates objecting to the county’s so-called “rubber rooms” used for isolating troublesome prisoners in the jails, Gray said: “There’s something basically inhumane and almost medieval about putting a person naked in one of your rubber rooms.”

He ordered the county to modify its use of those rooms.

Gray and Gates confronted each other across the bench on other occasions as well. Gray presided over a long trial that ended last November with Gates agreeing to a $616,000 settlement with plaintiffs who challenged his gun permit policy.

And yet, despite his rulings against Orange County’s top political leaders, Gray has earned grudging respect at the County Hall of Administration.

“He’s been pretty straight with us, pretty reasonable,” Dan Wooldridge, an aide to Supervisor Don R. Roth who specializes in jail issues, said recently.

While Gray is best known in Orange County for his jail rulings, his career has spanned an array of cases, first as a private attorney and later as a federal judge.

A native of Los Angeles, he was graduated from UCLA in 1934 and from Harvard Law School in 1939. He returned to Southern California after serving in the Army during World War II and built a thriving practice in Los Angeles.

In 1958, he was tapped to act as a special assistant to the U.S. attorney general to pursue the government’s lawsuit against oil companies whose operations had caused the ground to sink beneath the Long Beach Naval Shipyard.

Gray got a settlement out of the companies, which agreed to help rebuild the shipyard and pay $18 million in damages.

In retirement, the judge will turn his attention to a new type of public service. He intends to volunteer his services at John Muir High School in Pasadena, where both of his children went to school.

“It is my hope to be of some help on a ‘one-on-one’ basis to encourage remaining in school, stay away from drugs, maintain rapport with probation officers or parole officers, help obtain needed summertime jobs, and otherwise lend a helping hand wherever I can,” Gray wrote in his retirement memo. “I acknowledge a certain amount of excitement as I look toward my new career.”

Gray and his wife, Elizabeth, have two children, Robin Frazier and James Gray. They also have five grandchildren.

Though his legacy to Orange County law will probably be most directly felt in his jail rulings, it will manifest itself in another way as well. His son, James P. Gray, is an Orange County Superior Court judge.

Wednesday, during a break in the latest round of the Orange County jail case, he recalled one of his proudest moments: swearing in his son in 1984.

A few minutes into the recollection, the phone rang, and Gray’s clerk announced that it was his son on the line. “Hello, your honor,” the senior Gray answered, beaming.

GRAY AND THE COUNTY JAILS

Sept. 11, 1975--The American Civil Liberties Union files a class-action lawsuit because of jail conditions in Orange County.

May 4, 1978--U.S. District Judge William P. Gray orders Orange County to improve conditions in its jails and sets a 1,500-inmate limit.

March 18, 1985--Gray finds the Orange County Board of Supervisors and Sheriff Brad Gates in criminal contempt for violating his 1978 order; he fines the county $50,000 but stays the $10-per-inmate fine for 60 days. March 25--Gray appoints a former Terminal Island warden, Lawrence G. Grossman, to monitor the overcrowding in Orange County jails. He also approves Sheriff Gates’ plan to put folding cots in the jail.

June 6--Gray approves the Board of Supervisors’ plan to temporarily house inmates in tents while the James A. Musick Honor Farm near El Toro is expanded.

June 11--Gray visits Orange County jails to assess the overcrowding situation for himself. He commends county officials for reducing the jail population from 2,000 inmates to about 1,700 but adds that the jail is still too crowded. “Inmates have the right to be treated like human beings and the right not to be cramped together like sheep in a pen,” he says.

June 24--Gray cuts in half the $51,660 in daily fines accumulated against the county and approves the temporary use of triple bunks.

March 20, 1986--Gray withdraws his contempt motion against Gates for three violations of the 1,500-inmate limit in February; the judge threatens “severe penalties” if it happens again. Gray also sets a new ceiling of 1,400 inmates to coincide with the 180-bed expansion of the Theo Lacy Branch Jail in Orange. That number is later reduced to 1,296.

May 11, 1987--Gray rules that the ACLU may have access to all medical records and coroner’s reports about the deaths of nine male inmates.

Dec. 15--Gray praises ongoing efforts by the county to reduce jail overcrowding and subsequently dismisses Grossman. .

June 30, 1988--Gray refuses to allow the ACLU to expand its claims in the jail overcrowding case.

June 13, 1989--In a new case filed by the ACLU, Gray hears testimony from an inmate who was locked in a “rubber room” and who had to resort to drinking water from a hole in the floor that served as a toilet. The following month Gray limits the county’s latitude in deciding what “amenities” may prove dangerous to inmates and orders that all prisoners should have mattresses, clothing and the use of toilet facilities except in extraordinary circumstances.

Dec. 7, 1990--Gray has a small benign tumor removed from his brain.

April 3, 1991--After a two-day tour of the county’s jail system, Gray hears arguments on a new motion requesting a cap on the housing population at each of the five jails but issues no ruling. He announces his retirement, effective next month.