Judge Who Granted Stay Described as ‘Savvy’ Jurist : Courts: Marilyn Hall Patel has long been a champion of liberal causes. But lawyers say she is fair and not motivated by politics surrounding Harris controversy.

SAN FRANCISCO —  If Central Casting went searching for a federal judge to call off an execution, that judge would be Marilyn Hall Patel.

The first woman appointed to the San Francisco federal bench, Patel used to be on the board of the American Civil Liberties Union. She was once counsel to the National Organization for Women.

Late Saturday, Patel awarded condemned murderer Robert Alton Harris an extraordinary reprieve, saying there were “serious questions” whether death in San Quentin’s gas chamber is cruel and unusual punishment.

Patel got the Harris case, filed by the ACLU, through a random computer draw.

Lawyers who know Patel said Sunday that her ruling was far from predictable.

“It’s a very big mistake to assume that because she has made some liberal decisions, and has some familiar liberal names on her resume, that anything having to do with civil rights is a slam dunk in her court,” said Jerrold M. Ladar, a former San Francisco federal prosecutor now in private practice.

“She’s just a very bright, extremely savvy judge,” Ladar said. “She’s not afraid to take on difficult issues and rule in a way that may not be publicly popular.”

In polls and profiles published over the years, Patel consistently has won the respect of lawyers who appeared before her and has been characterized as an honest, gutsy judge with unquestioned integrity. Several times in print, she has been called the best federal judge in San Francisco.

President Jimmy Carter appointed her to the federal bench in 1980, elevating her from Alameda County Municipal Court, where she had been a judge for four years after being appointed by Gov. Edmund G. (Jerry) Brown Jr.

Before taking the bench, Patel practiced law in San Francisco, and was known as a liberal activist and leading lawyer in sex discrimination cases.

Over the past 12 years, Patel has issued some liberal decisions.

In 1983, she became the first federal judge in the nation to denounce the World War II internment of Japanese-Americans, erasing the 40-year-old conviction of Fred Korematsu, who had been prosecuted for evading internment.

Last year, Patel dismissed a case against a reputed drug dealer after finding unconstitutional a policy that instructed federal prosecutors to talk to criminal suspects without their lawyers present. She called the policy a “perilous threat” to “the integrity of the criminal justice system.”

But Patel, who could not be reached Sunday for comment, has also demonstrated that she is far from a bleeding heart liberal.

In 1989, she sentenced Oakland drug lord Felix Mitchell to a long prison term, then disqualified herself when a federal appeals court ordered the charges against Mitchell dismissed after he was killed in prison. To dismiss the charges, Patel said, would have “violated (her) moral and ethical conscience.”

That same year, she tossed out the core of one of the largest sex discrimination suits in the nation’s history, ruling that the state of California did not intentionally discriminate against women in setting up its wage and job classification system in the 1930s.

“I knew she would take (the Harris case) seriously,” one of her former law clerks said Sunday. “But she’s not one to pre-decide cases. And she’s not going to rubber-stamp (cases) filed by groups with which she used to be affiliated or who are urging positions she might believe in.

“For her,” the clerk said, “it’s very important that the law be there and that the facts cry out for what she believes is the right determination.”