State Panel Urges Ouster of Judge for Unethical Conduct

After holding its first public disciplinary hearing in history, the state Commission on Judicial Performance Monday unanimously recommended the ouster of a Central California judge for unethical conduct.

In an unusual move, the watchdog panel suspended Kings County Municipal Judge Glenda Kraft Doan for failing to disclose personal connections with defendants who appeared before her.

“She attempted to manipulate the outcome of criminal cases involving friends or people who owed her money,” said Deputy Atty. Gen. Raymond L. Brosterhous II, who presented the case against Doan to the state panel.

Doan was suspended with pay pending a final ruling by the California Supreme Court on her permanent removal. The ruling could take three months.

The commission found that the Corcoran judge was habitually tardy, failed to disclose some loans on a bankruptcy petition and on her economic disclosure statements and had improperly instructed witnesses not to cooperate with the disciplinary probe.

Doan, 50, who was elected to the bench in 1982, could not be reached for comment.

William A. Romaine, a Visalia lawyer who represented Doan before the commission, said in a prepared statement that she will fight to retain her judgeship.

“The bottom line here is the Commission on Judicial Performance either does not know or does not care what it is doing,” Romaine said. “It is scary that a collection of political hacks can play such cavalier games with our notion of an independent judiciary.”

But Brosterhous said Doan deserves to be ousted. “The judge fixed criminal cases,” he said. “The remedy is to remove someone who does that.”

Doan released a drug defendant without bail and without disclosing that he was her gardener and that his wife had appealed to her for help. At the time Doan owed the gardener money. She also released his co-defendant, who fled and has not been apprehended, Brosterhous said.

In another case, Doan refused to approve a plea bargain of a defendant whose aunt had enlisted her help, Brosterhous said. The judge owed the aunt money.

Doan has been disciplined three times previously for failing to report $75,000 in gifts, loans and legal fees from a law client, asking a Superior Court judge to release a defendant without bail and failing to report a loan from an employee.

Her attorney maintained during the commission hearing that Doan had done nothing wrong. He also suggested that her actions were not unusual in a small town where many people know each other.

After the commission’s action, he said that Doan “by every account” is a good judge. “She is not in trouble because she took bribes,” he said.

“Instead,” he said, referring to the episode with her gardener, “she is in trouble because she may have acted out of sympathy in one case for the plight of a mother with small children and a husband in jail.”

He called the commission’s action in the case “blatantly political.”

Doan is the 16th judge whose removal the commission has recommended in its 30-year history. The California Supreme Court followed the recommendation in 12 of those cases, and one is still pending.