JUDGING CRIMES

When I was in Los Angeles this past week, I had occasion to drive the rental car through the Harbor Freeway / I-105  interchange.  Curiously enough, I-105 seems to have acquired at least three nicknames: the Century Freeway, the Glenn Anderson Freeway (distinctly Chicagoish, that one) and the airport freeway.  The last, which you won't find on any map, is the only one I ever heard anyone use.

Not only that, but the interchange itself has a name: The Judge Harry Pregerson Memorial Interchange.  The "Memorial" bit would give me the creeps if I were Judge Pregerson, who remains on active duty at age 84.

I guess they've run out of courthouses to name after judges, and anyway politicians like to clap their own names on those.   (Note the cute orange accent in that previous link.)  Still, it seems a sensationally chintzy sort of memorial - nearly a random one, really.  Why not the Judge Harry Pregerson Memorial sidewalk, or the Judge Harry Pregerson Memorial elevator shaft and boiler room?  The signs would have been even less expensive and the symbolism just as meaningful.

(See the Update.)

And I can tell you that at rush hour one's state of mind upon entering the interchange is not necessarily conducive to reflections on a distinguished judicial career.   It's a little like contemplating the majesty of the law from the Judge Harry Pregerson Memorial dentist's chair. 

There are really only two things I know about Judge Pregerson.  One is that he and his son have combined the concept of dynastic succession to the traditional divine right of federal judges.  The other thing is that he's a liar.

I don't say that in the spirit of half-insane recklessness evident in, say, this indication that the Pregersons are  high-profile enough to feature in a paranoiac's belief system.  (Can a mention in a James Ellroy novel be far behind?)

No, I say that because the United States Supreme Court said it first.  They didn't use the word "liar," of course.  They phrased it like this:

All of the mitigating evidence, and all of counsel's prejudicial actions, that [Judge Harry Pregerson's opinion for] the Ninth Circuit specifically referred to as having been left out of account or consideration were in fact described in the California Supreme Court's lengthy and careful opinion.

But I think that means "liar."  (See post 11 and post 210.)  (And here's Pregerson's opinion, if the link works.)

The fascinating thing is that lying is considered perfectly acceptable behavior in a federal judge, at least in some contexts.  The pertinent context, it's hardly necessary to say, is that Pregerson was lying about the record in a death penalty case - it was just his way of preventing the machinery of death from lurching forward. 

By the standards of the legal profession, lying in the pursuit of abolition of the death penalty is no vice, or at least not such a vice as would disqualify one from having one's name cursed daily by rush hour drivers.