Paul Stachelek

Judge Frederic Link once offered Landon $200 to cut off his ponytail.

Bulging stained manila file folders spewing yellow legal pads hugged to his chest, pin-striped charcoal suit coat over-large on his narrow shoulders, curly gray-streaked brown hair neatly caught up in a ponytail, Alex Landon slips into Municipal Court. There, his client, in jailhouse blue, awaits preliminary hearing on felony charges of robbery and assault with a deadly weapon and four counts of misdemeanor battery, plus four felony counts of violating the civil rights of individuals.

Landon: "Most felony cases wind up getting taken care of within three or four months."

Paul Stachelek

Or, Alex Landon in Federal Court pleads with the jury to find not guilty a client (the client’s clenched jaw violently twitches) who could face ten federal prison years for minor involvement in a major drug deal. Or, again hugging those finger-smudged manila file folders, slight frame hunkered, ponytail newly washed and curls frizzed, Alex Landon strides into the El Cajon courthouse’s second floor hallway to answer reporters’ questions after yet another two-hour hearing on the matter of jail overcrowding.

Landon: "I don’t think my moods swing as wildly as perhaps they did when I was younger."

Paul Stachelek

Or Landon is at the University of San Diego (where he teaches corrections and sentencing law) debating against the death penalty. “This country,” he’s saying, the nasal tenor rising, hacking away at word after word, “is an interesting minority, in that there has been a progression of countries over the last 20 years who have rejected the death penalty and are giving it up for other means of punishment. And it is interesting to see where we stand in relationship with other societies that we consider to be civilized, as opposed to our country, and who we stand with, and those countries that impose the death penalty. What are the countries that do impose the death penalty? I will start off with a popular one. Iraq.”

Landon's office in the Columbia Court, two blocks from the county courthouse

Paul Stachelek

From the audience of 100 or so, someone yells out, “And Iran!” Then Landon continues. “Russia. Both North and South Korea. Vietnam. The People’s Republic of China. And South Africa. And the list goes on. If we consider ourselves to be a civilized nation, we should join those countries that have rejected this barbaric and medieval punishment and join the civilized world that has respect for life.” Municipal Court Judge Frederic Link once offered Landon $200 to cut off his ponytail. Link wanted the four or five inches of tail to hang on his wall. Landon: “The remark was not intended cruelly. We’ve been friends for a long time.”

Prosecutors may resent Landon’s “papering” them to death with the motion-after-motion blitz.

Paul Stachelek

What about the tail? This is not the gleaming, nouveau male chic, hair-salon-trimmed tail, bouncing along the Armani jacket collar. This is the now-old New Left, rubber-banded, grow-your-own tail (and mustache and beard) last seen in great numbers at Vietnam war protests. Landon:

“I started wearing it in law school. I liked the appearance of it; it had a certain meaning to me. It stood for a certain protest or my saying, ‘I’m going to law school. I’m going to be involved in the system, and I don’t like the bias and prejudice I see, and so perhaps I can represent that an individual with long hair is not necessarily no good or shiftless, nor should he be looked at in a negative way.’

“I think some reactions to it fostered my desire to continue to wear it. I’m from Los Angeles, and I would go up to visit my parents and go through the San Clemente checkpoint, and the immigra-tion/naturalization officer there would stop me. I’d have law books on the front seat, and he’d say, ‘What are you doing with those books?’ and I’d answer that I was going to law school. He’d say, ‘Well, you’ll never make it.’

“And just being stopped in my car by police more than once for no reason, here in San Diego. Which I would be. Those experiences let me know and understand certain things clients are going through. Then when I became a lawyer, and clients saw me for the first time, I think it helped to break down certain barriers and permitted them to have a certain trust.

“When I’d get in front of juries, the ponytail would help me get through to some people, either to find out their prejudices and to indicate they wouldn’t be appropriate to sit on the case or to find out how they think. As I tell certain juries, when I’m allowed to voir dire [examine] the jury — a procedure which is being repressed and done away with under our current system — when I’m allowed to do that, the ponytail gives me a chance to say that I wear my hair in perhaps a more traditional manner. Thomas Jefferson wore a ponytail, and it didn’t seem inappropriate or negative.

“Also, I’ve always felt if the ponytail were to hurt a client and make me ineffective in representing him or her, I would remove myself from the case or consider removing the hair.

“So every time I think about getting a new hairstyle, first, I’m not sure what hairstyle I’d move to. I’m comfortable with it. And whenever I hear something negative about it, such statements shake me back to reality, remind me there are still people out there who are small-minded or prejudiced or biased, and perhaps it’s something that needs to continue to be worn both as a symbol to certain people and as a reminder to myself that there remain issues out there to be dealt with.

“Only one judge ever made a negative comment about it in court, and that was back in 1972. I know there were probably questions about it early on — ‘What is this person doing?’ I think, however, that as time has gone on, I’ve won the respect of most judges.”

Probably true, that he’s won the respect of most judges. Also most prosecutors. Around courthouses Landon, 44, is spoken of as always well prepared as a staunch advocate of the defense viewpoint. Prosecutors may resent Landon’s “papering” them to death with the motion-after-motion blitz that slows criminal proceedings, but most admire his thoroughness and tenacity.

For the past two and a half years, Landon has kept an office in the Columbia Court, two blocks from the county courthouse and three blocks from the federal building. In the waiting room, which he shares with three other lawyers, old copies of Rolling Stone are fanned out on a coffee table. His own office, a high-ceilinged room with shuttered windows, is three walls of filing cabinets and bookcases and file boxes stacked high. The bookcase nearest Landon’s desk is packed with the six-inch-thick, pale-blue California Death Penalty Defense manual, the pink California Death Penalty Defense Motions manual, the charcoal-gray California Death Penalty Defense Final Arguments manual (Landon is a member of the Death Penalty Committee of California Attorneys for Criminal Justice). On the fourth wall, behind Landon’s desk, hang plaques and awards: Criminal Defense Bar Association Board of Directors’ Award; Volunteers in Parole Distinguished Service Award; National Lawyers’ Guild Member of the Year; ACLU’s Civil Libertarian of the Year. Tvo shirts held in laundry shirt bands sit atop piled papers, books. Near the window, a tall plant straggles upward toward the light.

Reared in Los Angeles, a political science major at San Fernando Valley State College (now California State University at Northridge), Landon moved to San Diego in 1968 to attend the University of San Diego. In 1972 he set up private practice in San Diego. As a law student, Landon volunteered at various free legal clinics and Selective Service counseling centers. Early in his career, he defended a black sailor charged with rioting aboard the USS Kitty Hawk. “There was extreme tension onboard the ship,” Landon recalls, “and racial conflict The black sailors were actually afraid of going onboard.” He defended black Marines at Camp Pendleton. “There was Klan activity on base. A group of black Marines had complained about violent incidents and racial epithets. For instance, in the parking lot outside their barracks, a big van was parked on which a sign had been painted: ‘Save the Land, Join the Klan.’ On my clients’ doors someone had stuck stickers printed with a gunsight that read, ‘We have you in our sights.’ My clients were all from the South. They felt terribly threatened. The command did nothing to defuse the situation, were not sensitive to it. Unfortunately, what happened is that a group of the black Marines went into what they thought was the room on base used by the Klan organizers and attacked the people. As it turned out, they were in the wrong room.”

In 1978, in the initial trial in San Diego County after California’s new death penalty law passed, Landon tried his first capital case. TWenty-one-year-old Charles Colbert was charged with the rape and murder of a 17-year-old cheerleader. In the Case’s penalty phase, Landon brought the victim’s father to the witness stand to plead with the jury. Landon remembers that the victim’s father said that nothing could bring his daughter back. He didn’t want to see yet another young person killed. The jury took the father’s plea to heart. Colbert was sentenced to life without parole. In 1979 and 1980, Landon defended Michael Kennedy, charged with killing an alien at the border. The case was tried three times; the first two trials ending in a hung jury, the third ended in conviction. Over the next decade, Landon defended another 20 clients charged with murder, including David Allen Lucas, sentenced to death in September 1989 for what print journalists and television newscasters referred to as the “throat-slash murders” of two women and a child.

Asked what cases he’s working on now, Landon ticks off “murder, attempted murder, assault with a deadly weapon, assault, attempt to commit great bodily injury, drug cases, a lawsuit relating to overcrowding at juvenile hall.”

When people ask how he can sleep at night knowing he’s helping all these horrible people get off, what does he say?

“First, two things you suggest are totally false. It assumes things that aren’t true. These aren’t ‘horrible people,’ and I don’t ‘get them off.’ As a result of both those things not being true, I have no trouble getting to sleep at all. In fact I sleep very well.”

I’d think you’d be exhausted at night.

“I am, which probably helps me sleep well. Again, I believe that if our Constitution and Bill of Rights are to have meaning, they have to live. That means the rights we say people have, have to be protected. So what I do, being a defender of those rights, I think is very important. Beyond that, many people I represent are very, very nice people. With many of them, it does just turn your stomach to see the waste of these truly bright, energetic young people that could be doing something positive in the community but for circumstances in which they are trapped.

“Most don’t wind up getting off. Very few people wind up getting off, because most of what we do is plea bargaining. It’s usually a freak thing if someone ‘gets off.’ That is a misperception. The reason jails and prisons have filled up is because we are not letting people off.

“Most cases have always settled early on. Most felony cases wind up getting taken care of within three or four months. At least 90 percent of these settle before they come to trial. They get dismissed or there’s a plea to a lesser offense or a plea negotiation. The cases that linger on are fairly few. But they’re high-visibility cases, and then a false impression is given the public that justice takes forever”

As a member of the Criminal Justice Administration panel of the Federal District Court, Landon often finds himself appointed to represent indigent defendants in federal court These cases are not moneymakers. Federal cases pay $75 per hour for both office and court hours. “On the state side,” says Landon, “it’s even worse; the amounts paid are even less. In private practice, someone would get $150 or more per hour for representing defendants in similar cases.”

He had been in federal court that morning, representing such a client in a marijuana importation case. A Mexican national here legally, Landon’s client was in his mid-30s, clean-cut, with a well-trimmed mustache, dressed in white shirt and navy trousers.

Landon unravels his client’s complicated story. A customs agent had posed as a corrupt customs agent and persuaded a suspected drug importer that he, the importer, could fly a substantial load of marijuana from Mexico into California. “Then, in feet, he did fly it in. There were several people at an Imperial County airstrip to help unload the plane. The marijuana — 299 kilos — was in sacks and also allegedly in kilos wrapped in paper and plastic. The marijuana was unloaded and brought to San Diego. One of the guys at the airstrip wound up taking a pickup truck with a certain quantity of the kilos to another residence, where a fourth individual picked some of these up. As he was driving away — of course, they had him under surveillance — they stopped him and busted him for possession of those kilos, and they busted this other guy the following day for possession of the remaining marijuana. They didn’t bust the importer, the big guy, until they allowed him to fly a load of coke in. And then several months after the marijuana was brought in, they busted my client, whose only involvement was allegedly as an off-loader.”

In 1984 Congress passed the Comprehensive Crime Control Act, and in 1987 this act’s guidelines for sentencing reform went into effect. Since 1987, says Landon, “the most heinous crime other than murder is a drug offense.” (Federal guidelines rank crimes from 1 to 43. Prior criminal record, drug sales, lack of cooperation with law enforcement, quantity of drugs, parole violations all add points. No priors, cooperation with prosecutors and law enforcement, admission of guilt all subtract points. Points are totaled, and the judge must then mete out a sentence within boundaries set by the U.S. Sentencing Commission.)

Because of the quantity of drugs, Landon’s client faced a mandatory minimum five years. “Clearly, he was a minor participant. Before federal mandatory minimum sentences came into effect, someone involved at his level might have been given a year, 18 months. Now, because of the weight and because the law does not distinguish among parties involved as to level of participation, my client winds up feeing the same mandatory minimum as the big guy.

“My beef with the U.S. attorney was, why should we try this thing? I attempted to negotiate a plea that would avoid the mandatory minimum sentence, and he wouldn’t do it. Not long ago I did the appeal for a 19-year-old Mexican national, also an off-loader, no prior record; and because of the quantity involved, the case went to trial, and because of the quantity involved in the case, he was sentenced to ten years.

“The guidelines were intended to create continuity and uniformity in sentencing. But they aren’t doing that We tried that in California when we went [in 1977] to determinate sentencing. And it’s been a horrendous mess.

“In the old days, if you weren’t talking about big quantity, you weren’t really talking about going to federal court. There was a perception on the state side that the federal court was too easy on the small quantities. You might find a person on the federal side with a kilo of marijuana, and he’d be offered deferred prosecution; and on the state side, possession of a kilo might be charged as possession for sale.”

The prosecution, Landon explains, gets to choose on which side, state or federal, certain cases will be prosecuted. “Basically, forumshopping is what it is. A crack case that would have been prosecuted on the state side now may wind up on the federal side because the federal sentencing guidelines provide a harsher sentence.

“Judges are frustrated by the guidelines because they’ve taken away their discretion and put much of the discretion in the hands of prosecutors. If you are willing to be a snitch, then the prosecution can make motions for modification or ask judges to go downward and bypass the guidelines.

“Recently, Judge Irving [U.S. District Judge J. Lawrence Irving], one of the finest judges in our Federal District Court, resigned. In the press conference in which he announced his resignation, he said one reason for his resignation were these federal guidelines.”

Landon returns to discussion of his morning’s client “It’s sad. His going to prison. What’s going to be achieved by it? He’s an individual who likes to work. He has a girlfriend, a child. Send him to prison, and he’s a drain on the community.

“He exemplifies the numbers of people who are in the system day in and day out who pose no real danger to the community. The public knows only about those few whom the press deems interesting. You will never see anything about him in the paper. Everyone gets upset about the one case that is reported in which someone did something particularly offensive. The media sits through the calendar until that matter is called, focuses on that one matter, and then leaves. But what was the case before that one, the case after that? The public gets a distorted view as to what goes on day in and day out in the criminal justice system.

“What you do see day in, day out are 18- to 25-year-olds — unemployed high school dropouts involved in drug offenses, petty property crimes. Those are the people we pay tax dollars to warehouse, and those are the people we will see again because we are not addressing reasons why they got involved in the first place.

“The frightening part is that prison is supposed to serve as a deterrent. Most people wouldn’t want to go to prison. For those people, I guess jail and prison serve as a deterrent. But for many people, incarceration doesn’t pose a threat. Either they don’t consider incarceration before they commit a crime, or jail and prison don’t pose a threat. Some people, for economic reasons, feel that at least they have three meals and a roof over their head in a jail or prison. And it’s sometimes the first kind of family or friends they’ve had. Once these people become institutionalized, they are often more comfortable in prison than on the streets.

“Then we drop these people back into society and expect them to function. We know from experience with prisoners of war and hostages that you can’t do that. Even stable individuals — with education, support of a family, ability to work — need psychological assistance and help before they go back into the community. You take people who don’t have supports and expect them to function properly when they hit the free world, that’s too much to expect.”

Landon became involved in prisoners’ rights issues in law school, while working as an intern for State Senator Mervyn Dymally. “He got many letters from prisoners,” says Landon, “complaining about conditions and assigned me the task of responding to those letters.” After graduation Landon handled a class-action suit {Black v. Duffy) that won the right for inmates in the downtown jail and county honor camp to have law libraries. In 1977 the ACLU asked Landon if he would bring a class-action suit against San Diego County to end jail overcrowding and numerous other violations. In September 1977, he filed what is now the Hudler case in Hudler v. Duffy. “That began a several years’ ordeal of getting the case ready for trial. At the time, central jail was the only jail in San Diego. Hudler was an inmate and a client of mine. Three other inmates were members of the class. November 1979 we began trial in front of Judge James L. Focht. He found that conditions at that jail constituted cruel and unusual punishment and violated on a number of fronts the constitutional rights of those who lived there. All the issues were dealt with in the first year after the judge’s order with the exception of population.” Judge Focht had set a population capacity of 750 for the central jail.

“Other institutions came on-line before and while we were in trial. Las Colinas women’s facility had opened up. The county converted the Descanso honor camp into a pre-sentence detention facility, then the El Cajon and South Bay facilities opened.”

In July 1987, the ACLU and the Legal Aid Society asked Landon if he would bring another suit — Armstrong v. San Diego County Board of Supervisors — to attack overcrowding in Vista, Las Colinas, Descanso, South Bay, and El Cajon. He did. The outcome of the Armstrong suit was that a population capacity was set for each of those facilities.

On December 4, 1990, 13 years and several months after filing Hudler v. Duffy, Landon was pleased to hear Assistant Sheriff Ken Wigginton tell Judge Malkus (who in previous hearings had threatened San Diego County supervisors that he’d toss them behind bars if they didn’t trim jail population) that for the first time in six years, compliance had been achieved in the matter of jail population. At the time, 3828 men and women were resident in the seven county jails. This was 245 below the maximum set by the court-ordered caps.

How many hours has Landon put in on these jail cases?

“Probably hundreds.”

How did he survive financially?

“Hudler lasted over a six-month period. Three of the months we were actually in trial, and three months we were not. During the time we were out of session, I tried two cases and basically just hobbled along. The ACLU takes care of costs. At the case’s conclusion, you can apply for attorney’s fees, but basically you’re working without fee for that time. Black v. Duffy, Hudler, and Armstrong were all cases where no fees were paid up front. That’s part of the difficulty of doing pro bono work, because although there is provision for attorney’s fees at the end if you are the prevailing party, there’s nothing going in and no guarantee that you will prevail. So you could wind up putting a great deal of time and not be compensated for it.

“All the [case] monitoring is totally pro bono. So there have been ten years of monitoring I’ve not been paid for. All the hearings have been totally uncompensated.

“I do it because I am committed to the issues and not necessarily for the fees. It’s understandable why it’s difficult to find people to do this kind of work. Either a person has to be a member of an entity that supports them and pays them a salary or you have to be willing to go out front and do it and hope some of your time will be compensated.”

How did he and ex-Sheriff Duffy get along? “Many issues we’ve litigated, although he found himself being the defendant, he’s been happy about. They’ve been things he’s asked for too. He has testified that the best thing that could be done with the downtown facility was to blow it up and start from scratch.

“It’s a bad facility. It’s configured in such a way that unless you are standing in front of a particular tank, you are out of touch with what is going on in that tank. And there are six tanks around the floor. We were able to show that a deputy could be standing in front of the A tank, and down the hallway in the C tank someone would be gang-raped, and the deputy wouldn’t know because he couldn’t see it and couldn’t hear it. It’s also dangerous. It’s archaic in the way you open up the tank. You actually crank the doors open. I had a murder case in the jail; the killing occurred in one of the tanks, and I timed the deputy, who was very good at the cranking, to see how quickly he could get the tank open. My point in part was that the man who’d been stabbed could’ve been saved if they’d gotten him out speedily.

“If you had a fire up there and you had to go around to each tank and open it to get inmates out, you’d have a lot of dead inmates. It’s a dangerous place.”

What did he think was the best local jail? “Probably the reconstructed Vista facility. Exercise yards connect to living areas. Each module has its own visiting area. They did away with individual barred cells. Certainly Vista’s not plush — not as nice,” Landon smiles, “as a federal facility that has carpeting or accouterments like microwaves and juice machines.”

The longest you can keep someone in jail before they’re sentenced?

“I had a death penalty case where my client was in jail for four and a half years. That is a freak situation. But it’s not unusual for people on felony cases to be there 120 days.”

What you don’t see among awards and plaques on Landon’s walls is any mention of the man whose troubled life has cast its shadow over Landon’s career. October 6, 1972, less than a year after then-23-year-old Landon was admitted to the state bar, Ronald Wayne Beaty, an inmate at the California Institution for Men at Chino, was on his way to a hearing in the San Bernardino County Courthouse when two cars carrying two men and two women ambushed the state car in which the shackled Beaty was riding. One of Beaty’s guards was killed and the second wounded.

Beaty remained on the loose several months before he was captured. Incarcerated again, Beaty agreed to testify against the quartet who helped him escape. Landon had met Beaty at Chino through Beaty’s cellmate, Douglas Burt (one of the four who aided Beaty’s escape), and had given Beaty some minor aid in a civil rights matter. Although in a grand jury inquest that preceded the quartet’s two trials Beaty did not suggest Landon had any part in his escape, he changed his tune when the cases went to trial, spinning an elaborate tale that had Landon smuggling out escape plans and smuggling in hacksaw blades and acting as go-between to fund Beaty’s escape. Phone bills produced at the two trials showed that in the three months prior to Beaty’s breakout, 33 calls were made between Landon’s office and home and telephones belonging to Burt, Burt’s brother, and to Beaty in Chino.

The four were convicted. Landon vigorously denied Beaty’s story, insisting he had no involvement in Beaty’s escape Three agencies, including the FBI, investigated Beaty’s claims, and no charges were ever filed against Landon. And eventually Beaty changed his story. Nevertheless, in 1973 the Department of Corrections barred Landon from entering all state prisons, and this bar remains in effect despite Landon’s efforts to have it overturned.

Fifteen years later, the Beaty story surfaced again in the midst of the climactic moment of what came to be called the contract wars, a controversy in the legal community as to how and by whom indigent criminal defendants would be represented. San Diego County supervisors were considering whether to grant the $40 million contract for indigent representation to Community Defenders Inc. (CDI), a nonprofit firm headed by Landon that contracted with the county to defend those who could not afford private lawyers. Along came Republican state assemblyman Larry Stirling, now a San Diego Municipal Court judge Someone, whom no one seems to know, brought Beaty’s allegations to Stirling, and Stirling took the allegations to state Senator Robert Presley’s Joint Committee on Prison Construction and Operation. The matter came to the attention of county supervisors, who brought it before CDI’s board of trustees.

It became apparent that final approval of the county contract with CDI would not be signed as long as Landon was director. May 12, 1988, in a letter presented at a CDI board meeting, Landon resigned the directorship (Landon was sufficiently popular with his board that some board members threatened to resign in protest if he resigned).

“I am aware,” Landon wrote, “of the public controversy surrounding me manufactured to deprive Community Defenders Inc. of a contract with the county.” He noted that he was innocent of any wrongdoing and believed that he would be vindicated.

The letter ended, “Because of my deep concern for and commitment to Community Defenders Inc. and to the system of indigent defense which it was created to serve, I am voluntarily stepping aside as the executive director.”

I had promised Landon I would not ask him about the Beaty matter. Several times I broke my promise. To no avail. He would not talk. Nothing he said nor any gesture indicated displeasure; conveyed across the littered desk, it was an unchippable granitic stoic presence that wordlessly said, the way that conscience does, what I already knew: that asking him after I said I wouldn’t, I was behaving dishonorably.

But I could not help wondering how over years the Beaty matter must have pained, infuriated, frustrated him. His face seems pinched and lined and battered beyond what 44 years normally inflict.

As well, Landon entered law school in the late ’60s, amid the buoyant hopefulness that individual rights would be extended fully to the poor, to racial minorities, to women, and that bars would be dropped to affordable housing, education, and jobs. In fact, very few hopes of the ’60s have been realized, and many of the men and women of Landon’s generation who enthusiastically worked toward those hopes’ fruition long ago succumbed to hopelessness. Landon, however, has persevered.

How had the profession of criminal defense attorney and the rights of criminal defendants altered since Landon began practice almost 20 years earlier?

“I came out into a legal world that had been shown the way by the Warren Court, the United States Supreme Court with an Earl Warren, with justices like Arthur Goldberg, Abe Fortas, William Brennan, William Douglas, Thurgood Marshall, people truly sensitive to the rights of individuals, to making the Bill of Rights live, to insuring that the Constitution stood for all people in the country, that it was a meaningful doctrine, that we were a country that respects individual rights. Certainly the Supreme Court as it operates today is a far cry from that Warren Court. The same thing has happened with our California Supreme Court. Before Rose Bird ever arrived on the scene, our supreme court was looked to by other states and by the U.S. Supreme Court as a leader in refining and reflecting on the Constitution. That court has likewise changed significantly. Now, there is more concern for processing, more concern for procedure over substance, less interest in people as human beings.

“The problems are still there. They’ve been magnified. Our ability to deal with them has lessened. We are buying more into the ‘out of sight, out of mind’ concept, believing if we stick these people into jail and prison, they will disappear and crime will disappear.

“A misconception sold to the public is that we’re stopping crime, but in reality we’re not. We’re locking up more people. There was one jail here when I started practicing, and today we have seven. All crowded. The county jail population has quadrupled. The state prison population has risen similarly. In 1977, when we went to determinate sentencing, we were in the high 20,000s, and now we have close to 100,000 in state prison. And even though jail and prison populations have doubled and tripled, we’re seeing still more people coming into the system.” (Since 1980 the U.S. jail and prison population has increased by 114 percent, while those on parole went up by 107 percent, and probationers increased 126 percent.)

Landon complains that criminal defendants’ rights have been and continue to be eroded. He cites Propositions 8 and 115, on the ballot in 1982 and 1990, as adding to this erosion. “There was an agenda created by California District Attorneys’ Association and certain legislators who carried bills for the California DA’s Association. Frustrated because they couldn’t get certain legislation through the state legislature — it was turned down time and time again — these interested legislators, members of the California DA’s Association, some community organizations went by way of initiative. They created initiatives that were complex, lengthy, and with numerous issues and collected a tremendous amount of money and put these initiatives out before the voters and sold them. They were given attractive titles. They called Prop 8 the Victim’s Bill of Rights; they called Prop 115 the Crime Victim’s Reform Act. They suck people in. You say, ‘How can you be against the Victim’s Bill of Rights? The Crime Victim’s Reform Act? How can you be against crime victims?’

“Proposition 8 used publicity suggesting that people were getting off with crimes by pleading insanity. The reality is that the insanity defense is usually stipulated to between the parties, and when contested, very, very few people are found insane. Same thing in diminished capacity.

“Once Prop 8 passed, it changed the definition of insanity and diminished capacity. Shortly after it passed, I spoke before the San Diego Psychiatric Society, and I asked these people, educated people, psychiatrists, ‘How many of you voted for Proposition 8?’ Maybe half raised their hands. I asked, ‘How many of you were aware that anything in Prop 8 affected the legal definition dealing with mental health issues?’ None of them. Zero. Which means this educated group that voted in favor of this were not aware it changed both the definition for insanity and for diminished capacity.

“Also, Prop 8 had provisions that were supposed to stop plea bargaining. Nonsense. They limited plea bargaining in superior court to only a select list of crimes. There were three exceptions which allow you to bypass even that list of restricted offenses. So whenever the parties want a plea bargain, one of those three criteria will be found. The North County branch of the superior court found a method for limitation on plea bargaining in superior court. They allowed the parties to stipulate to go back to municipal court and work out the deal down there.

“These are types of things which are done because the system can’t function sometimes when things are passed through by people who don’t understand the system. Courts are left to interpret, and prosecutors and defense attorneys are left to try to work with it.

“Proposition 115 took away rights of attorneys to voir dire the jury; allowed for grand jury indictments without the right to a post-indictment preliminary examination; added categories to the death penalty, including changes made in the definitions for murder; [changed] discovery laws that give the prosecution reciprocal discovery rights from the defense.

“Prop 115 we’re all trying to juggle with. A lot of provisions just aren’t being followed right now in our county and many other counties; prosecution and defense attorneys are saying, ‘We just aren’t going to follow that.’ For example, in the hearsay preliminary examination — very few of those are happening.

“If justice is trying to make sure that all parties to a system are taken care of and people’s rights are being respected, I think we’re losing ground just because of the sheer numbers we’re having to deal with. A perfect example is the probation department. When I first started practice, we had special caseloads in which certain cases got intensive supervision. Probation officers might have had 15 to 25 people in a caseload of probationers under intensive supervision. They actually knew their probationers, had contact with them on a regular basis.

“The probation department would make recommendations for borderline people to be placed on intensive supervision rather than be sent to prison. When that unit in the probation department went away, a victim of funding, these probationers who would have been placed in the intensive-supervision caseload went to prison.

“Today, a caseload of anywhere from 150 to 500 is not unusual. Probation officers see names in a computer. They can’t put faces to the names. Probation, which is supposed to be a formal supervision, has become nothing but names in computers and random drug tests.

“What is now called probation doesn’t work. People wind up getting revoked because on paper they’re not reporting or a dirty drug test appears. I have seen this happen to people I represented, and I see it in the system every day.

“In the old days, there used to be more discretion. You might say the person was screwing up, but you wouldn’t revoke him, because he was doing somewhat better than average; so the probation officer warned him and told him, ‘Next time, you go to court.’ There was personal contact then between the probation officer and the probationer. Now a lot of it is done by computer.”

Doesn’t Landon ever feel terrifically discouraged?

“There are days when one feels a sense of accomplishment in being able to do something, and other days...” Landon pauses, gazes about his office. Begins again. “Doing this type of work for this period of time, I know what the work’s about. I don’t think my moods swing as wildly as perhaps they did when I was younger. It’s not that I don’t still have emotions. I do. I have strong emotions. But perhaps I don’t feel quite as disappointed when a position I advocated for has not been accepted.”

Is he particularly religious? Landon shakes his head in the negative.

What then kept him going?

“A strong belief in fairness and a strong belief in principles that the Bill of Rights stands for. Human dignity. A moral society.”

Were these principles something he learned as a child, at home?

“Oh, absolutely. I come from a background where I was taught injustice is wrong, one should be compassionate, understanding, and fair. One should not be put in a situation where one is oppressed or bullied. So I come to my work from that background.”

And how did he happen to become a lawyer? “I wanted to do something that would help people, so I went to law school in order to achieve that goal.

“It’s frustrating because we don’t have resources in the legal system to deal with society’s ills; so until those priorities are changed, we are going to continue to run in place or deal with the same problems. But I believe one can still, on an individual basis, have an impact on a person’s life.”

You are never going to get rich.

“No.”

And his personal life? His wife is a psychologist; they live in North County, no children, one dog. What kind of dog? He frowns. Considers the question. Finally says, “A Samoyed.” He allows as how he’s fond of Belgian chocolates and dim sum (but he seems one of those men who cares little what he eats, who could curl up anywhere and sleep, he seems indifferent to his body). Asked what he does for fun, like, on a weekend, he frowns again. “When I can, I like to travel. I play tennis.” He scowls. “Go to the zoo, the Wild Animal Park. Maybe take in a Padres game.”

More readily he admits that before Funland, on Broadway near the courthouse, was torn down, he’d stop off after lunch and play the pinball machines. Now he very much likes video games. He adds hastily, “The nonviolent ones I find to be a great distraction.”

I ask again if it isn’t difficult for him to see how little has changed for the better in the years since he entered law school. “I’ve always been an idealist, and I would have hoped things would have progressed a bit, and so I find it kind’ve depressing that we’ve not made more progress. It is depressing. There’s no question about it. I still remain optimistic, or I guess I couldn’t continue to do this. You see what the problems are, what causes these problems, but you are not seeing the system take the steps necessary to address these problems.”

Then he starts again, the voice gathering force “People with power, people in government, find themselves in a media society. They perceive that the way to get votes is by the quick method. It’s easy to tell the public in 30 seconds, ‘I got tough on crime. I increased the penalty for drugs.’ For a legislator to explain how he will do something responsible to deal with crime would take a long time.

“A message about attacking the source of crime can’t be told in 30 seconds. It’s easier to say, ‘This person killed my granddaughter; won’t you please vote for this measure?’ It is difficult to explain to voters that by addressing the causes of crime, we will save tax dollars and make society safer in the long run.

“I could show a picture of Hitler and say, ‘Do you want to live under this kind of regime?’ To a certain extent, that might bring home the point, because if we continue to erode our rights, that’s what we will get. A regime that has no respect for freedom and individual rights. Hitler promised he would eradicate crime; and under the guise of protecting the people, he stripped away the legal rights of German citizens. We are being told, ‘Don’t worry about individual rights. Give them up, and we will take care of you, we will protect you.’ I am not willing to do that. I think those rights are there because we have a system of balance of powers, and when one power gets out of whack, we’re in trouble.”