A car-loving judge criticized by a state judicial commission won re-election last week—without ever appearing on the ballot

ILLUSTRATION by LUKE MCGARRY

Because he loves cars too much, Joseph E. Di Loreto has been spanked twice by the state’s Commission on Judicial Performance, each time because the Long Beach Superior Court judge used official letterhead to conduct unofficial business involving his collection of high-performance automobiles.

Still, on Election Day last week, local voters returned Di Loreto to his office in the Long Beach Superior Court. That’s partly because Di Loreto ran unopposed, and also because his name was never on the ballot—which raises a question: When a guy whose entire job is to assert what’s lawful, when he’s got the power to bang a gavel and dissolve marriages and settle disputes over businesses, homes in foreclosure, and vacations gone awry, when that guy runs afoul of his own code of ethics—twice—and the voters don’t seem to care, is democracy dead, at least where judges are concerned? Or if not dead, maybe in a coma?

Di Loreto is a trial lawyer and the son of one of the founders of Pepperdine Law School. He’s also, Di Loreto is, a car collector. In a kind of Valentine to the judge, Long Beach Magazine last year reported car designer Carroll Shelby’s visit to Di Loreto’s Paramount warehouse. There, with internal-combustion love in the air, the writers counted “18 high-performance vehicles” belonging to Di Loreto, including “five original Shelby designs” of which “the rarest cars . . . are the only Shelby-designed, Ford-powered McLaren and Shelby’s Cobra Coupe.”

Shelby, the authors tell us, calls Di Loreto “The Flying Judge.”

Governor Pete Wilson appointed the Flying Judge to fill a vacancy in the superior court in 1995. Six years later, the judge was in trouble for writing a letter on official stationery to a friend named Robert Barton in a dispute over the ownership of a race car. The state’s Commission on Judicial Performance later concluded, “this letter, asserting lawful ownership of property that was the subject of a dispute and dictating your preferred resolution, constituted a use of judicial stationery to advance a personal or pecuniary interest.”

In the judicial equivalent of a spanking, the commission publicly admonished Di Loreto. You’d think the judge would have been more careful around (a) cars and (b) the company letterhead, but no. Five years later, in 2006, he was admonished again.

Last week, sitting in his chambers overlooking Long Beach, the early-afternoon sun turning everything some shade of brown—honey, sepia, dun—Di Loreto recalled the 2006 decision. He says he owned a vacant lot in Downey where he stored a trailer for hauling his cars. He’d had no problems for years until the city “got a new code enforcement officer who told me to clean it up.” Di Loreto asked for a reprieve: He was building a warehouse in Paramount, he explained. He just needed some time.

Downey stayed the hand of justice.

Soon after, on December 29, 2004, apparently forgetting the lessons of 2001, Di Loreto wrote to the city of Downey on his official letterhead. “Due to many delays too numerous to explain,” he wrote, he couldn’t complete construction on his Paramount car warehouse. He needed still more time.

Someone in Downey forwarded that letter to the state—along with a complaint.

In 2006, the same Commission on Judicial Performance noted that the “judge’s letter, on ‘chambers’ judicial stationery, with ‘The Superior Court’ printed at the top, and with the court’s address and official seal, expressly identified Judge Di Loreto as a judge; the letterhead bore the inscription ‘Joseph E. Di Loreto, Judge.’ In the letter, Judge Di Loreto sought an extension of time within which to remove his trailer and, implicitly, the forbearance of legal action. This December 29, 2004 letter was referred to in subsequent correspondence by another city employee and the City Attorney on behalf of the City of Downey regarding the dispute.”

In 2001 Di Loreto had vainly argued that the recipient of his missive already knew he was a judge, so writing on judicial stationery was no big deal. He made the same argument in 2006, in a letter to the commission and in a May 10, 2006, in-person presentation.

The commission didn’t find the argument any more persuasive the second time. Use of his official stationery was “at a minimum” an “improper action,” they said. “The propriety of using judicial stationery in personal disputes does not turn on whether or not the recipient already knows the author is a judge. Rather, the use of judicial stationery is prohibited under the canons in question because, in such circumstances, such use involves lending the prestige of office or the judicial title to advance personal or pecuniary interests.”

On June 13, 2006, with one member absent, the commissioners voted unanimously “for a public admonishment.” None of this mattered on Election Day, June 3, 2008, when Di Loreto, facing no opposition—and therefore not even appearing on the ballot—was returned to his office on the fifth floor of the Superior Court above Ocean Boulevard.

Di Loreto wasn’t the only judge returned to office without facing the voters on Election Day. Indeed, on February 6, according to the legal newspaper Metropolitan News-Enterprise, he became the last of the Los Angeles County’s 142 incumbent judges to declare his intention to run. That left just 10 superior court offices open to an authentic contest between two non-judges.

So it continues, year after year, election after election, in a dark-robed spiral—“a job for life,” one lawyer called it. In order to limit competition for open seats, many judges bail on their office mid-term, so long as they like the governor in Sacramento: it’s his right to choose a replacement—a replacement who will then run in the next election as an incumbent until he bails early for a replacement from his own party.

And so on. Like Di Loreto, those incumbent judges file to run and, facing no competition, are left off the ballot. They simply walk back into their offices after Election Day knowing they have at least another six years to wear robes, swing a gavel, and pass judgment on their fellow citizens in what is, for most of us, the place where being ruled by others shades into something antique, medieval, terrifying.

That terrible power over citizens of a democratic republic is one reason Californians directly elect their superior judges—or, rather, have the right to, but don’t. When the guys in funny hats, boxy suits and spats gathered in Sacramento to rewrite the state’s constitution in 1913, many of them considered the direct election of non-partisan superior court judges the Mt. Whitney of their achievements.

The high rates of incumbency suggest we’ve let them down.

“If the people who wrote the state’s constitution saw what was happening today, I would guess they would be surprised by the lack of public participation,” says Cal State Long Beach professor of political science Lewis Ringel.

Or maybe high rates of incumbency among judges isn’t a problem?

“No, it’s a problem,” says Mark Petracca, chair of the political science department at UC Irvine.

Petracca doesn’t blame our lack of democratic virtue. “It’s not that people are lazy. It’s that we simply don’t have the information or experience on which to make a reasonable decision about judges,” he says. “Not only do voters not know anything about how good a judge is, even if they had the information they still wouldn’t have a standard for evaluating a judge.”

“I can easily relate to voters,” Ringel says. When it comes to reading the ballot, “you usually don’t know anything about these guys, unless it says ‘judge’ next to their names.”

Ringel tells me there are other ways to choose judges—in some states, the governor or state legislature appoints them; in others, the states hold non-partisan or partisan elections; in still others, a panel (usually the governor and some justice officials) appoints judges. California uses a combination—the merit system for state supreme and appellate court judges, and non-partisan races that allow voters to choose judges for the far bigger superior court system.

Except of course that no one’s really running, and no one really votes. Says Petracca: “It’s the equivalent of tenure.”

Petracca sends me to the website of the American Judicature Society (ajs.org), an organization that (he says) advocates a system for picking judges that sounds a lot like the merit system. That, he says, is the likeliest solution to the problem of incumbency: a process that would allow the people who understand the courts best to pick the judges for us.

But isn’t that a step away from democracy?

“No,” says Petracca, “because the people in a position to select the judges—the governor, for example—are themselves directly responsible to the people.”

And besides: What we’ve got now is hardly democratic.

Lawyers who appear before him (and therefore spoke to The District on condition of anonymity) call Di Loreto “abrupt,” “arrogant,” and “imperious.”

“It’s not that he’s a bad judge—he’s not bad—it’s just that he’s a dick,” says a lawyer. When I point out that most lawyers think most judges are, well, dicks, these lawyers argue that Di Loreto is somehow exceptional. “All you have to do is look at how he handled his performance problems with the commission,” said one. “He basically ignores [the commission] because he can. He’s an incumbent.”

I pop by Di Loreto’s office unannounced during something like a judicial lunch break, and the judge—through a remarkably genial court clerk—agrees to see me for a moment.

Sitting in his chambers—amidst framed images of sleek-looking vehicles, photographs of drivers, miniature collectibles, a bust of Abraham Lincoln (I think) and, of course, law books—Di Loreto is easygoing, even warm and good-humored. I tell him I’m wondering if our system of choosing judges is broken, and he’s positively expansive. He leans back, laces his fingers behind his head, and tells me, well, sure the system looks lousy. But it’s probably better than all the other possibilities out there. If you believe in direct-election of judges—and Californians say they do, even if they fail to actually vote for judges when given the chance—what are you going to do to improve voter participation?

How about Petracca’s merit system? “First, then, you’d have to amend the state constitution,” Di Loreto says.

How about the Texas system of partisan elections? That (I observe) seems to drive up rates of popular participation.

Too much money, Di Loreto says. You’d have to ask yourself if you really want judges out raising money from powerful interests—what the progressives of 1913 hoped to avoid in making the superior court job non-partisan.

“In LA County you’ve got, what, 13 million people and however many voters over a very wide area,” Di Loreto says. “Unless you’ve made some major mistakes in your life, and someone’s shined a light on those so that people might recognize your name . . . well, even then, even with really unfavorable ratings you’re likely to get re-elected because you’re running countywide. Anyone challenging you would have to raise a lot of money.”

It seems sort of off-the-charts stupid to ask Di Loreto if his mistakes with cars and stationery cost him anything, but I ask anyhow.

“It’s not like it’s a plus, let me put it that way. But I don’t think it really hurt me,” he says, sitting there in the midst of his answer—a brand-new six-year term in his chambers in Department H of the Superior Court of Long Beach, with his collectibles, the photos, the books and city view.

Tags: joseph di loreto, judicial review, Long Beach, los angeles county, the flying judge