What goes around apparently keeps going around, especially in regard to the courtroom events involving Inglewood Mayor and former Superior Court Judge Roosevelt Dorn.

Dorn has twice been the subject and the object of district attorneys’ controversial, racially tinged jurist-removal tactics — first as a judge and now, as a defendant.

The trial for Dorn on felony conflict of interest and misappropriation of public funds charges was scheduled to be under way by now, but the district attorney’s prosecutors, Juliet Schmidt and Terry White, had the trial judge removed from his case.

In what trial-watchers termed “an insult to every Black judge on the bench,” the prosecutors used their one peremptory challenge on Jan. 15 to remove from the trial the duly assigned Judge Marcelina Haynes, an African-American.

Speaking from the bench at the start of the trial, Judge Haynes said she was acquainted with Dorn through their membership in the Langston Bar Association, to which most African-American lawyers belong. She said she had encountered him at various Langston events, but had no close relationship with him and she said in open court that she could be fair in the conduct of Dorn’s trial. Before the day was over, the prosecutors filed the necessary paperwork to remove her from the case.

Legal experts told me the D.A. has one opportunity to remove a judge for no reason — simply because he wants to — but after that, he has to have cause and has to prove it before a judge has to get up and go.

The entourage that follows Dorn to court decries Haynes’ removal, contending it to be race-based and unequal. They point to the fact that Judge Samuel Mayerson, a Caucasian, was permitted to preside over Dorn’s preliminary hearing despite being an avowed friend of Dorn’s.

At the start of the preliminary hearing, Judge Mayerson is reported to have said from the bench that he was a good friend of Dorn and the two of them often lunched together when Dorn was a judge. Mayerson reportedly said that despite their relationship, he could be fair in the conduct of the hearing.

“The prosecutors didn’t say a word,” a court observer said.

A lawyer who takes issue with the D.A.’s removal of Haynes said: “The district attorney thinks it’s perfectly OK for judges who are former D.A.s to hear defendants’ cases, but it’s not all right for Black judges to hear cases of Black defendants.”

Which takes us to the first time Dorn found himself in a similar situation.
Dorn had served as a judge for 18 years prior to becoming Inglewood mayor. The only African-American judge in the Superior Court in 1992, Dorn was tapped to preside over the trial of three Black men accused in the televised beating of a white truck driver, Reginald Denny, at the onset of rioting after four white LAPD officers were acquitted in the beating of Black motorist Rodney King.

Prosecutors of the three Black defendants used their one peremptory challenge to remove Judge Dorn, the county’s lone Black judge, setting off a firestorm of racism accusations. The media and the community confronted then-District Attorney Ira Reiner and insisted on an explanation for his ouster of Dorn.

Reiner’s reasons further fanned the flames of protest, as he first said he removed Dorn because of the judge’s “heavy court calendar” and concerns about security in his courtroom.

The chief judge disputed that. He said Dorn’s calendar had been cleared for the trial and his courtroom was secure. He praised Dorn as one of his most productive colleagues. Then things got really hot when Reiner recanted his “calendar and security” reasons for removing the judge, and then said he did so because Dorn “lacked a judicial temperament.”

The African-American community, in general, and the Black clergy, in particular, was outraged by Reiner’s treatment of Judge Dorn and his insulting and contrived reasons for that treatment. Preachers preached in their pulpits against Reiner; we writers wrote in our Black newspapers against Reiner, and we Black people knew in our souls that Reiner removed Dorn because he didn’t want the Black judge trying his Black defendants because he believed Black judges did not have the capacity to apply jurisprudence to members of their own race. The community’s anger spilled over and evolved into a general hand wringing over how African-Americans are being treated by elected officials in this county — an issue with which we still wrestle today.

Oh, and a weakened Reiner subsequently sought re-election as district attorney but lost to Gil Garcetti, and yet, it seems that what goes around keeps on going around and around and …