We talk a lot about crime and punishment on this radio show, like a lot of people do in the country. It's one of the top issues everywhere, all the time. And Katie, Katie, Katie the news Lady. Her dad was a judge, he's now a retired judge, and thought it would be cool to talk to him at some length about a whole bunch of different stuff. I'm gonna let Katie introduce her own dad. Okay, Yes, judge in Oakland for thirty three plus years.
Thirty three thirty three plus yep.
Known to some as Judge Larry Goodman, known to others as LL Dog and Daddy O. So here he is here, Come here, pops, Judge, thanks for coming back on the Armstrong and Getty Show. Appreciated how you How you like in retirement? By the way, not everybody adjusts well to retirement.
I love it. I love it.
No adjudgment problem.
No, Because it got to be a point where remember Sunday nights when you were in school and you hated Sunday nights because you had to go to school. Yeah, never felt that until right before I retired, and it was like I knew it was time at that point.
Interesting so you stuck around long enough. Yeah. Yeah.
So before I get into some like specific questions I have, do you think you have an overall takeaway from all those years of being judge a judge just about society and order and crime in general in Oakland?
Yeah, not so much overall. I mean, you see good people, you see bad people. Oakland is particularly depressing at times, just because it's it's overwhelming and the kind of cases I did you just life was so cheap and there was really no concert. There was consequences, but it didn't seem to stop anybody from acting out. So but overall,
it's it's it's a job, just like everything else. The only you feel like you're contributing a little bit by being part of the judicial system or the justice system. But outside of that, it's not like any shattering awareness that I have.
Now, Well, do you think most people who commit crimes, particularly bad crimes, it's because of they're just born to be bad or do you think there's an environment they came from?
I think most of them are. It's the environment. I think it's life is cheap. Would you like to sell burgers at McDonald's or sell drugs? And if you sell drugs, you hang more gold, and you drive better cars. So I think that's what I'll do. But there's a certain risk involved in that, but I'm willing to take it. And that's what they see, that's who their role models are, and that's what they do.
I don't know if you know the statistics on this, but were the vast majority of people that would come before you guilty found guilty?
Oh? Yeah, I had three three non I tried according to my clerk, one hundred and seventeen murder trials. I had three not guilty verdicts.
Really and in your opinion, do you think they were not guilty?
One of them in a death penalty case, he was definitely guilty.
The other two and it was found non guilty and found out not guilty.
Yeah.
Interesting.
He killed both his sisters and tried to kill his parents. But that's a long story for another day. But the other two they probably did it, but the evidence wasn't all that great.
But so most of the time, if specifically a murder gets to a courtroom, they did it.
The chances are pretty good. I mean, they've gone through the charging, the screening before the charging, they've gone through a grand jury or a preliminary hearing. They've gone through all the pre trial motions by that time, it's been reviewed quite a few times, and so it may not be a murder, it may not be a first degree murder, it may be a second, it may be a manslaughter. But they pretty sure that they killed somebody.
And I suppose because of limited resources and time, you know, money, all that, you wouldn't pursue it unless you're pretty sure they were guilty.
On the prosecution sign In Alameda County, where I worked, we had used to have not anymore. They had one of the best DA's offices in the country, and so there was a lot of checks and balance, and nobody really went to trial unless they were pretty sure they had the right person, although I will say I did one trial. After about three witnesses, the DA came in and said, you know, I think we got this one wrong. We're going to dismiss the case.
Wow, So you weren't in the era or place of these das who don't want to charge anybody with anything to try to make some sort of point about society.
No, that's one of the other reasons I'm glad I'm out, because i'd be getting in trouble all the time.
So how would you have handled that as a judge, or would you have had any role in it whatsoever? If your local, if you got a gascon or whoever that just doesn't want to prosecute crime.
Well, I mean, eventually what happens. I have a friend of mine who's still sitting on the bench and he's been challenged by the DA because he wouldn't go along with all of her issues or all the things she was trying to do. He kept denying motions to strike priors or strike that, so they finally filed a blanket challenge. So he went from criminal into probate.
Oh so that's interesting. Back to the violent crime.
So you you've had a lot of violent criminals come before you do they tend to regret what they did at the point that they're in a courtroom. And I don't mean like regret it because they got caught, but if they could go back, they wish they hadn't done it.
Very few, very few. I mean, I'm sure some of them deep inside might have felt that way, but it's kind of a sign of weakness if they do that. I most of them kind of maintained the aura of I'm a criminal and I didn't do it, but you're gonna and if I did do it, you got to prove it. But I'm not going to say I did it and I'm sorry. Once in a while it's sentencing, they will address the family of the victim and say I'm sorry, But not up until that point.
You said, these people live in a world where life is cheap. Expound on that a little bit. They just for some reason, it because of their youth or environment. They just don't get what.
I don't think. They think that they're going to live that long because they see a lot of their peers get shot or get killed, and so it's kind of like a live why you can go fast and go hard because you're not going to be here that long. And so you look at me funny while I'm standing on the street corner and I come back and I shoot you, because that's the kind of a unwritten rule of the streets. You don't disrespect somebody without having consequences,
And people get shot over the dumbest things. Or I'll shoot at you and I'll hit a twelve year old girl across the street because I miss. But that's collateral damage, and I really don't think about it. I just move on. And that was just kind of the mindset that we saw a lot of.
Did you have people come into your courtroom with as flimsy a reason for killing somebody as you just described.
Oh sure, Oh yeah, lots of times.
Okay, give me some examples.
Well, we had the gun well, I used to call it the gunfight at the ok Corral. It was the gunfight ninety eight the needs in Oakland, and one gang got disrespected by another game because somebody disrespected the guy's car. He said that car looks like this and looks like that, and it was his pride and joy. So one group of kids is in the liquor store buying liquor, and this other group rolls up and opens fire with semiautomatic
weapons and kills three people. The other gang he finally gets their guns out and shoots back, and one of them misses, and the bullet goes across the street and hits a guy getting gas and bodges in his neck and he has a stroke and he loses his ability to talk. And all the people that we did the
trial for, they had no remorse whatsoever. Matter of fact, I had to keep pulling this one kid out because he kept disrespecting and saying rude things to the one of the victims mothers who came to address the court.
Oh my god, and how old were these people?
Unfortunately, when he did it, he was seventeen, which is entitled him to have another resentencing under the new laws in California. I sentenced him to sixty five years to life or something like that, but that he was seventeen when he did the crime, so he was entitled to be re sentenced. I don't know what he got again, but do.
You keep track of people after you sentenced him?
The only I kept track of two people, and they weren't even murder cases. They were multiple sexual assault cases. And one one guy was a retired law enforcement officer who continually raped his stepdaughter. And he came up for parole and I was asked to write a letter, and I'd never done it before, but he actually raped his step son, who kind of gave him. He gave himself up to protect his step daughter, and the son ended
up killing himself. So I wrote a letter saying he should I sentenced him to ninety nine years, but he's now in his sixty so he's eligible for elder parole or whatever they call it. And I wrote a letter saying I sentenced him for that long they didn't ever getting out, and he didn't know his step son had killed himself. So once he found that out, he withdrew his request for a parole and he's still in there.
So I've always believed that on a lot of the sexual stuff, their brains don't work right. They were they were they were, they're born in such a way or whatever, their brains don't work right, as opposed to the other thing you were talking about, the you know, you grew up in an environment where you run with gangs in the more environmental than your brain doesn't work well.
The sexual the in home sexual predators like this guy, Ron Roy Chass, I still remember his name. He's probably not wired right. But some of them are just mean, vicious people that it's you know, rape is not about sex, it's about violence, about control, and so some of these people are just violent sexual predators who just like to inflict that kind of pain on people.
How how do you And this is tough for cops and prosecutors and people work in prisons, all kinds of different people. How do you keep your sense of humanity in that most of us are good and most of us don't do that.
When you're encountering these people all the time, it's got to wear on you.
Yeah. Well, I was lucky enough to have Patty and Katie and come home and be able to, you know, coach Katie and sports and hang out with her and my wife, and you just kind of leave it at work. And I don't think I tried real hard not to bring any of that stuff home, even when it was a high publicity stuff, when we didn't talk about it, we didn't watch it on the news or read the newspapers. You just try to when you leave the office, you just try to leave it there because it will wear
on you. I mean, I had a couple of cases that to this day I still don't like to talk about them. But most of the time you're able to leave it at work.
Wow, that's interesting.
We're talking to Katie's dad, who is a was a judge for a very long time, is retired.
Now what do you do? Mostly? You fish? You hunt? Yeah? You what do you what do you do?
I work out, I play, guitar, trying to get back into golf, which will probably shorten my lifespan exactly. We still have a boat that we keep in Craplifornia that we go out and stay on for a while.
To that story, we got to talk about you getting robbed in our old hometown and what that was like, because this is just a story about the lawlessness of some areas of the country.
You came back the other day, tell us what happened.
Well, we keep our boat in Alameda because we one thing we do miss is the ocean and stuff like that. So we were having some people to go out on the boat for the Blue Angels. So we were on our way to the grocery store to get some things. We go out to the parking lot and I look, and I said, honey, our tires are gone. And there was the Toyota Corolla sitting. They brought their own blocks, so there was blocks under each of the doors, and they left the lug nuts, but all four tires were gone.
With the wheels. Yeah, tires.
So so you're back in California, which you fled because of the crime and the homelessness and the taxes and all that sort of stuff. You come back briefly and your round car gets all four wheels stolen off of it.
Yeah, I'm like a junkie. I had to come back from my crime fix. I guess that is.
An amazing story and so emblematic of why you can't hardly ever get a U haul in California because there are so many people fleeing the state.
And the funny part about is the lady that rented us the car, she said, now, you'd be careful because they'll steal everything. And when you go get gas, you keep your eye open because they'll break the passenger door window and steal your purse. I mean, she went through this whole litany of things that were going to happen, and sure enough, the day after that happened to us.
Unbelievable.
Back to you judging and crime and punishment and what you've learned over all the decades of being in the system. I've always been I'm a big believer in the US justice system, and I've always just I've never been afraid of being falsely accused of anything like that, because I just feel like the justice system generally works, is that your assessment after decades of being involved in it the vast majority of the time, we get it right.
I think so absolutely. I mean, like I said, we were always a little bit better than a lot of places in Alameda County. But yeah, I think for the most part it works the way it's supposed to.
And for places that it doesn't work as well, what would cause that?
Just an overload of cases. Sometimes things get shuffled through that shouldn't get shuffled through. There are places where based upon how you look and how you act, sometimes you
get charged. They're built in prejudices in some places. I taught at the National Judges College in Reno one day and the judges from Louisiana, a certain part of Louisiana came up and we're kind of making fun of us from California about how long it took us to pick juris and death penalty cases and everything, and really so it's just kind of a different mindset.
Yeah, I should ask you about that.
California has the death penalty but doesn't actually put anybody to death. The leading cause of death on death or in California is old age. We taxpayers spend gazillions of dollars on this and nobody actually dies are you four or against the death penalty?
Oh? I was for it. I sentenced nine people to death I think, and one of them die to liver failure. The rest of them will probably outlive me.
Well, yeah, that's the problem with it. We're not getting it. Nobody's dying, so I don't like paying for it. I don't mind capital punishment. I'm against it for the it does. It's not practical if nobody's dying.
Standpoint.
Yeah, if we're not going to do it, we shouldn't have it.
Thanks for coming on.
I just want to ask you some questions about your experience as a judge, and whenever a big case hits, we'll go to you for expertise.
As always, I appreciate it. Thanks Jack, you bet, you Armstrong and Getty