Judge responds to line of questioning

One of the greatest misconceptions about her job is that she works regular hours, Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Mary Thornton House told the congregation Sunday at Unitarian Universalist Church of the Verdugo Hills.

“People think we start at 8:30 in the morning, totally unaware of the 3:30 a.m. calls for search warrants that keep you up until it’s done,” said House, whose weekend lecture described a typical day on the bench. “People tend to think that because we wear a black robe that we’re superhuman. The truth is, we’re not.”

House was named to the Pasadena Municipal Court in 1996 by Gov. Pete Wilson and became a Superior Court judge upon unification four years later. Along with serving on the court’s Personnel and Budget Committee, Small Claims Advisory Committee of the Administrative Office of the Courts and as an instructor at the California Judicial College, House is also an ardent musician and spent years as an integral member of the Pasadena Community Orchestra.

“You make the job, the process so human,” Janet Weymann told House after the lecture.

One of the keys to the job is suppressing any dog one might wish to bring into the fight, no matter how loud the barks grow, House said, and to sit back and ensure lawyers follow the rules.

Her vivid descriptions of a day in the life touched on criminal and family court cases in an attempt to shed light on the pressures and points of satisfaction of the job.

Vignettes touched on the ugly incidents of drug abuse cutting across all races, genders and socioeconomic statuses, from teens who began using heroin at their high school prom and became full-blown addicts only months later, to a young woman who told a judge to go to hell and later returned to his courtroom with a gift, a token awarded to her by a narcotics anonymous group marking one year of sobriety.

In family court, where the county maintains 47 courtrooms in 53 courthouses, deep state budget cuts will likely force the closure of 10 to 15 courtrooms, she said.

One judge in House’s day-in-the-life became distraught after hearing news reports that a case he worked on involving a child and her father was playing out on television as a missing-persons update. Later, police found the two bodies and declared it a murder-suicide.

“For now, he had to put the horror in the back of his mind,” House said.