No Benchmarks for Judge When Sentencing Looters : Riots: Hard-line jurist’s plans were softened when he met defendants and by the realities of the judicial system.

Until Felicia Bell stood before him in court and looked him in the eye, Judge Arthur Jean had planned to send the looters back to jail.

But there she was, his very first riot defendant, a frightened 18-year-old barely over 5 feet tall, dressed in a black suit jacket and heels, trying her best to look like an adult. Perched behind his judicial bench, Jean read through the letter Bell had written him, in which she never once asked for mercy but merely apologized “for my stupidity.”

“I’ve hurt my family, my church, myself, society,” she wrote.

At that moment, right on the Long Beach Superior Court bench, the judge’s plans “faded away,” as he put it later.

In a county where Dist. Atty. Ira Reiner was clamoring for minimum one-year jail terms for looters, Jean sentenced Bell to time served--the nine days she had already spent behind bars--plus three weeks of community service.

And during a period when a crush of riot cases often has spawned assembly line justice, this chance encounter between two individuals--the Ivy League judge and the Long Beach looter--would alter the fate of hundreds of suspects in one community and set a provocative example for judges in other courthouses who were searching for the proper response to the riots of ’92.

“Most of us have never had a situation like this,” said Jean. “So what to do? . . . What should we do to these folks?”

A former prosecutor, Jean is hardly a judicial wimp. On the same day he sentenced Bell, he imposed a two-year prison term on a woman caught looting gallons of milk--”for my baby,” she claimed, until an investigation found that she had no such infant but did have a history of drug convictions.

That was the exception for the judge whose view of the riots changed when he “started meeting the people face to face . . . decent people with no records who got caught up in the excitement of the situation.”

In those cases, when they had clean records, he began turning them loose. Scores of looters would follow Bell into his court and receive sentences of time served, community service and three years probation. Before they left the court free men and women, he would peer over his reading glasses and offer a parting comment: “Good luck to you.”

From the windows of his fifth-floor office, Jean had a million-dollar view of the flames rising from Pacific Avenue. Although Long Beach did not experience the devastation seen in parts of Los Angeles, the rioting was hardly insignificant. Ten buildings burned within hours of the verdicts in the Rodney G. King beating case on April 29, scores more in the days following. There were stabbings, gunfire and a murder, when Matthew Haines, 32, was dragged off his motorcycle by a mob and shot to death.

“I was horrified by what I saw,” recalled Jean, 48.

His background seemed the resume of a hard-liner. He had spent three years in the Army in the mid-1960s before completing degrees at Dartmouth College and Harvard Law School. Then--in a highly unusual move for a silk-stocking law graduate--he plunged into the gritty realm of local criminal prosecution, spending 14 years with the Los Angeles County district attorney’s office, including a stint prosecuting gang members. In 1985, he was appointed to the judiciary by law-and-order Gov. George Deukmejian, a fellow Republican.

“A tough guy,” said Denis K. Petty, the head deputy district attorney in Long Beach, about Jean.

One way Jean’s toughness manifests itself is in a near fanaticism for courtroom efficiency. As supervising judge for Long Beach Superior Court, he is responsible for pushing the “bodies” through the system and clearing a backlog of cases. And it was this concern that first led him to question Reiner’s high-profile, get-tough policy toward looters.

“I’ve been around the criminal justice system for 21 years,” Jean said, “and I knew, as sure as the sun comes up in the east . . . that a year in the County Jail was impractical, unworkable.”

As he saw it, the problem was one of logistics: Few defendants would plead guilty if they faced such a jail term. Huge numbers would demand trials. “We don’t have the resources to try all these cases,” he said.

As riot-related felony filings rose to almost 300 in Long Beach, Jean called a meeting with Petty and the head public defender to make an announcement: He would offer defendants with clean records a better deal--six months in jail--if they pleaded guilty.

The announcement had exactly the effect Jean intended. While few riot felony defendants were pleading guilty in downtown Los Angeles courts--less than 6% at last count--the Long Beach looters leaped at his offer. To date, 188--65% of the total--have pleaded guilty or no contest. Lawyers for 183 of those insisted on one condition for their plea: that they be sentenced by Jean.

Although defense attorneys were delighted to see a judge undercut Reiner’s one-year standard, some prosecutors complained that he was putting court management before principle--and sending a dangerous message to the community. “In future riots, people would probably be induced to join,” said one deputy district attorney.

But local prosecutors were not entirely displeased. With so many looters pleading out, they would have an impressive conviction rate. And it was not like anyone was getting off scot-free with the promised six-month terms.

“I really thought that was going to be the floor,” Petty said.

Indeed, as the defendants were scheduled to come before Jean for sentencing, Petty and other prosecutors had no way of knowing that another side of the judge would soon come into play--one that had nothing to do with court efficiency. It was a side of him reflected once when he was asked what he liked about his work.

“I am a voyeur into the human condition,” he said.

The file for Case No. NA 11325 lists Felicia Bell as black, but her face reflects the urban melting pot. One grandfather was an American Indian, another white, her father Puerto Rican, other relatives Samoan, and the grandmother with whom she lives--an engineering planner for Hughes Aircraft--is a Creole from Louisiana.

“It wasn’t a prejudice thing,” the 18-year-old said, grappling with how she became a looter. “I would have to hate my own family.”

Boredom was her best explanation for what brought her to the Long Beach Discount Center at 2 a.m. on May 1.

A graduate of Lakewood High, Bell was still in the stage of wondering what to do with her life. Considering careers as a nurse or preschool teacher, she worked in the interim as a receptionist for an uncle’s janitorial business.

That night, she was at the home of a friend, also 18. “We were bored,” Bell recalled, “so we said, ‘Let’s just walk outside.’

“We wandered down to this swap meet place. There were a lot of people going in and out. Someone said: ‘You want to go in?’ ”

Police arrived as she was walking out. She dropped a pancho-type wool shirt. She could not say why she selected it from all the goods up for grabs. “I was just getting something ,” she said.

Bail for looters was set at $10,000 in Long Beach. Luckier than most, Bell had relatives capable of posting it. But she hesitated to ask for help from her grandfather, an aerospace computer engineer. “I just didn’t have the guts,” she said. “I was really embarrassed.”

She was not bailed out until May 10. By then, she had agreed to join the mass of defendants pleading guilty to a 459, commercial burglary, after learning that a judge was promising six-month sentences, half what the district attorney was seeking.

Her court-appointed attorney, Ted Batsakis, said there were rumors that the judge might consider going even lower, that it would not hurt to send him letters attesting to her character. Even so, Batsakis told her, “expect some jail time.”

So Bell informed her uncle that he would need a replacement at work. Then, as her May 22 sentencing approached, “I prepared myself in the mind,” she said, “so I wouldn’t sit there and cry.”

She sifted through her closet, deciding what to wear, with one thought in mind: “I don’t want to go in looking like a hoodlum.”

Then she arrived at Jean’s courtroom and learned that her name was atop the calendar posted on the door. She would be the first Long Beach looter “to face the music.”

In the weeks since the riots, the judge had, in fact, been reassessing his decision to impose six-month jail terms. “I was casting about,” he said, asking colleagues: “ ‘What do you think?’ ”

He found that the riots had spawned two judicial philosophies. To one group, it was “a situation that deserves a response . . . a minimum response”--a message that looting will not be tolerated.

“Others said: ‘Wait, you really have to treat these as individuals.’ ”

By the morning of May 22, he still believed in the need for “an appropriate signal to the community.” But he jotted a new figure on the files of several defendants with clean records: 90 days.

To be sure, many others were no strangers to court. The 27-year-old woman gathering milk in the aisles of the Top Value Market, Kathy Ervin, a.k.a. Sherry Liggett, had two convictions for selling drugs and an outstanding arrest warrant, according to court records. “She has displayed nothing . . . other than defiance toward authority,” a probation officer concluded, urging a prison term.

But about half the looters were first-timers, including defendant NA 11325.

There were four letters in the file. Bell’s grandmother described her churchgoing upbringing. So did the pastor of the New Jerusalem Baptist Church. Her uncle said she was a reliable worker.

Bell’s handwritten note covered one page. “I was wrong, dead wrong, to have gotten involved or should I say to take advantage of this riot situation,” she wrote. “There’s no excuse for my actions so I won’t try to make one. . . . I was being what society calls a follower, something I’ve never been and won’t be again!

“I’m not writing to condone my actions or curve your thoughts, but to apologize.”

Jean carried the file to the bench and called the court to order.

“Some of these (cases) are cut and dried, but many you think about and wonder about,” he said later. “You don’t make the decision until you see flesh and blood.”

What he saw that morning was a cross between a child and an adult, “a person who had gotten caught up in events . . . in something she would not normally have done and will never do again. This young person had some promise and some poise--she just didn’t deserve further jail time. Enough is enough.”

He called his decision to release her with time served “a matter of conscience.”

In the three weeks since, virtually all the 188 Long Beach looters who pleaded guilty have had their sentencing day before Jean. Court officials at one point calculated 57% were being released with time served--usually about 30 days--on the condition they perform community service and make restitution to the stores they looted.

Those with minor records, perhaps a single drunk-driving conviction, have gotten 90-day terms--meaning about 40 days in custody under early release programs designed to control jail crowding. Veteran criminals go to prison--one drew the maximum three-year term.

For prosecutors, it has been a discouraging period, as their recommended sentences are slashed time and again.

According to the judge, Petty recently quipped to him that “when this (rioting) happens again, he’s going out and stealing himself a Mercedes. Then he wants me to be the sentencing judge.”

Petty recalls the conversation only slightly differently: “I said a red Porsche.”

Jean does not discourage such challenges to his approach.

“You’ve got to understand. I’ve never sentenced defendants in a looting,” he said.

“I can’t explain why people take part in riots. I’m not a psychologist. I’m not a sociologist. . . . Were these political acts? I don’t know. Were these acts of people who probably have less of a stake in the community than others? Yes.

“Take Miss Bell. Why she went into a store, she couldn’t explain it to you. . . . (But) I looked at Miss Bell. I listened. . . . And a pattern developed, where I treat these people as individuals.

“We judges sit alone,” he added. “I’m up here by myself. If I’m wrong, I’m wrong.”