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A mandate (known as a “Petition for Writ of Mandate and Prohibition”) filed by Judge DeAnn Salcido was denied Tuesday by the 4th District California Court of Appeals.

Salcido, who will face re-election next month, filed the writ against the San Diego Superior Court and her former boss Peter Deddeh, the presiding judge of the court’s east county branch in El Cajon since 2009. Salcido now reports to presiding Judge Daniel Danielsen.

Her lawsuit accused Deddeh and other Superior Court judges of putting plea bargains above public safety and used the case of Chelsea King and Amber DuBois’ killer John Gardner as a prime example.

She decided to file the suit now, she said, “Because Judge Deddeh pushing me to rubber stamp plea bargains is the same judge who sentenced John Gardner on that first case. He should have got a heavier sentence.”

The court’s ruling said a judicial officer doesn’t have standing to act as a litigant in a case being heard by other judicial officers, that the court has no power to issue such mandates and that Salcido has no standing “to challenge her colleagues’ interpretation of the law.”

Announced last Friday on the steps of the Hall of Justice downtown, the petition was to order Deddeh and the judges of San Diego County to follow state law for sentencing domestic violent offenders, which requires, among other things, entering names into state registries, more probation and more protection for victims of abuse.

The Appellate Court’s decision is proof she had to go public, Salcido said.

“It proves that judges and the court system are not able to police themselves,” she said, adding that the 4th District Court of Appeals is often seen as the San Diego Superior Court’s “rubber stamp.”

Salcido said she has yet to decide if she will appeal to the California Supreme Court.

“I no longer want to be a judge if this is the way the system works,” she said. “If I didn’t speak out until after the election, then people would criticize me for putting election interests first, so I chose to err on the side of public safety.”

“I’m not doing this for a popularity contest. I’m highly unpopular right now.”

Her decision to be so vocal about the subject has alienated her among judges and attorneys countywide, she said. She expects to be disciplined by the Commission of Judicial Performance and was told she will receive a poor rating from the San Diego County Bar Association. But she says it’s made her popular with people, and encourages people to vote for her if only to tell other judges they can have the courage to do the same.

A year after arriving in East County Superior Court in El Cajon, Salcido co-authored a memo in spring 2007 with Judge Carolyn Caietti and wrote another the following year about what her petition calls other judges’ unwillingness to follow the law.

The threats and intimidation began a few months after Deddeh became presiding judge of the East County courthouse, Salcido said, when he claimed he had to steer cases away from her court room and take other judges off more important cases.

“When I would bring this up to my colleagues, it would fall on deaf ears,” she said.

Salcido’s suit may be the first time a sitting California judge sued another in this way, said Philip Carrizosa from the Judicial Council of California.

“I’ve been covering the courts since 1979, and my supervisor has been doing the same since 1985, and we could not recall a suit like this,” he said.

Salcido used the writ as an opportunity to champion a victim’s rights in court as well, calling for the court to end its “culture of suspicion of ulterior motives of women in court proceedings.”

“Judges must be taught that whenever victims come to court, they must feel safe to disclose abuse,” Salcido said.

Joyce Murphy agrees wholeheartedly.

Murphy feels the entire San Diego family courts system failed her, including Judge Salcido, who ignored warnings that her ex-husband Henry Parson was dangerous and granted him custody, eventually leading Murphy to kidnap her daughter for about a month in 2003.

“Judge Salcido has never apologized to me. Not even after my ex was sentenced for child molestation,” Murphy said.

Her first reaction to Salcido’s lawsuit was “absolute anger,” and she called Salcido’s writ the “ultimate in hypocrisy.”

“She’s as guilty as she claims they are,” she said.

She would not gain custody of her daughter until six years after the couple’s divorce, when her ex-husband was convicted of molesting three of her daughter’s friends.

Salcido was eventually reassigned from the case, and therapists, Child Protective Services and others also failed to believe her, but Murphy said that Salcido set the tone and made her fight an uphill battle.

Salcido said she accepts blame for the mistake and that she deserves public acknowledgment that the court systems did her wrong. She offered to meet with Murphy last weekend and apologize in person, but Murphy declined her request to meet.

“That’s the thing that gets me. Out of all of the mistakes that a lot of different people have made within the family court system, I’ve never heard anyone apologize to me or my child,” Murphy said.

In the same way she’s accusing her former boss, Salcido said, “I similarly have to accept blame for how I handled her case.

“It was in my very first nine months of being a judge, and I had never done family court in my life before becoming a judge. I made a devastating error that caused me to give custody to a man who was later convicted of child molestation, and this wasn’t corrected for at least six years.”

Salcido believes Murphy “deserves an apology and public acknowledgment that the judicial system did her wrong.”

“I offer her the most sincere of apologies, and it’s not an excuse but the bottom line was I blindly accepted the findings of CPS (Child Protective Services) when they wrote the letter to the court saying that there was no evidence of child molestation,” Salcido said. “And based upon that, combined with the fact that when I went to a more senior judges for advice I was repeatedly told you need to be suspicious of any woman during divorce proceedings claiming domestic violence.”

Murphy’s “lifesaver” when she thought she was crazy throughout the six year ordeal was Bonnie Russell and her websites familylawcourts.com and sandiegojudges.com which she began in 2001 during her own ordeal with the courts system, custody battles and an allegedly abusive ex-husband a year before Joyce.

Several posts about Salcido have been published to the site over the years.

Russell said the only attempt to apologize she saw this weekend was being told by a third party “if Joyce wants to hear an apology she can watch it tonight on the news.”

“When I told Joyce that I think her blood pressure went up.”

No such apology was ever aired.

“She may indeed be remorseful, she may indeed feel her conscience finally, after all this time, but the timing just has suspicion on it,” said Murphy, who said she feels that Salcido asking to apologize now is “absolutely” based on the election.

Salcido and her now ex-husband were also sued for fraud in 2007 when a former employee was hurt in a motorcycle accident.

The case was eventually dismissed, said Salcido’s lawyer Ken Medel.

Harold Coleman, who is running against Deann Salcido, did not respond to request for comment. Khari Johnson is a freelance contributing writer.

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Pastor Chris Clark of East Clairemont Baptist Church was involved in the fight to keep the cross on Mt. Soledad and helped rally hundreds of religious leaders statewide for the Yes on Proposition 8 campaign.

He saw judicial activism in both cases and Proposition 8 “may have been the straw that broke the camel’s back.”

“It has just reached a head and something needs to be done,” he said. “[The judiciary] is a branch of government that’s just getting out of control.”

It’s why he decided to join 20 other members of the community, primarily politicians and Christian pastors and activists, to be in video endorsements for Bettercourtsnow.com and support a slate of candidates to challenge local incumbent Superior Court judges in the upcoming June 8 primaries.

Clark was asked to participate by Bettercourtsnow.com creator Don Hamer, pastor at Zion Christian Fellowship.

The Web site, which launched in December, is meant to inform voters and let judges know they will be held accountable for their decisions and can be replaced, Hamer said.

Hamer started to organize the idea of the site three years ago, “long before Proposition 8 became an issue,” he said, though he added the statewide measure that banned gay marriage didn’t hurt their attempts to rally a conservative base against judges.

“Some of these judges have a disregard for the law,” Hamer said. “We’re trying to give people a voice again, because right now we don’t have one.”

An official slate of candidates will be released at the end of the month. No incumbent judges were interviewed for endorsements, and no particular criticisms or examples of judicial activism will be posted to the site, Hamer said.

“I have to refrain from giving examples,” he said. “It’s not my goal to bad mouth anyone. But I will tell you I could give you a lot of examples.”

Each candidate went through a “vetting process” in which they were asked whether or not they support abortion or gay marriage.

“We did ask those questions, but the answers came back in a way that we know we had fair and just judges,” Hamer said.

Three of the four incumbents to be challenged are family courts judges, and three sit on the bench in El Cajon.

Contended races are:

- – Craig Candelore challenging Judge Lantz Lewis;

- – Bill Trask challenging Judge Robert Longstreth;

– Harold Coleman challenging Judge DeAnn Salcido; and

– Larry Kincaid challenging Judge Joel Wohlfeil.

Superior Court judges are appointed by the governor, but every two years about one-third of Superior Court judges face election campaigns.

Challenging incumbent judges is rare, especially for someone like Longstreth, who has only been a judge in downtown family courts since June 2008 and held a fundraiser last week at his former law firm downtown.

“We need to get prepared for a big fight,” said San Diego County District Attorney Bonnie Dumanis, a Longstreth supporter. “Make no mistake about it. They are going to be organized and they are going to raise money. And it is a fight for the independence of the judiciary.”

Top endorsements for Longstreth include deputy district attorneys and sheriffs, and former sheriff Bill Kolender.

“I think all the judges realize, as Bonnie mentioned, that this is something significant. Significant that we’ve had so many challenged,” Longstreth said. “And I think it’s really important that judges be selected based on qualifications, integrity, experience and judgments, not on political or partisan agendas.”

Also at the fundraiser were about 30 sitting Superior Court judges, as well as City Attorney Jan Goldsmith, public defender Henry Coker and Judge Harry Powazek, who almost faced a challenge of his own, said campaign adviser Jennifer Tierney.

Tierney will run the election campaigns for three of the judges being challenged.

She was surprised to see so many judges challenged since each is considered pretty moderate.

“If someone starts that drumbeat about being too conservative or liberal, these races are run with so little money it’s hard to do anything about it,” she said.

Though Tierney’s Gemini Group has run election campaigns for 90 San Diego judges, she isn’t sure what to expect. Since there are no limits to budgets of Superior Court races, money on both sides will be critical.

“We won’t know how organized they are until we see their financial filings and where the money’s coming from,” she said.

Sam Godkin met Longstreth once at a friend’s social event.

Godkin ran his family law practice in San Diego for 12 years before having his first child three years ago, which made his work much more personal.

“Having kids added a whole different perspective to me I never saw,” he said.

He agrees judges need to decide cases in a uniform way, and said he came to the fundraiser because he believes if he ever had to appear in family court with his own children, he’d want someone like Longstreth to preside over the case.

“The last thing I’d do is have someone really bad deal with my kids,” Godkin said. “Family law requires more work than any other kind of law. You need good, competent judges when kids are involved.”

Longstreth’s opponent Trask, a vice president at a mortgage lender, declined to comment on the race.

Brett Maxfield was running against Powazek, but Maxfield’s intent-to-run petition was thrown out. The retired judge ruling on the case came from Riverside County.

“No judge in San Diego County would touch it with a 10-foot pole,” Maxfield said, claiming his petition to run was thrown out on a technicality.

In order to campaign to be a Superior Court judge, candidates have to have at least 10 years of membership with the state bar, which Maxfield claims took place after he was sworn in June 1, 2000, not the date on his Bar card, July 31, 2000.

“The whole system is so rigged down here. It’s very difficult to get justice around here,” Maxfield said.

Maxfield said he wanted to appeal but couldn’t get it before a judge in time.

“If there’s anything illegal about what the Superior Court did, someone more powerful than me’s going have to make it right,” he said.

Maxfield moved to San Diego in 2004 working in the city’s real estate assets department, where he said he saw widespread corruption and was fired for blowing the whistle. Afterward, he worked in securities fraud law, ran for the state Assembly and applied for the local U.S. district attorney post, but is now considering leaving San Diego.

“The case of Randy ”Duke” Cunningham was not an anomaly. It’s the standard operation of the way things work in this county,” Maxfield said. “They don’t want me to be a judge. I’d cause problems. I know where all the skeletons are buried.”

New chapter

The Bettercourtsnow.com Web site doesn’t have to do with religion and isn’t politically motivated, Clark and Hamer said. It has to do with identifying activist judges, promoting strict constructionism on the bench and informing voters.

But some content on the site could be seen as contradicting this claim.

Aside from the endorsements, nearly all posts on bettercourtsnow.com are news stories verbatim from — but not always attributed to — other sites. The sites are mainly newspapers, but also Christianpost.com stories reporting about prayer in Florida schools and Christian student groups’ right to exclude non-Christians from becoming voting members or leaders. A Protect Marriage Action Fund press release is also included. In partnership with Protect Marriage, Clark worked with more than 300 pastors statewide to help rally the Christian vote for Proposition 8.

There are three separate posts of a video of the last 10 minutes of a Newt Gingrich speech at a David Horowitz gathering, which sums up the strategy for conservative political victory in 2012 elections.

“We’re going to have to isolate and crush secular socialist left and replace their failed systems with systems that will succeed,” Gingrich said in the video in which he advocates impeaching judges of the U.S. Ninth District Court for aiming to strike “one nation under God” from the pledge of allegiance. “This is work George Washington would approve of.”

The only post that looks truly unique or made by site creators is entitled “They are taking your children” about family rights in family courts. Again, no particular judges or decisions are named.

“We must keep innocent parents from losing their children and breaking up families based on hearsay evidence and the whims of judges,” stated the post.

Organizations and individuals associated with Bettercourtsnow.com include:

– Protect Marriage Action Fund executive director Ron Prentice;

– Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse, director and founder of The Ruth Institute, which promotes marriage between a man and a woman;

– Dran Reese, director of The Salt and Light Council, which “provides a structure and readiness for a quick response to issues that surface attacking family values and God’s Non-Negotiable moral values.”

– Frank Kacer, founder and executive director of the Christian Citizenship Council;

– Dwight Johnson, founder of the Christian Catalyst;

– Charles Li Mandri, West Coast regional director of Thomas More Law Center, which calls itself “the sword and shield for people of faith”;

– Dean Broyles, an attorney for the Western Center for Law and Policy;

– John Woodrum, president of the Eagle Forum in San Diego;

– Joel Anderson, 77th District State Assemblymember;

– Jim Garlow, pastor of Skyline Wesleyan Church in La Mesa

“A new day is coming,” said Clark in his video endorsement on the Web site “because we have Bettercourtsnow.com who has done the homework we’d not previously done.”

Getting out the vote

The Ramona Tea Party is tentatively scheduled to host Hamer, who will discuss judicial activism at a May 29 meeting, just ahead of the June 8 primaries.

“This is a backwater area,” said John Selck, a member of the organization’s steering committee who moved to the town from Wisconsin eight years ago. “Ramona is conservative potting soil.”

Patrick Kiernan, another member of the Tea Party steering committee, met Hamer by posting a link to the Ramona Tea Party Web site on Bettercourtsnow’s Facebook page.

Kiernan and his wife Norma own a garden supply store in Ramona. Like almost everyone they know in the Tea Party, Kiernan said, this is the first time they’ve been politically active in their lives, though they have always voted.

“Whenever we vote, our biggest weakness is judicial,” he said. “You see a name, and I’ve never heard of the guy.”

Norma, a former legal assistant for law firms, school districts and at one time the state attorney general, said she has never visited Bettercourtsnow.com.

In her former work, she saw first-hand the process of judge selection and appointment, and called it “a very detailed and absolutely non-prejudicial way to get candidates.”

“I don’t see prejudice in everything,” she said. “I don’t look at things that way.”

Still, she said, people should know who they’re voting for in Superior Court races, just like any other election.

“I cringe when voting on judges. Probably 99 out of 100 people have no idea what they’re voting for, so there’s got to be a better way to do it.”