Obituary:
Charles Renfrew — former S.F. judge took interest in defendants
Charles Renfrew, a former San Francisco federal judge and accomplished lawyer whose affiliations ranged from Chevron Corp. to the NAACP, died of heart failure on Dec. 14. He was 89.
He served as a judge from 1971 to 1980 and was known for taking a personal interest in the criminal defendants in his court.
“He went to all the prisons, stayed in touch with the people he sentenced,” said San Francisco attorney John Keker, who tried many cases in Renfrew’s court and later provided an office in his firm for Renfrew’s private law practice.
After initially imposing a lengthy sentence, Keker said, “he would ask the person to write him from prison, tell him how things were going,” and, based on the replies in the first 120 days, would often reduce the sentence, as federal law then allowed.
“He could be stern if he thought someone was playing games with the law,” Keker said. “But he was a wonderful, even-tempered judge. He loved the law.”
For defendants who were to be released on probation, particularly white-collar criminals, Renfrew would often require them to give talks to students and other groups explaining what they had done wrong and the lessons they’d learned, said Vaughn Walker, a former law firm colleague who also served as a federal judge from 1989 to 2011.
Walker said he followed Renfrew’s example in some of his own cases. One was a 2003 case in which Walker required a defendant, after serving two months in jail for mail theft, to spend 100 hours outside a San Francisco post office wearing a sandwichboard sign that declared, “I have stolen mail. This is my punishment.”
Renfrew, born in Detroit, enlisted in the Navy after high school and served three years in the Pacific during World War II. He also enlisted in the Army for two years and served in the Korean War. In between, he attended the University of Michigan on the GI Bill, and later attended its law school, graduating with honors from both institutions.
He began his legal career in 1956 with the San Francisco firm of Pillsbury, Madison & Sutro, becoming a partner in 1965. Six years later, Renfrew, a Democrat, was nominated to the U.S. District Court by Republican President Richard Nixon under an arrangement with California’s Democratic senators, Alan Cranston and John Tunney, who agreed not to obstruct Nixon’s judicial nominees in the state in exchange for being allowed to recommend one-third of them.
He left the bench in 1980 to join Jimmy Carter’s administration as deputy attorney general.
“If Carter had been re-elected, I think Renfrew would have been on the Supreme Court,” Keker said.
But Carter was defeated in 1980 by Ronald Reagan — leaving office as the first president in more than a century with no Supreme Court appointees — and Renfrew soon returned to private law practice. He spent a decade with Chevron Corp. as vice president and general counsel, starting in 1983, and in 1984 supervised its hotly contested $13.2 billion acquisition of Gulf Oil, then the largest corporate merger in U.S. history.
He served on the boards of the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund and the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights, and was president of the American College of Trial Lawyers in 1995-96. His last legal venture was a law practice he began in 1998, at age 70, specializing in arbitration, mediation and internal corporate investigations, and continued for more than a decade.
Renfrew was also an avid fly fisherman.
He is survived by his wife of 33 years, Barbara Jones Renfrew, and eight children, 21 grandchildren and two great-grandchildren. A memorial service is scheduled Jan. 6 at the Episcopal Church of St. Mary the Virgin, 2325 Union St., San Francisco. The family suggests donations in his name to the NAACP Legal Defense Fund.