Target of judicial recall draws night duty

The annual list of new job assignments for Santa Clara County Superior Court judges nearly always contains a few nuggets, and the new roster is no exception.

Judge Aaron Persky, faced with the first viable recall threat in California in more than eight decades, has volunteered to take an assignment he can do from home, out of the direct public eye.

He’ll be the “night judge,” meaning he’ll be on call 15 hours a day, five days a week, from 5 p.m. to 8 a.m., starting Sunday evening and ending Friday morning. All new judicial assignments for 2018, including his, begin Jan. 16.

Persky won’t comment to the press on anything since he was targeted for recall by Stanford law professor Michele Dauber. That was after Persky gave

what many considered a lenient, six-month sentence last summer to former Stanford swimmer Brock Turner, who sexually assaulted a woman in 2015 outside a campus fraternity party. Turner served half the time (three months), as is customary for inmates for good conduct, and will have to register as a sex offender for life.

Persky could have volunteered for nights for any number of reasons. It’s possible his new assignment will free him up to campaign during the day. Or maybe he’s just trying to be helpful to the court since the night job isn’t normally a popular assignment.

But the rumor that Persky is being driven out of civil court by lawyers filing peremptory challenges to disqualify him from handling their cases is false.

As the night judge, he will handle a variety of requests, including for search warrants, bail and emergency protective restraining orders.

In another interesting tidbit off the new list, Judge Vanessa A. Zecher will become supervisor of the criminal division. Those are the courts that came under fire this summer from the civil grand jury for taking longer than any other in the state to resolve felony cases, leaving accused suspects in jail longer than necessary at a significant cost to taxpayers.

If anyone can snap the court out of what the grand jury called a “culture of complacency,” it’s Zecher. A tough, hardworking judge, she’s not afraid to deny lawyers’ requests for postponements, as proved by her calm but brisk handling of the recent Sierra LaMar death penalty trial.

“This is what it boils down to: ‘Please excuse my murder.’ Do not excuse his murder.”

— Santa Clara County Deputy District Attorney Chuck Gillingham to jurors who convicted Michael Sheppard, who claimed he was too drunk to know what he was doing, of beating a homeless woman to death.

Alum Rock trustee calls for receivership

On the verge a week ago of suing the Santa Clara County Office of Education and state auditors for allegedly holding his school district’s budget hostage, Alum Rock schools trustee Khanh Tran has done an about-face and now is calling for his school district to go into state “receivership.”

“We are convinced (the) administration is incapable of doing things right,” he wrote in a text message. “We need outside help like the county and the state.” He also expressed similar sentiments on Twitter.

Tran believes that under state control, Superintendent Hilaria Bauer and other top administrators will lose their jobs.

He said trustee Dolores Marquez, who last meeting gave Bauer a tonguelashing over the budget, agrees with him.

While the school district keeps running, Alum Rock remains in an official budget limbo, lacking full approval of its 2017-’18 budget from the county office of education. The business department is working on a to-do list, including reporting its cash flow and reconciling its books — a challenge with some outstanding items from as long as two years ago. It’s a problem predating the current business department.

That said, Tran “doesn’t understand process,” county schools Superintendent Jon Gundry said. “He thinks the state swoops in. It doesn’t.”

Instead, the state acts primarily through local county offices of education, sending in an adviser, then an overseer. “The state rarely steps in and takes over finances of a school district,” Gundry said.

His office has until next Wednesday to decide whether or not to approve Alum Rock’s budget. The office of education’s CBO Megan Reilley is reviewing finance reporting. Gundry also is taking into account another critical measure of school district stability: how its school board behaves.

“The Twitter rants of one of their board members certainly don’t inspire a lot of confidence,” Gundry said.

Since this newspaper revealed Alum Rock’s precarious position with its books, Tran has been gunning for action.

“Once the state fixes the problem,” he wrote, “the board will hire a new superintendent.”

Governor appoints new county judge

In a move that’ll make immigration hardliners plotz, Gov. Jerry Brown has appointed an Iranian-American immigrant to serve in Santa Clara County Superior Court as a judge.

Iran is one of the countries included in President Trump’s travel ban. Brown’s pick, prosecutor Nahal Iravani-Sani, emigrated From Iran to the United States in 1979 when she was 10 years old.

And she wasn’t even a citizen — just a permanent resident with a green card — when she volunteered in the mid-1990s to work for the Santa Clara County District Attorney’s Office. Within three months, former District Attorney George Kennedy hired her. (She became a US citizen long ago.) She has been a prosecutor for 22 years.

“I truly feel humbled to be chosen and honored to serve the community,” Iravani-Sani said.

Now 48, she is married with a son in high school and another in his freshman year in college. She is a Democrat. Judges earn an annual salary of $200,042.

While prosecuting sex offenders for failing to register with police, she told the Huffington Post last year, she noticed that sex offenders who were mentally ill kept getting thrown in jail for failing to register. Working with judges and defense attorneys, she created a process to transfer supervision of such offenders to the Mental Health Court, where they are seen monthly and may register there.

“I am proudest of this local reform because I collaborated with my colleagues across the criminal justice system to implement a new policy and to address a longstanding issue that had existed for years, but no one had taken the initiative to address in the past,” she said.

Known for her friendly, collegial manner, she also has taught at the Stanford Law School’s Trial Advocacy Clinic since 2013 and was a lecturer at the Santa Clara University’s law school in trial techniques from 2006 to 2013. Iravani-Sani also is a member of the Iranian American Bar Association Board of Advisors and the Pars Equality Center Advisory Board. She went to law school at Santa Clara University after graduating from the University of California-Irvine.

By the way, of Brown’s 34 judicial appointments, more than half — 56 percent — are women.

Challengers line up in San Jose Dist. 7

A San Jose mortgage industry expert has joined two other candidates vying to replace Councilman Tam Nguyen — but the first-term councilman up for re-election next year isn’t sweating it.

“I welcome the challenge. It will make me focus and work harder,” Nguyen told IA. “I feel very confident I have deep-rooted and solid relationships with the constituents.”

Nguyen, a political newcomer who won a fourway fight for the District 7 council seat in 2014, has made splashy headlines since then. There was a public kerfuffle with a business leader, the time he was disbarred, accused of wiretapping and a legal fight with two bloggers over posts calling him a “communist.”

But Nguyen also championed a controversial fight to ban the communist Vietnam flag, provided help to victims of massive flooding and a fire and successfully opened a new Vietnamese Community Center in San Jose.

The latest challenger to Nguyen’s re-election is Thomas Duong, a mortgage loan manager who served in the U.S. Air Force for six years. “Some of the amazing things that I have done in my life are because of what was paved for me by courageous people,” said Duong, a Democrat. “Now it’s my turn to serve and pave the way for our future generations.”

Duong, who is the president of the Asian Real Estate Association of America, recently announced his candidacy in a video where he slammed Nguyen over two recent scandals.

Nguyen is also fending off a challenge from Van Le, an East Side Union High School District trustee who recently left the Republican Party and who unsuccessfully ran against him in the 2014 race, and Chris Le — no relation to Van — an Oakland tax auditor and Libertarian.

Chris Le said Nguyen “failed the Vietnamese community and he’s a very divisive figure.”

“We call ourselves the capital of the Vietnamese refugees and they need better representation,” Le said. “You need a leader, not just a voting machine on the City Council.”

Maya Esparza, who also ran against Nguyen in 2014 and lost the runoff by about 200 votes, is rumored to be running again. Esparza, who works for the nonprofit Destination: Home, did not respond to requests for comment.

Despite the criticism from Duong and Le, Nguyen said his record speaks for itself.

“Three years ago, I started with nothing and I was not expected to win against other opponents,” Nguyen said Friday. “But I came out ahead and I’ve been working very closely with constituents especially those who didn’t have a voice before.”