A San Diego judge was disqualified from hearing racial bias motions. Now the motions department is gone. (2024)

The San Diego Superior Court’s downtown central division did away with its pretrial motions department last week in a change that appears linked to recent controversy surrounding a judge who was censured by a state judicial oversight body and disqualified from hearing certain racial bias cases.

The change was celebrated by defense attorneys who say their clients may now get fairer rulings than they received from Judge Howard Shore, who was previously assigned to hear most pretrial motions — such as those to dismiss cases or suppress evidence. Shore was also assigned motions made under the Racial Justice Act, a relatively new state law designed to ensure that race does not factor in the administration of justice.

Shore, who was assigned to the court’s criminal division since 1998, has been reassigned to the civil division, court spokesperson Emily Cox said.

Shore received a “severe” public censure in December from California’s Commission on Judicial Performance for skipping 155 days of work without permission. Earlier this year attorneys from the county Public Defender’s Office filed at least 19 disqualification challenges seeking to remove Shore from their cases, citing his censure, comments he had previously made in court and comments he allegedly made in a private meeting with two public defender chiefs.

In March, Orange County Assistant Presiding Judge Cheri Pham sided with the Public Defender’s Office in some of those challenges, disqualifying Shore from hearing several motions under the Racial Justice Act. Pham ruled there were reasonable questions about whether Shore can remain impartial given his prior “insensitive language and comments” in the courtroom. Pham — who heard the issue to avoid a conflict of interest within the San Diego court — wrote that Shore’s censure and the comments he made privately to the public defender chiefs did not factor into her ruling.

Cox, the court spokesperson, did not directly answer questions about whether last week’s change to pretrial motion assignments was related to the recent controversies surrounding Shore. Instead, she said the court rotates assignments regularly and made last week’s change to bring the downtown central division in line with the way pretrial motions are assigned at its branches in East County, North County and the South Bay.

But those in the Public Defender’s Office celebrated and took credit for the change.

“This is great news and a direct result of the efforts of every lawyer in this office,” Chief Deputy Public Defender Jo Super wrote in an email to her office announcing the court’s decision last month.

Chief Public Defender Paul Rodriguez did not respond to a request for comment.

“It’s a big change,” said private defense attorney Danielle Iredale, who attributed the move by the court to the efforts of the Public Defender’s Office to challenge Shore in recent months. “Those for-cause challenges being granted changed the landscape.”

If the court had not made the change that it did, it’s likely the Public Defender’s Office would have continued seeking to disqualify Shore. And having successfully disqualified the judge from several cases already, the Public Defender’s Office had the playbook it needed to continue filing successful challenges.

“It could have created an administrative nightmare,” Iredale said last week.

District Attorney Summer Stephan’s office did not comment on the reasons behind getting rid of the pretrial motions department. “The decision made by the Superior Court was within their purview of authority and we will adjust to accommodate this change,” Tanya Sierra, a spokesperson for the office, said in a statement.

Officially, the pretrial motions department at the downtown Central Courthouse did not have a name, according to Cox. But defense attorneys commonly referred to it as the “law and motions” department and said Shore had been the lone judge in that department since around 2017 when the new Central Courthouse first opened.

Iredale, the private defense attorney, explained the previous flow of a typical felony criminal case like this: when a defendant was first arraigned, his or her case was assigned to one of three felony readiness judges. Many routine hearings and procedural matters would be heard in front of that assigned judge, while preliminary hearings and trials ended up assigned to different judges. But while the case was progressing toward trial, the need would sometimes arise to file certain pretrial motions. Those would end up with Shore.

“Previously, in the Central Division, criminal motions such as Racial Justice Act motions, motions to dismiss, motions to suppress, and other general pretrial motions that would not otherwise be assigned to the trial judge, were heard in one department,” Cox told the Union-Tribune.

Attorneys from the Public Defender’s Office viewed Shore as unfavorable to their clients when deciding on those matters. One of the successful motions to disqualify the judge alleged he had a history of making racist or racially insensitive comments in his courtroom in various cases over the past several years. The motion alleged Shore had argued that Black people commit more crimes than White people and had repeatedly downplayed systemic racism in the justice system, even though the state Legislature cited such racism in passing the Racial Justice Act in 2020.

“From his comments, a person aware of the facts could reasonably believe that Judge Shore believes certain racial or ethnic groups commit more crimes than others,” Pham, the No. 2 judge in Orange County, wrote in one of her orders disqualifying Shore.

Additionally, California’s 4th District Court of Appeal ruled in February that Shore had not taken into account implicit bias during a Racial Justice Act hearing for a driver who alleged San Diego police improperly pulled him over and arrested him. The three-judge appellate panel found that Shore “fail(ed) to address the abundant evidence suggesting that the traffic stop may have been the product of unintended racial bias.”

Typically in criminal proceedings, defendants have little recourse over who will hear their case. But California court rules provide both the defense and the prosecution with what amounts to one free veto of a judge during the pendency of a case. Iredale said attorneys almost always hold onto that challenge for trial and sentencing.

“You always want to save it,” Iredale said. She added that using such a challenge before trial can be tempting when attorneys have a strong argument and need to ensure their defendant “can get a fair shake,” but doing so amounts to putting all eggs in one basket. “You might use it when you have an extremely strong motion, or for preliminary hearing — but the overwhelming majority of the time, you want to save it.”

That meant the attorneys in the Public Defender’s Office had to use a different tactic to try to disqualify Shore from their cases while still saving their veto for trial. Instead, they used a different but related section of the court rules to argue that Shore could not be impartial based on his previous remarks.

The deputy public defenders had to show the Orange County judge that Shore should be disqualified for cause, Iredale said. “It’s extraordinary to get that for-cause disqualification and retain that (veto),” she said.

With Shore transferred to the civil division and his pretrial motions department gone, the court’s downtown central division will now run like the east, south and north branches. Cox, the court spokesperson, said that in those branches, the supervising judge assigns motions “to various criminal departments depending on the needs of the court and availability of judges, and not specifically to one judge or one department.”