An attempt to recall six Orange County probate and family law judges has quietly fizzled.
The deadlines for turning in signatures expired July 31 and Aug. 2 on petitions to recall Orange County Superior Court judges Mary Kreber-Varipapa, Julie A. Palafox, Kimberly A. Carasso, Carol Henson, Maria Hernandez and Stephen Hicklin.
“We had to drop it because we couldn’t get enough people to work it,” said Christine Fleming, founder of the California Family Law Naked Truth group, which launched the recall campaign in late February.
According to Fleming, the group had to gather about 152,000 valid signatures for each judge to qualify the recall elections for the ballot.
With the group unable to afford professional signature gatherers, “it’s impossible to get that many signatures,” she said.
“I don’t look at it as a failure, because we still brought attention to the judges.”
Mark Rosen, the attorney representing all six judges, said Fleming’s group misused the recall process in an attempt to influence the bench.
“I think they were just trying to intimidate the judges because they weren’t happy with the rulings,” Rosen said. “That’s not a proper use of the recall process. … It backfired.”
Rosen said he looked for the petitions outside his local stores and didn’t find any.
Despite the recall problems, Fleming said her reform group will continue to put a spotlight on alleged abuses in the family law system in Orange County, where she said she witnessed first hand the problems in a case involving a child she helped raise.
The recall notices, served in December, generally accused the judges of judicial misconduct, failing to hear evidence and discriminating against women and people representing themselves.
In their formal responses, the judges painted the recall effort as an unwarranted attack on six respected jurists that would cost taxpayers more than $8.5 million for a special election.
Hicklin, in his response to the Orange County registrar of voters, noted the recall attempt was lodged by people unhappy with the rulings in their own cases, choosing politics over the appellate process.
“Instead of appealing, these litigants are trying to unseat fair and experienced judges for trying to do their jobs,” he wrote.
The last recall campaign against an Orange County jurist came in 2015, when a group attempted to recall Judge Marc Kelly for sentencing a man convicted of sexually assaulting a 3-year-old to 10 years in prison instead of the mandatory 25 years to life. That effort also failed to gather enough valid signatures to qualify for the ballot.
Organizers in that attempt said they simply could not raise enough money to support a signature-gathering campaign.