Panel chides attorney for accusing judges of corruption

A Court of Appeal panel chastised a civil rights attorney who accused three Los Angeles judges of corruption. The panel unanimously denied attorney Robert C. Moest’s bid to have Los Angeles Judges Olivia Rosales, Margaret Miller Bernal and Raul Anthony Sahagun disqualified from a pair of medical malpractice cases on due process grounds.

“We regret we must admonish [Moest] about the inappropriate personal attacks in his briefs on the trial judges,” Justice Victoria G. Chaney wrote in the unpublished 2nd District Court of Appeal opinion on Nov. 2. “When briefing an appeal, an ad hominem attack on the trial judge is not only unpersuasive, but also unseemly.” Poe v. Pioneer Medical Group, B314246 (filed July 20, 2021); Poe v. Southern California Infectious Disease Medical Group, B316457 (filed Nov. 10, 2021).

Justices Helen I. Bendix and Gregory J. Weingart concurred.

Moest, an attorney with the Santa Monica office of The Brown Law Firm PC, based in New York, had appealed summary judgment rulings for the defense in both cases, claiming that the failure of his bids to disqualify Rosales, Bernal and Sahagun denied his client due process.

Moest declined to comment in a phone call on Thursday.

In opening briefs, Moest pointed to rulings by all three judges between 2020 and 2021 that he characterized as a “whimsical disregard for the law.”

These included rulings imposing sanctions on the plaintiff, declining to reassign cases to different judges and granting summary judgment to the defense.

“This appeal raises a key question as to how far a reviewing court should go in order to support conduct by Superior Court judges that is dishonest, unethical, and malevolent,” Moest wrote in an October 2022 appellate brief.

In the Nov. 2 opinion, however, Chaney said that Moest had failed to establish the rulings were the result of corrupt conduct.

“Assuming the rulings were erroneous, to establish that refusal to disqualify a judge violates due process the offended party must show more than that the judge made erroneous rulings, he must adduce extreme facts showing the rulings resulted from judicial bias,” she wrote.