He's seen the Internet jibes. "The Sharia judge of Mexifornia." "Jihadist judge."
Not
that he didn't see it coming. The governor's people called him one
final time before announcing his appointment. "California's first Muslim
judge," the news release would say. Was that OK?
Halim
Dhanidina's first thought: "Of course." His second: "Maybe not." But by
then he'd hung up the phone, and he couldn't take it back.
Some
other ambitious young jurist might shrink from that "first Muslim"
label, with its whiff of tokenism. Dhanidina, 42, has since opted to put
it out front.
"I've stopped looking at it as a burden," he said.
The
L.A. County Superior Court judge has given interviews about being a
Muslim, attended dinners and headlined conferences — including one at a
conservative Christian college titled "American Jurisprudence and Sharia
Law: Assimilation or Accommodation." (Friends had said not to do it. He
did.)
The after-hours appearances are tacked on to packed
workdays. In his Long Beach courtroom recently, he wished a defendant in
jail fatigues, "Best of luck." He overruled a prosecutor who heaved
frustrated sighs. He cut in swiftly when a defendant started bellowing.
"That's not called for," he said.
"There's a lot of people who think Muslims shouldn't be judges," Dhanidina said later. "No one who has ever been in
my courtroom."
To
those who know him, this insistent openness about his faith is more
striking than his appointment to the bench. Dhanidina quickly rose to
top posts at the L.A. County district attorney's office, and few were
surprised when he made judge in 2012, before his 40th birthday.
But the Islamic part — some longtime colleagues said they didn't even
know. "I can't think of it once coming up," said Geoffrey Rendon, who
was a deputy district attorney with Dhanidina.
But what his friends didn't grasp was that he was a judge not despite his religion, but because of it.
::
He
was raised in Evanston, Ill., came west to go to Pomona College and
later UCLA, and married a Californian. She is Roman Catholic, and his
friends are Christian, Jewish, atheist — professionals like himself. In
short, said Alan Jackson, a friend and his former boss in the district
attorney's office, Dhanidina is "assimilated — as far as a Chicagoan can
be assimilated here."
Unlike the Islamic background, the
Midwestern one is conspicuous. Dhanidina is friendly in a clean-cut,
corn-fed way, and still loyal to the Cubs. He's also every inch the
Californian — a fan of beach volleyball, hip-hop and college football,
and was a marathoner before a knee injury.
His
parents left Tanzania for Illinois before he was born. The family is
Ismaili, a Shiite tradition that represents a progressive strand within
Islam.
Ismailis value education, gender equality, community
service, international cooperation and civil institutions. A word
Ismailis use a lot is "pluralism," and value the constitutional
protections that preserve it. For centuries, they have lived under rule
by foreign dynasties, hostile majorities, secular and colonial powers.
Thousands were uprooted from ancestral homes. When Ismailis speak of
legal safeguards for minorities, they are not speaking in the abstract.
Their
tradition bears little resemblance to the media images of Muslims that
bombarded Dhanidina through childhood. The Muslims he knew were "not
here to change American society," he said. "They are here to be part of
it. They
buy in."
But Dhanidina, who is of Gujarati Indian heritage, learned early to
keep quiet when people talked of Islam. "It was always in a context that
would make me defensive," he said.
Even though he kept his faith
in the background, now and then came a jarring moment: a colleague who
talked of "towelheads"; a judge right after Sept. 11, 2001, who told
jurors to be fair even if the appearance of someone in court called to
mind the attackers. Dhanidina, feeling as raw as anyone that day, was
slow to realize the judge was referring to him.
Another time,
Dhanidina was a guest at a dinner party that Jackson had invited him to.
A fellow diner denounced Muslims. Jackson said he wanted to crawl under
the table. But Dhanidina had heard such comments all his life. He was
surprised later when Jackson begged his forgiveness.
Dhanidina also knows how it feels to be accused of bigotry.
::
He describes it as one of the most upsetting moments of his career.
It
came in 2008, during a Watts double-murder case. All involved in the
death-penalty trial, including the defendant and the victims, were
black.
Three black jurors had been chosen when Dhanidina sought to
dismiss a fourth. At that point, he had already exercised a dozen of
his permitted exemptions — dismissing three whites, four Latinos and
five blacks. Defense attorneys James Brewer and John Daley argued that
Dhanidina wanted fewer blacks on the jury. They won.
Such a ruling
against a prosecutor in Los Angeles is very rare — and potentially
damning because it suggests Dhanidina acted from racial prejudice. For
years after, he felt himself under a cloud. He braced himself to answer
questions. He worried it would derail his judicial nomination.
To
this day, Dhanidina insists that his objection to the juror was not
racial. It was because the juror was a devotee of KPFK-FM.
The
left-leaning radio station is part of the Berkeley-based Pacifica
network, which was founded by a World War II conscientious objector.
Dhanidina considered it a sure sign of anti-death-penalty bias. "I know
because I listen to it," he said.
Neither Daley nor the judge
accuse Dhanidina of genuine bias. It was just the heat of battle, Daley
said. What's striking about the whole spat is how little it seems to
have had to do with actual bigotry. Rather, it speaks of something more
nuanced — the way racial controversy and court procedure have merged to
produce a kind of theater of civil-rights conflict.
As for the KPFK juror, he proved everyone wrong: He voted for death.
::
Gov.
Jerry Brown has not had to publicly defend his state's first Islamic
judge. But his office received hate mail, staff members say.
Dhanidina
saw a no-win irony: U.S. Muslims were once called insular. Now,
participating in public life, he was sometimes viewed as an infiltrator.
Being
the face of Islam in California jurisprudence still felt strange. He
drinks alcohol, doesn't pray by any formal plan and has tried to observe
the monthlong fast at Ramadan — but usually doesn't. He wasn't sure he
knew enough about his own religion to speak for it in public.
But it struck him that if strident voices dominate, moderates must speak out. "If I don't, who will?" he said.
So
he told audiences of his faith in God and secular government, and how
these complement each other. He said he has been surprised by the
response, not just from Muslims, but from people of other faiths.
"They
said, it's so nice that someone can feel comfortable just talking about
religion," Dhanidina said. "So often it is used as a way of dividing
people. Or as a bludgeon. It can feel like a topic it is better to
avoid."
His courtroom offers further lessons in pluralism.
Defendants
cross class lines. In his court recently were a young woman with green
hair, a filthy man who might have been asleep and a literal untouchable —
a well-dressed man with hand-foot-and-mouth disease who sat apart.
The
bellowing defendant was acting as his own lawyer. He wore an untucked
shirt, muttered and flipped pages, wasting hours in legal minutiae.
Dhanidina was patient. When the man grew belligerent, he tried flattery:
"We have procedures we have to follow, and you seem like you" —
microscopic pause — "
care about procedures," he said. The defendant nodded vigorously.
Dhanidina
hears up to 50 cases daily, mostly misdemeanors, and sometimes seems to
hardly breathe. But don't call his work mundane: Defendants may seem
"indistinguishable from dozens of others," Dhanidina said. "But to them,
I may be the only judge they ever see."
His crisp style in court wins praise from defenders, prosecutors and judges, even his old antagonist Daley.
"I didn't realize he was the first Muslim judge," the defense attorney
said. "That's a hard thing to undertake. I wish him well with it."
