Charles S. Burnell

Charles S. Burnell (September 21, 1874 – June 23, 1949) served 21 years as a judge in Los Angeles County, California, presiding over trials that sometimes involved Hollywood motion-picture personalities.

He earned a master of arts from Stanford in 1896, and he was later given an honorary doctor of laws degree from Loyola University in Los Angeles.

In 1934, Blanche was granted a divorce in Los Angeles on the grounds of desertion after a decree had been refused in Reno, Nevada, in 1931.

In 1936 he married Agnes Storey Smith in Sandpoint, Idaho, whom he had met while on a vacation in Alaska; he adopted her daughter, Beth.

[1] Burnell, of 170 South Vista Street in the Fairfax neighborhood of Los Angeles,[4] died in Sebastopol, California, on June 23, 1949, while on vacation in Sonoma County.

[6] He was assistant city attorney between 1913 and 1918 when he became a special counsel for the Los Angeles County Flood Control District.

In 1919 he was elected city attorney, serving for two years until he was chosen by voters for the Los Angeles County Superior Court.

[1] In July 1925 Burnell made news when he allowed attorneys and court officials (including himself) the right to remove their jackets during hot-weather days, and then he dashed off a poem to mark the event: Oh, why should judges stew and sweat, As hot and hotter it doth get.

The two judges noted that the State Judicial Commission could retire a jurist "for reason of mental disability that is, or is like to become[,] of a permanent character" or that a two-thirds vote of each house of the Legislature could oust him.

[20]In April 2001 Roger M. Grace, a lawyer and columnist for the legal newspaper Metropolitan News-Enterprise, wrote a three-piece series whose headlines called Burnell a "Judicial Tyrant of Many Years Past" and "A Barb-Spewing Jurist."

[24][25][26] Grace's text noted that: A source of particular consternation to the bar and fellow judges for a three-decade period in the first half of the last century .

Near the end of his career, two justices in a Court of Appeal opinion called for his removal from the bench either by a judicial commission, based on mental disability, or by the Legislature through the impeachment process.