Honorees

Hon. Robert W. Conyers

1917-2011

Robert Whaley Conyers was born on September 5, 1917 in the small farming community of Cando, North Dakota.  Conyer’s grandfather was among the pioneer settlers who named the town “to show you that we can do it.”  In 1919, his father bought a lemon grove in Chula Vista.  Conyers worked in the orchard every summer through his last year of law school.  He graduated from Sweetwater High School during the height of the Great Depression.  He attended San Diego State College (now SDSU), which had just relocated to its new campus on Montezuma Mesa.  Conyers graduated with a B.A. in business administration in 1938.  He then moved north to attend the University of California’s Berkeley Law School.  He was a member of Phi Delta Phi  –  a prestigious international legal fraternity open to those “whose moral compass, academic ability, and personal integrity is beyond reproach.”  World War II interrupted his legal career.  He traveled the United States as an FBI special agent investigating domestic espionage cases.  Once the war ended, Conyers entered private practice with his friend Lowell Davies, who had just become President of the Board of Directors for the Old Globe Theatre.  After three years, he joined the larger firm of Higgs, Fletcher, and Mack.  He took “whatever walked in the door,” including the defense of an osteopathic physician who stole a newborn after telling the mother that the child died.

In 1957, Conyers was called as a defense witness in the notorious Ruth Latham kidnapping and attempted murder trial.  The two women accused of burying Mrs. Latham alive in the desert shifted attention to the victim’s husband, a wealthy investment manager with an unsavory past.  Based upon his experience as a FBI agent, Conyers testified that George Latham had a “bad” reputation in the community.  The defendants were acquitted.

Conyers served as President of the San Diego County Bar Association in 1958. 

In 1959, Governor “Pat” Brown appointed Conyers to the Superior Court.  The docket reflected the rapid growth of the region.  Each judge disposed of over 1,000 cases a year.  Civil cases waited more than a year for a jury trial.  The backlog was complicated by space limitations – there were 17 departments but only 10 courtrooms.  To handle the overflow, the court remodeled the second floor of the San Diego Hotel (the current site of the federal court annex).  There, Conyers took the oath of office on October 1, 1959.  His then-father-in-law, Municipal Court Judge Eugene C. Haney Jr. spoke on Conyers’ behalf:  “He is a man of many parts.  He will bring to the court the zeal and zest of youth tempered with human kindness.”   (SD Union10/2/59) 

In 1964, he was appointed to the Superior Court Appellate Department, which reviewed cases from the municipal and justice courts.  In 1976, he was named presiding judge of that department.  But Conyers preferred trial work, where he “deal[t] directly with the human problem” that was the “life blood of the law.”  (SD Union 10/10/76).  When critics complained that judges were too soft on crime, Judge Conyers responded with these eloquent words:

We are charged with keeping the balance between the prosecutor’s zeal and the defendant’s soul; the victim’s cry and the wrongdoer’s tears; and the balance between the taxpayers’ purse and the taxpayers’ outrage.  We can only say to you that within the limits of our own humanity, our own outrage, and our own tears, we are working professionally to accomplish a peaceful, secure society for all of us.

During his twenty years on the bench, he handled major murder, rape, and fraud cases.  He presided over several capital cases, including the second penalty trial of Robert Anderson (the case in which the California Supreme Court would find that the death penalty violated the State Constitution), and the bench trial of the handyman who brutally murdered retired stage actress Marie Chapman.  Judge Conyers also handled the Yellow Cab scandal.  After being acquitted of bribery, Mayor Curran pilloried the grand jury.  Judge Conyers took the unusual step of calling a news conference to defend the honest and “good citizens” who served “without any political motive or ambition” against the Mayor’s “invective.”  (SD Union 1971).  Conyers also criticized the White House for preventing an IRS agent from testifying about public corruption.  (SD Union10/10/76)

In 1971, Judge Conyers held a “public morals” statute unconstitutional as applied to adult movies shown at the Gaiety Theater.  In 1974, Judge Conyers dismissed an action charging two men with oral copulation as a “public offense” on the ground that it was private, non-harmful adult conduct.  People v. Baldwin, 37 Cal. App. 3d 385 (1974) (reversed on appeal). 

Shortly before retiring in 1979, Conyers presided over the eight-month jury trial of C. Arnholdt Smith.  Smith had been a prominent civic leader, owner of  the  Padres franchise, and a close adviser to Richard Nixon.  The jury convicted Smith of embezzling $8.9 million from his own United States National Bank.  Judge Norbert Ehrenfreund recalls the sentencing hearing when Judge Conyers looked the defendant in the eye and said, “Mr. Smith, you are a crook.”  “That simple, blunt remark was very important.  The people of San Diego wanted to hear it.  That was a great relief to the thousands of defrauded investors,” according to Judge   Ehrenfreund. (SDUT 12/3/11).

He was known for his keen sense of humor.  Conyers believed that a “light joke” could break the inevitable tension in the courtroom.  “So long as you don’t make a joke at anyone’s expense” and treat matters “consistent with the underlying dignity and purposefulness,” Conyers believed everyone benefitted.  (SD Union 10/10/76).  Judge Louis M. Welsh observed that “his opinions are pithy and frequently witty.”  (SD Union 9/29/79). All of his colleagues agreed that Conyers was “a legal scholar,” “very bright,” and “a real gentleman.”  (Id.)  Judge Conyers looked forward to retirement with his third wife, a former court reporter.  “I have an enormous appetite for so many things in life that I’ve never had time to taste.”  (Id.)

Judge William B. Enright describes Conyers as one of the “most brilliant and wisest jurists in San Diego County.”  As a prosecutor and defense attorney, Enright “tried many serious criminal cases in front of Judge Conyers, and I had enormous respect for him.  We do a lot of very hard things to people when we sentence them, but the thing I learned from Judge Conyers is that I would never, never do anything to diminish the dignity and self-respect of the man I was sentencing.  He was always very fair.  He was very conscious of the rights of a defendant and also society’s right to be protected against barbarism.”  (SDUT 12/3/11).

Conyers died at the age of 94 on November 27, 2011.  He has one son, Jeffrey, from his first marriage.

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