‘An icon.’ Judge who broke glass ceilings in Fresno County law dies at age 99
Of the few photographs Fresno County District Attorney Lisa Smittcamp has in her office, there’s one she keeps on top of her copy of the California penal code.
It is a photo of Smittcamp standing between two of her role models; women who pivotal roles in her career as a lawyer. On the right is Judge Sandra Snyder.
On the left is Snyder’s mentor, Judge Annette LaRue.
“She’s right there with me,” Smittcamp says of LaRue, who served as a municipal court judge from 1979-1998 and was the first woman to sit on the bench in Fresno County.
LaRue died Dec. 16 at her home in Fresno’s Tower District. She was 99 years old.
There’s an irony in Smittcamp’s admiration for LaRue.
As her family tells it, LaRue applied for a job with the Fresno County District Attorney’s Office shortly after graduating from Hasting College of Law in 1952. The DA at the time told her he didn’t want “any god damn females on my staff.”
So, LaRue started her own private practice. She was the second female attorney to work in Fresno.
LaRue was born in Fresno in 1924, the second of three children in a poor farming family during the Great Depression. The experience shaped her world view, says son Frank Bailey.
Like people of the time, she was hard-working and honest.
“You saved your money. You didn’t waste anything,” Bailey says.
“That’s pretty much how she lived her life.”
By the time LaRue graduated from Roosevelt High School in 1942, she had decided to become a lawyer. It was an almost unheard-of choice for a young woman at the time and caused a major rift with her parents, which lasted until her son was born in 1960. She graduated from Fresno State College with a degree in education and worked as a school teacher to save money to go to law school, where she was one of 25 women in a class of 900.
‘She was an icon’
LaRue was never afraid of pushing against the status quo, especially when it came to women’s issues. In a story recounted in The Bee, LaRue was once at a Bar Association meeting with a colleague who was known to tell prostitute jokes “and then espouse his theory that women couldn’t be attorneys because of their monthly indisposition.”
LaRue responded by pouring a glass of water on his head.
But, “she was not loud, she was not brash, she was not showy,” Bailey told The Bee. “Her deal wasn’t getting on the front page of the paper and getting a lot of attention.”
Of course, sometimes she did.
Bailey remembers his mother on the front page of The Bee in 1989 calling out the DA’s office and Fresno’s large law firms for not doing enough to promote women into positions of responsibility.
The public display was unusual for her, he says. She usually wanted to work behind the scenes to make things happen — such as getting a gender bias liaison appointed at the municipal court to hear complaints about biased conduct. She was also a founder and board member for both the National Association of Women Judges and Fresno County Women Lawyers.
A law-and-order judge
As a judge, LaRue was law-and-order. She believed in accountability, Smittcamp says, but not without compassion: “Her goal was always to keep people out of the system.”
LaRue wanted people to succeed and encouraged growth through mistakes. As a judge, she oversaw the Youthful Drunk Driver Visitation Program in the late 1980s. It sentenced DUI offenders between 16 and 21 years old to spend two hours in a hospital emergency room and intensive care unit, then submit a 1,000-word written report to the court.
While Smittcamp never appeared before the judge in court, she did call LaRue for advice several times. She says the judge always encouraged her to be her own woman and to be vocal about the problems she saw in the system.
“I will miss her tremendously,” Smittcamp says.
“She was on icon.”
LaRue retired from the bench in 1998, though she continued her work on a fill-in basis until 2011.
A memorial service for LaRue is planned for 11 a.m. Feb. 3 at First Presbyterian Church, where she was a long-time member of the congregation. In lieu of flowers, the family asks for donations to the church or the Salvation Army of Fresno.
