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In My Opinion
Public Comments by Judge Armendariz Deviated From the Truth
By a Concerned Citizen
PREFACE
The writer, whose identity is known to this newspaper, provided information that Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Lucy Armendariz has frequently recounted tribulation she faced as a child. In one recent account, she told an interviewer:
“[C]hildhood for me was not idyllic. When I was 8 years old, my mother was sentenced to life in prison...and she’s still in prison today.”
“Concerned Citizen” pointed out that Armendariz was born Aug. 19, 1970 and her mother, Soledad Medrano, was sentenced for first degree murder on May 24, 2001, at which time Armendariz would have been age 30. Medrano died on Feb. 18, 2022.
Queried, the judge explained:
It is my understanding that she has numerous arrests and convictions throughout her lifetime. At least one of those sentences was while I was a child and removed from her care. She died in prison in 2022.
Later in the day she elaborated:
The events that transpired during my childhood are painful to remember and to relive and discussing the details in public is equally difficult. The distilled summary I share in public is meant to briefly detail a lifetime of obstacles and inspire others who face similar challenges that there is a way through such adversity. The trauma caused by a parent who spent the majority of my life in prison has been immense.
My mother was sentenced to prison when I was young. As one can imagine, I accepted my mother’s absence as a mode of survival and was too young to understand the intricacies of her interactions with the justice system. It wasn’t until later in life that I was made aware of additional details of her struggles to remain out of penal custody, her numerous re-arrests, and her eventual final sentence to prison where she remained until her death.
As you can imagine, her death has been difficult to accept because of this complex history. There are moments when I forget, maybe subconsciously, that she is no longer with us and that’s mainly because I can’t remember the last time that she was with “us” as a family. As noted above, I’ve survived emotionally by distancing myself from my mother’s life and it is only within the last few years that I’ve been invited to discuss my story by organizations who have asked me to speak because they believe my story of overcoming adversity and becoming a judge will serve to inspire others.
Until I have fully coped with my mother’s life and her recent death, I will continue to briefly discuss this past in terms of the many obstacles a child who was abandoned by her mother faces. At a future time, there may be other details of my complicated relationship with my mother that I am prepared to discuss publicly, but at this point I am not. It is my hope that this clarifies your inquiry.
“Concerned Citizen” remains concerned. Below is a reaction to the information Armendariz supplied. The judge is invited to provide a reply.
Armendariz response is, at best, an explanation for her lies. An explanation is not an excuse. And the explanation itself is not convincing. The public, as well as her colleagues, have a right to know the truth: that they are being lied to, and let Armendariz explain why.
There is no escaping the fact that Armendariz was not eight years old when her mother was sentenced to life in prison. It follows that she was not placed in foster care at that tender age either. Two lies from a Superior Court judge, delivered in her capacity as a judge.
It must surely be accepted that a Superior Court judge is to be held to a higher standard of veracity and credibility than a lay person. The very notion that a judge can be permitted to knowingly, or if Armendariz is to be believed (which is a bridge too far for me), recklessly make palpably false statements when appearing in her capacity as a judge, as she did when swearing-in her “good friend” George Gascón, is to undermine the very core of the integrity of the judiciary.
Armendariz could and should have stated that her childhood memories were incomplete and hazy; however, she does quite the reverse. Indeed, her tear-jerking account of her Kafkaesque courtroom experience where a nameless white male judge is accused of not being aware of her age or of her presence in the courtroom, and perhaps most egregiously (in the eyes of the woke left) could not correctly pronounce her name, (code for racism in woke circles, because it is considered to be a microaggression) is recounted verbatim, ad nauseum, with such a degree of clarity as to dispel any suggestion of a defect of memory.
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Let’s take a closer look at some of Armendariz’s justifications for her lies.
“My mother was sentenced to prison when I was young.”
One immediately notices that an eight-year-old child has now been replaced with “when I was young.” Perhaps that is true, depending on what the meaning of “young” is. Thirty-one? That was Armendariz’s age when her mother received the life in prison sentence. Doubtless there are men of a certain age who properly consider a 31-year-old Armendariz to be “young.” However, it is unlikely that the multiple audiences who heard of an eight-year-old child had in mind a “young” 31-year-old Armendariz.
Members of the public can conduct a name search of criminal defendants from the Los Angeles Superior Court website for a modest fee: https://www.lacourt.org/paos/v2public/Login
A list of all Los Angeles Superior court cases filed under the name “Soledad Medrano” shows no criminal case in 1978 when Armendariz was eight years old as she has so adamantly and repeatedly claimed.
The list of filed cases shows that Soledad Medrano’s first criminal case, number A368457, was filed on 6/12/1981. Armendariz would have been 10 years and 11 months old at the time of filing. I do not yet have details of the offense or the sentence but do note that the sentence cannot have been a life sentence, as Medrano’s next case, A384322, was filed less than two years later on 3/8/1983 when Armendariz was 12 years and 9 months old. This case too could not have resulted in a life sentence as Medrano’s third case, NA592526, was filed on 12/222/1986 when Armendariz was 16 years and 5 months old. That case too could not have resulted in a life sentence; however, it might have resulted in a sentence of sufficient length to trigger a foster care placement as Medrano’s fourth case, VA021748, was not filed until 8/12/1994.
The chronological analysis of Armendariz’s mother’s criminal cases not only proves Armendariz lied about her age in her amazing story, but also supports a belief that if indeed Armendariz ever was the subject of a foster care placement, it would have been far closer to her adulthood than her infancy. The logical conclusion from that is that the Kafkaesque courtroom proceeding she recounts is a matter of pure fiction, likely based on an assortment of tales of woe she adopted, or to use the woke vernacular, “culturally appropriated,” from her encounters with people who actually were in foster care, most likely those she interacted with during her service as a commissioner to the Supreme Court Blue Ribbon Commission on Foster Care.
★
“[I]t is only within the last few years that I’ve been invited to discuss my story by organizations who have asked me to speak because they believe my story of overcoming adversity and becoming a judge will serve to inspire others.”
This is another falsehood, easily debunked by logic. How could organizations be aware of Armendariz’s amazing story unless she had previously recounted it? Of course she had, ad nauseum, during her 2018 campaign for office number 67. It’s a classic chicken and egg situation if you will. The original motivation for Armendariz to spin her amazing story was to assist her campaign; to wow the Democratic clubs, the labor organizations, the media, into endorsing her candidacy. Once the amazing story had achieved its goal, Armendariz may or may not have been “invited to discuss her story,” but the inescapable conclusion is that those invitations were issued because Armendariz had already blabbed about it to bolster her campaign.
Copies of the complaint and abstract of judgment for the murder case provide precise information as to the date of Soledad Medrano’s arrest and conviction. Armendariz’s childhood, while not idyllic, was not as chaotic as she claims, and therefore the foster care claim has no credibility either.
Before you dismiss the notion that Armendariz has lied about her foster care placement as too speculative, I do have some corroboration. If you search Armendariz’s social media around Mother’s Day, you will find reference to her daughter, who goes by the name “Jourdan Amen.” The daughter’s social media will lead you to a short movie entitled, “The Home I Never Had.” According to the movie credits it was produced as part of the daughter’s college course on documentary production at Cal State Long Beach. This short movie was released on Vimeo (a video sharing platform similar to YouTube) on May 16, 2021, and can currently be viewed at https://vimeo.com/551264886. This provides a more solid basis for doubting the veracity of Armendariz’s account of her foster care experiences, in much the same way that her account of her mother’s incarceration has now been proven to be false.
Significantly, at around two minutes into the movie, Armendariz’s daughter asks Armendariz, “How many homes did you go through in the foster program?” to which Armendariz replies:
“I went in when I was eight and I left when I was 18 so in those 10 years I probably did about 20 homes.”
I am reliably informed by those familiar with the foster care system that it is beyond highly unlikely that Armendariz had 20 different foster homes. Assuming, for the sake of argument, that Armendariz actually was placed into foster care at the time of her mother’s first criminal case, she would have been in foster care for seven years. 20 homes in seven years is quite impossible. It is simply another lie.
★
There are somewhat different statements made by Armendariz regarding her foster care experiences.
In July 2007, the California Bar Journal reported on Armendariz’s appointment as a State Bar Court judge, stating, “When she was 10, Armendariz’ parents were deemed unfit and she was placed in the state’s foster care system. She ‘bounced around quite a bit’ at first, but stayed in the same home for her high school years….”
https://archive.calbar.ca.gov/archive/Archive.aspx?articleId=86683&categoryId=86143&month=7&year=2007.
In 2021, Armendariz was appointed to the California Access to Justice Commission where her bio states, “Thrust into the foster care system at age 10, Judge Armendariz bounced between homes before a long-term placement provided the stability that facilitated her pursuit of a college education.”
https://calatj.org/commissioners/larmendariz.
Those two quasi-official sources are perhaps more credible than anything Armendariz says, and suggest that there was a period of stability during her four years of high school, once again diminishing the time period where 19 different foster care homes accommodated her, the 20th home apparently being the stable one.
Armendariz’s account of her alleged foster care placement and experiences therein are likely to be as untrue as her account of her mother’s incarceration.
In the movie, Armendariz also tells her daughter how she tried to comfort her mother at the sentencing: “It was at the courthouse once my mom was sentenced and I remembered wanting to calm her down as an eight-year-old like I remember thinking I was now alone and I was going to be taking care of myself but I somehow knew that I was gonna be OK about it.” Do I need to point out the credibility gap there?
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