Success story of a Filipino judge in America

by Laura Ernde
(Lifted from The Daily Journal)

Judge Efren Iglesia escaped the Marcos regime in the nick of time, and then capitalized on his strong work ethic to build his legal career.

As editor of his college newspaper in the Philippines, Efren Iglesia wrote articles criticizing the increasingly authoritarian regime of Ferdinand Marcos.

Iglesia didn’t consider himself a radical back then, in the late 1960s, but his friends feared for his safety and convinced him to drop out during his senior year and flee to the United States. He ended up moving in with a Central Valley family that had hosted him as an exchange student a few years earlier.

It proved to be the most important decision he ever made.

Iglesia, now a Monterey County Superior Court judge, later found out that many of his former companions, including his best friend from high school and student leaders at his college, had ended up dead due to political violence. He blames the Marcos government.

In 1972, a year after Iglesia left his native country, Marcos established martial law. Many years later at a party in San Jose, someone who had worked in the Marcos government confirmed that Iglesia’s name had been on a list of professors, students and union members to be taken into custody. Marcos remained in power until 1986, when he was deposed and exiled to Hawaii.

Iglesia became a lawyer and judge through a series of fortuitous events and a lot of hard work.

Because English was his second language, Iglesia worried he would fall behind in his studies, so he checked into how much time other students spent studying – and then doubled that. When he graduated in 1977, Iglesia only had one shot at passing the State Bar Exam. Failure would have meant deportation. So he hunkered down at the home of a friend. He typed up study outlines on large pieces of butcher paper that he hung all around the house.

The hard work paid off, and Iglesia went to work as a contract public defender in Madera County for three years before switching to civil law. He spent 28 years working as a deputy county counsel, first in Imperial County and then in Monterey County, before Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger appointed him to the bench in 2007.

One recent afternoon, Iglesia was sentencing a first-time offender who had been convicted by a jury of disturbing the peace after hurling some homophobic slurs at his victim. Instead of giving the man a jail sentence, Iglesia urged the lawyers to find the man a sensitivity training program to attend. “The objective is to come out of this a better person than when you went into it,” he told the defendant.

As a deputy county counsel, Iglesia worked on a number of cases that resulted in published appellate decisions.

Career Highlights:

Appointed by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger to Monterey County Superior Court, 2007; senior deputy county counsel specializing in land use, planning and zoning and environmental law litigation, 1983-2007; deputy county counsel and assistant county counsel, Imperial County, 1979-1983; contract public defender, Gendron & Gendron, Madera, 1976-1979. Law School: San Joaquin College of Law, 1976 Age: 59