LOS ANGELES (CN) – When new Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge Debra Archuleta was a young woman, she had a brush with death that would change the course of her life.
“I was 19 years old and I had a boyfriend who had anger-management issues and threw me into a wall,” Archuleta told Courthouse News in an interview in downtown Los Angeles late last year.
Archuleta suffered from headaches that worsened over the next two years. One day, her head hurt so badly she realized she could delay no longer. She drove herself to a hospital for a CT scan that showed a blood clot in her brain that was the size of an egg. Her doctor recommended surgery for a subdural hematoma.
“It wasn't until the doctor had done the neurosurgery that he said I had a trauma to the brain two years earlier,” Archuleta said. “I knew exactly what it was because that was the only head trauma I'd ever had.”
As a teenager, Archuleta had dreamed of becoming a lawyer. Though she was living at home in Orange County and was enrolled in community college she realized that it was time to go after her dream.
“After this particular incident, I sort of made a pact with myself and God that if I survived this, that I would move myself forward,” Archuleta said.
She came from a family where the women were teachers and the men worked in law enforcement. Some of them challenged her, albeit with love and respect. Her Uncle Mose, a Denver sheriff, told his niece there was no way she would finish law school. He bet her $100 and wrote an IOU on a scrap of paper, signing it with the same distinct initials he used to brand his horses and emblazon his boots and saddles.
Archuleta could not have proved him more wrong.
After close to three decades in the District Attorney’s Office as a violent-crimes prosecutor, this past November more than 1.6 million people voted for the 57-year-old to fill a seat on the Superior Court, the largest trial court in the nation. On Jan. 3, she took the bench at the Metropolitan Courthouse in downtown LA.
While her Uncle Mose’s words nudged her into action, her father Alfred Archuleta had an even greater influence on her. Now 88, he was with his daughter on election night, along with her husband Jay, a school teacher, her son Jake, a high school senior, and friends and supporters. Her daughter Alyssa, visiting from Chicago where she is studying public policy, monitored the results of her mom’s race online.
During an interview last month at a cafe in the basement of the Kenneth Hahn Hall of Administration, Archuleta recalled how her father had grown up in Southern Colorado in a house with dirt floors. As a Hispanic, he had experienced discrimination at whites-only dances. He worked hard to help the family, picking peas and fruit with his father in the summer while his mother cleaned houses and diapered other people’s children. Later, he would enlist as a serviceman during the Korean War, spending more than a month in a foxhole during the coldest winter. He graduated from college on the GI Bill and became the first bilingual probation officer in Orange County, Archuleta said.
