June 5, 2019 – Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Susan M. Speer’s last day on the bench will be June 21, ending a 21-year judicial career.
Speer was appointed March 12, 1998, to the Los Angeles Municipal Court by then-Gov. Pete Wilson. She had been a deputy district attorney since 1981.
Announcing her retirement, the judge said that the “most compelling reason” for retiring is to spend more time with her four “adorable grandsons, ages 2, 3, 4 and 5, who live too darn far away.”
Speer was named the San Fernando Valley Bar Association’s Judge of the Year in 2011. She and her husband, William Speer—who retired as a employed by the Los Angeles Police Department detective in 2009—have been active in the SFVBA’s Valley Community Legal Foundation and were honored for their volunteer work in 2017.
An article by retired Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Michelle Rosenblatt in the June 2017 issue of Valley Lawyer said Speer “is known for her wisdom, her legal reasoning, her poise, and her professionalism, both in and out of her courtroom.”
Judge Speer, the article continued, “Defines the reason why we volunteer to work together to help our community. She has worked on many projects each year, always investigating new ways for VCLF to raise donations for scholarships and grants, working tirelessly with her husband Bill and others on the golf tournaments and Gala auctions, introducing honorees, working day and night on the program for the CBS New York Street Gala, and so much more. Between her volunteer work for VCLF and for her court committee work. Judge Speer spends a great deal of her non-judicial time giving Pack to the San Fernando Valley community.”
Before becoming a prosecutor, Speer served as a neonatal ICU nurse—and even after joining the District Attorney’s Office, she regularly provided care at night for infants at Los Angeles’s Children’s Hospital.