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Cutler wins his lawsuit against lg camera, but can't collect

By Jason Sweeney

Los Gatos Camera has shut its doors for good. The camera shop was at the center of a discrimination lawsuit filed by Saratogan Mitch Cutler. Cutler won the lawsuit and Los Gatos Camera was ordered to pay $51,024.99. The camera shop owner, David Muston, has not paid up and has declared that Los Gatos Camera is bankrupt. Muston closed the camera shop on April 12.

Muston and his wife have been in the camera business for about 20 years. They opened Los Gatos Camera in 2002 after running a camera shop in Carmel. Muston's wife, Gail Muston, said she and her husband are getting out of the business and that they planned to move to Utah April 28.

Cutler sued Los Gatos Camera after bringing photographs to the camera shop in September 2005. Muston had refused to make copies of old photographs of Cutler's Jewish ancestors.

Muston said he refused to make the copies because he believed the photographs depicted members of the Irgun, which he said was a terrorist organization. Muston said he has no prejudice against Jews, but a strong belief in nonviolence prohibited him from making copies of Irgun members.

Superior Court Judge Marc Poche ruled Feb. 8 that Los Gatos Camera had violated the Unruh Civil Rights Act and must pay Cutler $4,000, plus attorney's fees of $43,880, and additional costs of $3,144.99. The Unruh Act prohibits discrimination against any person on the basis of race, creed, religion, color, sex or national origin.

After the ruling, Muston said he would appeal. He said he was unable to defend himself in court because Cutler had not sued him personally, but instead had sued the Los Gatos Camera corporation. Since he did not have an attorney and was not allowed to defend the corporation himself, he lost the lawsuit on a default judgment, he said.

However, Muston did not file an appeal. He arrived at a hearing in April with a notice of bankruptcy.

Both Gail and David Muston said losing the lawsuit was not why they closed their shop. The digitalization of photography and a resulting dropoff in business was the cause, David Muston said last February.

Gail Muston said she and her husband have received support from their customers, and that neither she nor her husband are anti-Semitic.

"I never would have expected that the guy would have run away from his payments and shut down his business rather than pay the fine and the court costs," Cutler said. "It all could have been solved with an apology from the beginning."

"From my point of view, if my relatives are in heaven looking down, they could be proud that this grandchild learned from his forebears that hate and mean-spiritedness need to be dealt with and not walked away from," Cutler said. "If you are still thinking about something days and months after it happened to you, then obviously it's an important issue to you. You have to ask yourself if you want to do something or not. In my case, I knew for me this was the right thing to do."