The presiding justice of California’s appeals court in Sacramento agreed to retire as part of his punishment for delaying decisions in some 200 cases, a sweeping mix of civil lawsuits involving high-profile parties along with criminal cases resulting in long sentences.

In one of the most egregious cases, a multiyear delay in the appeal process put a hold on restitution payments to victims of a large securities fraud scheme.

At least one victim in that scheme, a 78-year-old Santa Rosa woman eligible for as much as $50,000 in compensation, died before receiving her payout, now-retired California attorney Jon Eisenberg said.

Delays at the Third District Court of Appeal also, according to Eisenberg, whose complaint set the disciplinary matter in motion, resulted in more than a dozen criminal defendants having their sentences reversed or reduced — after already serving them.

Justice Vance Raye stepped down last week from the Third District, part of a stipulated agreement with the Commission on Judicial Performance.

In its decision, the commission wrote that Raye “engaged in a pattern of delay in deciding around 200 appellate matters over a 10-year period.” At least four cases took more than seven years from appeal filing to a decision.

From January 2011 to March 2021, “Justice Raye failed to properly exercise his administrative and supervisory authority to provide a forum for the expeditious resolution of appellate disputes,” the commission wrote.

Raye had been the administrative presiding justice of the Third District since 2010, after joining the court as an associate justice in 1991.

The watchdog commission wrote that the long delays created prejudice in several cases decided by Sacramento-area trial courts.

An attorney for Raye did not respond to a request for comment.

Eisenberg, who retired at the end of 2021 after 43 years as an appellate lawyer in the Bay Area, said he filed a complaint to the commission in January 2021, then spent weeks helping an investigator uncover the scale of delays.

Eisenberg said he helped uncover 18 criminal cases with appeal decisions made between 2018 and 2020 in which Raye reduced or reversed sentences for defendants who had already served them in full.

“This is a cardinal sin of appellate judging,” Eisenberg said in a phone interview. “To reverse a sentence of imprisonment after it’s been served, is just a travesty.”

The longest delay recorded, involving a lawsuit filed by the Environmental Law Foundation against the State Water Resources Control Board, was assigned to Raye in September 2011 and left pending for nearly eight years, with the matter dismissed in June 2019. The case involved a dispute over groundwater regulations in Siskiyou County.

The commission’s report said Raye’s delays affected the outcome of at least six cases.

Three of those six were appeals of decisions handed down in Sacramento County, and one was an appeal of a decision in a wage case involving Raley’s supermarkets.

The case involving an elderly fraud victim dying while awaiting a payout stemmed from a conviction out of Shasta County.

Defendant James Stanley Koenig, of Redding, was convicted and sentenced in 2013 to more than 42 years in state prison for running a $250 million Ponzi scheme.

Attorneys for Koenig filed an appeal in 2013, which was fully briefed in 2016 and finally adjudicated in December 2020 by Justice William Murray Jr., an associate justice under Raye. Murray affirmed the initial judgment.

Eisenberg said that victims in the scheme — dozens of residents, many of them in their 70s and 80s — were each eligible for up to $50,000 from the California Victims of Corporate Fraud Compensation Fund.

This was contingent on the appeal court affirming the judgment.

“Between 2018 and 2020, some two dozen victims wrote letters to the Court of Appeal imploring the court to expedite the appeal’s adjudication because the delay was preventing their recovery of restitution,” Eisenberg wrote in an email.

The case does not appear on the list of 200 prepared by the commission because it was decided by Murray. But the letters went to Raye as the presiding justice, Eisenberg said.

They went unanswered, he said.

“Several told the court that ‘this restitution would substantially increase the quality of my remaining life’ and “I would like to see this resolved in my lifetime,’ ” Eisenberg wrote.

One victim, Linda Lee Trapanese, died in 2019 at age 78, according to Eisenberg. She never received restitution.

Eisenberg last year wrote a petition to the California Supreme Court regarding the delayed appeals in the People v. Koenig case.

His petition included declarations from two other victims, both 81 years old. One of the two finally received a $20,000 payout from the compensation fund last year; the other is awaiting $20,000 following a clerical error, Eisenberg said.

According to the disciplinary order, a civil case in which the Environmental Council of Sacramento sued Sacramento County regarding an 800-home development in Rancho Cordova was assigned to Raye in February 2015 but not decided until January 2020.