judicial ethics

Indeed He Deserved All Of It, But Denny Hastert’s Sentencing Hearing Was A Legal And Ethical Travesty

/ Jack Marshall / 22 Comments

Hastert sentencing

“I am deeply ashamed to be standing here,” former Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert  told a judge yesterday at his sentencing hearing.  “I know why I am here … I mistreated some of the athletes that I coached.”

Wait…what? That’s not why Hastert was in court at all. He was before a judge for one reason: he violated banking laws and lied to the F.B.I.. The fact that he was a sexual predator and molested members of the wrestling team he coached many years ago is not the reason he was in court. It couldn’t be. The statute of limitations on all of those crimes, horrible crimes all, had expired. Hastert couldn’t be charged, tried or convicted of any of them.

I don’t understand why this hasn’t been the focus of the coverage of Hastert’s ordeal yesterday. Why did the judge think it was appropriate to “angrily” lecture him about his crimes that in the eyes of the law he must be considered innocent of by the legal system, because he cannot be found guilty of these crimes any more?

“‘If Denny Hastert could do it, anyone could do it,'” U.S. District Judge Thomas M. Durkin said. “Nothing is more stunning than to have the words ‘serial child molester’ and ‘speaker of the House’ in the same sentence.” Well, that’s very interesting, Judge. If  the late Ted Kennedy had been before you to be sentenced for, say, just a wild hypothetical, a drunk driving charge, would you lecture him about letting Mary Jo Kopechne drown in his car?

I may have missed it, but when O.J. Simpson was sentenced for burglary, I don’t recall the judge asking him to confess to murdering Nicole and Ron…did that happen?

Earlier this month, the judge and prosecutors allowed the trial to become a proxy trial for a crime that wasn’t on the docket, with prosecutors hammering at graphic details about the sex-abuse, describing how Hastert would sit in a recliner in the locker room with a direct view of the showers. The victims, prosecutors said, were boys between 14 and 17. Hastert was in his 20s and 30s. This is relevant to the charges against Hastert how, exactly? Answer: They aren’t. Continue reading →

The Ethics Of Judges In Love

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

gavel heart

When  attorney Joe Foley represented a client in a matter before Judge Scott Drazewski in early 2011, he was unaware that the married judge was involved a year-long secret romantic affair with Judge Rebecca Foley, the attorney’s wife.

Now both Illinois judges  have been disciplined by state legal ethics authorities for failing to reveal their romantic relationship and violating multiple ethics rules as a result. The ethics commission imposed a four-month unpaid suspension on Drazewski for “egregious” judicial ethics violations, and censured Judge Foley for assisting, aiding, abetting, and not reporting his violation or their affair. Continue reading →

The Seventh Annual Ethics Alarms Awards, Part II: The Worst of Ethics 2015

/ Jack Marshall / 17 Comments

Donald and Hillary

Ethics Corrupters of the Year

(Awarded to the unethical public figure whose prominence, popularity and success most corrupts the public’s ethical values)

A Tie: Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump.  Nobody else is close.

I’m sorry that these two are so dominating the awards. They also dominated the posts last year. If they dominate the awards next year, God Save The United States of America…

Double Standard Of The Year

The deference accorded to anti-white protesters on dozens of college campuses, not just by spineless administrators but much of the news media. Similar protests, conduct and rhetoric by white students would be immediately condemned for what it would be: blatant racism.

 Lie of the Year

Hands Up! Don’t shoot! The lie was uttered in 2014, but acquired new status after the Justice Department unexpectedly and definitively determined that the evidence did not support the inflammatory myth that Mike Brown was shot dead in Ferguson while trying to surrender to Officer Wilson. Never mind: the lie is part of the manifesto of Black Lives Matter and similar groups; it is still alluded to by activists and shameless politicians; it still divides the nation and focuses hate on police departments; and it has contributed to getting police officers killed while making communities more vulnerable to crime. It may be the Lie of the Decade.

Uncivil U.S. Official of the Year

Justice Antonin Scalia, who crossed all lines of judicial restraint, collegiality and civility when he excoriated his colleague, Justice Kennedy, who was the fifth vote in the majority of SCOTUS’s ruling  that same-sex marriage was a Constitutional right no state could deny, with this comment in a footnote:

“If, even as the price to be paid for a fifth vote, I ever joined an opinion for the Court that began: ‘The Constitution promises liberty to all within its reach, a liberty that includes certain specific rights that allow persons, within a lawful realm, to define and express their identity,’ I would hide my head in a bag. The Supreme Court of the United States has descended from the disciplined legal reasoning of John Marshall and Joseph Story to the mystical aphorisms of the fortune cookie.”

——U.S. Supreme Court Justice Scalia,

 

The Jesse Jackson Award 

(For the Year’s Worst Amateur Diplomat)

Barack Obama.  I know, this is snarkier than I like to be in these awards, but the signature diplomatic measure of the past year, the astounding, one-sided, dangerous and Munich-like deal with Iran, could only be the product of an ideological tyro placing wishes and hopes over diplomatic responsibility, and not for the first time. For most Presidents, trading dangerous terrorists for a deserter would be nadir. History has seen many tragedies seeded by world leaders with no diplomatic skills: the disastrous Treaty of Versailles,  Potsdam, and the treaty that this one most resembles, negotiated by the hapless Neville Chamberlain. We can only hope that the worst case scenario doesn’t materialize, but if it does not, it will be moral luck.

Most Unethical Sports League

New England Patriots quarterback Tom Brady speaks at Salem State University in Salem, Massachusetts, May 7, 2015. REUTERS/Charles Krupa/Pool ORG XMIT: BKS06

The NFL, for the third year in a row. “Concussion,” Tom Brady, Deflategate, more evidence that NFL players are slowly killing themselves with brain damage, Johnny Manziel.  What a great sport pro football is.

Sports Cheat of the Year

Tom Brady, New England Patriots ball-deflating quarterback.  Brady eventually avoided punishment because the NFL botched both its investigation and its imposition of penalties, but his smirking, cynical comments about the incident made it clear that he thinks cheating is no big deal, and most of his fans agree.

Not surprisingly, Brady supports Donald Trump.

Unethical Lawyers of the Year

Law Firm Division:  Lawyers Stephen Diaco, Robert Adams and Adam Filthaut of the Florida firm Adams & Diaco were found to have “maliciously” set up the drunken-driving arrest of their opposing counsel in a  high-profile defamation trial. The plot involved a comely paralegal and a cooperative DUI cop. Last I checked, it looked like all three lawyers would be disbarred for life.

Scary Lawyer Division: California lawyer Douglas Crawford  held a can of pepper spray a yard from the face of the opposing lawyer saying, “I will pepper-spray you if you get out of hand.” Then the lawyer pointed a stun gun at Traver’s head and said, “If that doesn’t quell you, this is a flashlight that turns into a stun gun.” To show he wasn’t kidding, Crawford discharged the stun gun the startled lawyer’s face.

Hard-working Lawyer Division: Massachusetts lawyer,  Karen Andrade, was  charged with prostitution after a police investigated a report by a suspicious neighbor and  found online reviews of both the lawyer’s legal services and her escort services

Celebrity Lawyer Division: Michael Cohen,  one of Donald Trump’s lawyers, told the Daily Beast that it was legally impossible for a man to rape his wife. He was only a couple of decades and many court cases behind on his research. That piece of legal scholarship came after he had threatened the website’s staff in language usually associated with loan sharks and pimps.

Unethical Prosecutor of the Year

Mosby

Baltimore’s City Attorney Marilyn Mosby
Continue reading →

Unethical Judge Of The Month: Florida Circuit Judge Jack Schramm Cox; Runner Up: Wisconsin Judge Philip Kirk

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

JudgeFor a judge, you just can’t get any more incompetent than this.

In Florida, Circuit Judge Jack Schramm Cox ordered the Palm Beach Post to scrub a previously published story from its website. This is prior restraint, or the government preventing publication based on content. The order violates the First Amendment; it isn’t merely unconstitutional, it is incredibly unconstitutional. Concluded Constitutional Law professor and blogger Jonathan Turley in his usual restrained manner,  “The utter lack of legal judgment (and knowledge) shown by Cox in this order is deeply troubling.”

It’s not troubling. It’s ridiculous. Continue reading →

Unethical Judge Of The Month, But Not For What You May Think

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

ShatteredGavelShortly after the the Supreme Court’s same-sex marriage decision, Obergefell v. Hodges, Utah began placing foster children with same-sex couples. An 8-month-old girl was placed in August with Rebecca A. Peirce, 34, and April M. Hoagland, 38, who are married and live near  Salt Lake City with Peirce’s two biological children.

The couple hoped to eventually adopt the child, but during what was supposed to be a routine hearing on the foster parent arrangement the juvenile court judge, Scott Johansen, issued an order that the baby be taken from them and given to a heterosexual couple so that she could be raised in a home with heterosexual parents. As his justification, Judge Johansen said that research he had seen indicated that children  do better in heterosexual homes. The order cited the court’s “belief that research has shown that children are more emotionally and mentally stable when raised by a mother and father in the same home.” There have indeed been studies that support that position, but they have been sharply criticized by social scientists. Continue reading →

In Alabama, A Blood Sucking Judge

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments
Judge: 'If you don't have money, you can pay your fine in BLOOD!' Wait...WHAT?

Judge: ‘If you don’t have money, you can pay your fine in BLOOD!’ Wait…WHAT?

Not to hold you in suspense, this is unethical. In fact, it’s incredibly unethical.

In Alabama,  Perry County Circuit Judge Marvin Wiggins is prevented by Alabama law from jailing those who owe a debt to the state.t—debtors prison was abolished long ago. Wagner, however, has been recorded in his court telling indigent parties owing money  that they have the option of contributing their blood or paying up, and if they opt for neither, “he sheriff will have handcuffs waiting” for them.

The Southern Poverty Law Center has filed a judicial ethics compliant, Explained the SPLC on its website.

“Defendants in more than 500 criminal cases, which can be as minor as hunting violations, were mailed notices to appear before Wiggins on Sept. 17. Dozens showed up to pack the courtroom for a hearing on the restitution, fines, court costs and fees they still owed. When Wiggins took the bench, he offered defendants with empty pockets and full veins an option.Wiggins said to consider the option of giving blood “a discount rather than putting you in jail.” However, no one who donated blood received any “discount” on their court debt; they simply received a reprieve from being thrown in jail. Most of the people in the courtroom still owed thousands of dollars to the court – even after years of making payments, according to the complaint. Virtually every case included fees that indigent defendants had been charged to recoup money for their court-appointed counsel, the complaint states. Without speaking to the judge about their financial situation, many indigent defendants gave blood out of fear of going to jail.”

The complaint outlines several ethics violations, SPLC says, including failure to demonstrate professional competence and failure to uphold the integrity of the law. It also describes how forced blood donations violate the U.S. and Alabama constitutions. I would think that most educated American could name several of these. Due Process? No law exists making forfeiture of blood a legal penalty for anything. Cruel and usual punishment, per the 8th Amendment?
 Continue reading →

KABOOM! Justice Sonia Sotomayor Is A Supreme Ethics Dunce

/ Jack Marshall / 19 Comments

HeadExplode3

Sonia Sotomayor is far from my favorite Supreme Court Justice, as she is the court’s most vocal advocate for pro-minority discrimination and a practitioner of touchy-feely law. Still, I assumed she had integrity, or at least my skull did,  because it exploded all over the place when it learned the truth.

Federal employment law forbids employers from having unpaid positions unless they meet stringent requirements of providing genuine educational experience to such workers while not personally (as opposed to professionally) benefiting from their services. Nevertheless, Sotomayor has used  unpaid interns as her servants —not law clerks or researchers, but servants—since 2010. Continue reading →

If Anyone Starts Paying Attention To What Bernie Sanders Is Saying, He’s In Trouble

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-VT, gestures as he speaks at the Californi Democrats State Convention in Sacramento, Calif., Saturday, April 30, 2011. Sanders called on Democrats to work together to stop what he calls the GOP's attack on the middle class.(AP Photo/Rich Pedroncelli)

So far, Bernie Sanders’ major function in the Democratic presidential nomination race is as a gauge of how badly Hillary Clinton is doing. The same function could be served by a wooden spoon or an Elmo doll, but Bernie will do: as Hillary’s machinations and lies about them sloooowly convince even Democrats that she should not be allowed near any office that includes a button labeled “Power,” he rises in the polls. So far, this had not required anyone actually thinking about Sanders himself, but the contents of a recent speech to a throng in Portland, Oregon should be cause for alarm. Sanders managed to announce his willingness to rig the Separation of Powers and eliminate judicial independence as well as his contempt for judicial ethics and his ignorance of how the Supreme Court works, all at once. All of this indicates that Sanders really isn’t qualified to be a U.S. Senator, much less President.

In his speech, to the sounds of cheers, Bernie shouted, “My nominees to the U.S. Supreme Court will in fact, have a litmus test and that test will be that they will have to tell the American people that their first order of business on the Supreme Court will be to overturn Citizens United.” Those cheers are interesting. My guess would be that not a single member of the audience, and quite possibly not even Bernie himself, has read the decision. Most people who turn red in the face and twitch when one mentions Citizens United do so because they think that it stands for the proposition that “corporations are people.”

It actually stands for the rather reasonable principle that the First Amendment protects the rights of people who band together for common purposes, and who wish to use such organizations to express their opinions regarding elections. The decision forbade the government from restricting independent political expenditures by a nonprofit corporation, and by extension to for-profit corporations, labor unions and other associations. Among other things, the law that was struck down in the case allowed the Federal Government to ban books and films based on content. Continue reading →

Now A Judge Is Punishing Innocent Citizens Because He Doesn’t Like Gay Marriage

/ Jack Marshall / 30 Comments

atherton

Meet Hamilton County (Tennessee) Chancellor Jeffrey Atherton, a local judge who is throwing a high-profile tantrum to show that he doesn’t agree with the U. S. Supreme Court’s same-sex marriage decision. Atherton denied a divorce petition last week, but not really because of the case at hand.. After hearing from seven witnesses and going through 77 exhibits, he rejected the requested divorce by Thomas Bumgardner and his wife, Pamela, stating that the Supreme Court’s ruling declaring gay marriages a right destroyed Tennessee’s ability to determine what constitutes marriage or divorce.

No, it doesn’t make sense.

 

Atherton said the Supreme Court must clarify “when a marriage is no longer a marriage”  and until it does, Tennessee courts are unable to handle  marriage and divorce litigation.  “The conclusion reached by this Court is that Tennesseans have been deemed by the U.S. Supreme Court to be incompetent to define and address such keystone/central institutions such as marriage, and, thereby, at minimum, contested divorces,” Atherton wrote.

 Or the short version: “I am an asshole with power!”
Continue reading →

From The “I Told You So” Files: Judge Kopf Finally Decides To “STFU”

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment
There go de judge!

There go de judge!

Last year, I wrote a post about the intemperate blogging of Judge Richard G. Kopf, a senior district court judge on the U.S. District Court for the District of Nebraska. Actually intemperate doesn’t quite describe it: in his criticism of the Supreme Court’s decision in the Hobby Lobby case (the Ethics Alarms discussion is here) he wrote, “As the kids say, it is time for the Court to stfu” and linked to the Urban Dictionary so his less cool readers would take his meaning. I wrote:

That he did this on his blog, Hercules and the Umpire, doesn’t matter. It was in print, in public, and he’s a Federal judge. The obscenity came in the context of Judge Kopf’s criticism of the recent Hobby Lobby decision, but the context doesn’t matter either. There is no context in which it would be appropriate, judicial and ethical for a member of the judiciary to tell the Supreme Court of the United States to shut the fuck up. Nor does it matter that he used the texting code stfu rather than spelling out the words.

For a Federal judge to be openly disrespectful, uncivil and abusive to the top of the nation’s judicial branch is an assault on the rule of law, and undermines public respect for our institutions…. If the objective is to speed a complete breakdown in public respect for our institutions, divisive partisans like Kopf  and Wilson are doing a bang-up job. Neither they, nor you, nor I will like where this will lead if our leaders and officials don’t come to their senses.

This post, of all posts (I don’t think my position is rationally assailable, frankly) managed to get three commenters banned from the blog, essentially by 1) arguing that the Roberts Court doesn’t deserve the usual respect due to any court, and 2) telling me to “stfu.”  All were Judge Kopf acolytes who weren’t going to stay here to contribute anything positive, just uncivil, arrogant progressive lawyers who the judge-blogger had trained well.

Last month, a year after his obscene riff on SCOTUS, Kopf slipped again, writing that  “Senator Ted Cruz is not fit to be President.” The post wasn’t obscene; in fact it was  funny: Kopf, who had a year earlier condemned the Supreme Court for bias, argued that Cruz was not fit to be President because…

“Any rational person understands that we must accept decisions we like and decisions we don’t like when we ask the highest Court in the land to decide difficult hot button questions for an entire country. Judicial retention elections are fine for Nebraska and all the other states that have developed unique and parochial histories and traditions. However, we are talking about a federal Constitution–one that protects and covers 320 million people from Maine to Hawaii. Given the fractious divisions in our country that exist now (and many times in the past) and the obvious geographical fissures among the states (Red State/Blue State), judicial retention elections, fueled by whether a majority likes or dislikes particular Supreme Court rulings at a given point in time, is a formula for chaos and for further dividing our country into factions, a well placed fear held by the Founders.”

Wait…who is this guy? Surely he bears no relation to the sneering, potty-mouthed anti-Supreme Court critic I wrote about the last time? Continue reading →