Judicial opportunity

Why aren’t judges and their families making more money?

As you may have read, ProPublica last week reported that it and a bunch of students looked at rulings by more than 1,200 judges and discovered that dozens of them failed to recuse themselves from cases “involving familial financial connections.”

Dozens!

Why that could be as many as 3 or 4%! Yikes!

Clearly there’s a serious issue here: Why aren’t the rest of those judges getting in on this? Don’t they realize they could be buying summer homes and cruising on yachts?

I blame a misguided view of what “appearance of propriety” means. Too many judges think taking money from one side of a case makes it look like they’re biased.

Well, they are biased if they do that, but it doesn’t have to look that way. Transparency is the key.

All a judge has to do, for example, is announce that their politician or lobbyist spouse has taken money from one side of a case. Then the other side knows what it has to pay to even the playing field (or playing court).

We can’t have a fair and open justice system unless we know what it costs.

Admittedly, this is unfair to litigants who don’t have disposable income to spend on justice. In criminal cases, this will often be innocent or incompetent defendants who haven’t profited from crime.

There are, however, alternatives for relatively indigent parties. The Judicial Council of the Ninth Circuit, for example, recently offered some examples in an order that publicly reprimanded a federal judge named Joshua Kindred.

The order was based on a 105-page committee report that contained a whopping 1,039 pages of exhibits. That alone should be grounds for impeachment. A judge who leaves a thousand pieces of evidence lying around for committees to find is obviously not cut out for the job.

Among many other things, Kindred apparently got nude photos from a prosecutor. That’s got to be worth as much as a major bribe. Pity the homely defendants this prosecutor goes after.

Defense counsel should consider setting up Only Fans accounts for their clients with all-access passwords for preferred judges.

By the way, I highly recommend reading the Kindred Ninth Circuit order. It’s lots of fun.

You’ll come across sentences like this: “And then he performed oral sex on me.”

I know you’re going to read it now.

Free elections? Every now and then it’s nice to see that chutzpah doesn’t always win.

Sanity, at least for a moment, has won out in the State of Utah where the state’s Supreme Court has ruled on this question: If voters pass an initiative that reforms the government, can the state Legislature just repeal it and get rid of the reform it doesn’t like?

You’d think the answer would be obvious but what we got was a unanimous 84-page opinion featuring a laundry list of amicus filers — everyone from the ACLU to a trio of former governors of other states.

My favorite was the “additional attorneys for amicus curiae in support of neither party.” I have no idea why they decided to weigh in if they didn’t care who won. I guess they didn’t want to be left out.

This came about because voters in Utah passed an initiative to end partisan gerrymandering. The State Legislature then repealed the law and partisan gerrymandered. Litigation, of course, ensued.

Can you guess what one of the Legislature’s defenses was?

This is from the ruling: “Defendants argued that the courts could not intervene because these claims involve ‘nonjusticiable political questions.’”

In other words, they can ignore voters and then they can ignore judges. Amazingly, this argument didn’t work.

There was also this: “In the alternative, defendants argued that the state constitutional rights invoked by plaintiffs — the right to free elections, to vote, to free speech and association, and to the uniform operation of laws — do not prohibit partisan gerrymandering.”

Just because your vote is meaningless doesn’t mean it isn’t free.