12. It Happens Here
Greece is undergoing a judicial corruption scandal. It's hard to find any news about it in English, but here's some, and a little more, and some more, and a vivid blog post from December 4, 2005, that tells us that "Dozens of judges, prosecutors, and some high-profile lawyers have been implicated in a many-tentacled, tortuous scheme involving bribes and under-the-table deals to allow criminals to get lighter sentences, or go free, with the least amount of trouble from the courts."
It would be nice to believe that it doesn't happen here. But the striking feature about some of the most outrageous recent judicial scandals is that they were uncovered by accident. Louisiana's Judge Ronald Bodenheimer was caught conspiring to plant OxyContin in an antagonist's car only because the feds happened to be investigating the bail bonding system. The child pornography allegedly stored on the courthouse computer of California's Judge Richard C. Kline would never have come to light but for a hacker who turned the information he gleaned over to authorities.
Bribery scandals come to light only when a lawyer touched up by a judge is brave enough to put his or her career on the line by wearing a wire. In the 1950s, when a lawyer exposed the outrageous corruption in the Oklahoma Supreme Court, that court disbarred him. Even after his allegations were proven accurate, the judges of the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals refused to permit him to practice his profession in their court, as described here (see dissent). The use of "professional discipline" to intimidate critics of the judiciary isn't a relic of the past, as one Indiana lawyer discovered to his cost. (This is why I haven't written about the New Mexico courts, of course.)
Common sense tells you that for every instance of judicial criminality uncovered by accident, there are hundreds that aren't. For every lawyer brave enough to chance his right to practice his profession, there must be dozens who conclude it's cheaper just to pay up.
Now imagine yourself with inside information about a Greek-type scandal, involving prosecutors and judges mutually on the take. Would you want to cooperate with the prosecutor's office in its investigation? Would you want to testify in court against the malefactors? Greece's scandal should remind us of the scandals we haven't had yet.
Saturday, December 10, 2005 at 03:38PM in Crimes of Judging
Reader Comments (1)