60. How do you fire a judge?
It's hard to read about retired Rhode Island traffic court judge Marjorie Yashar without a twinge of sympathy. She seems to have had some pretty persistent demons to battle. Articles in the Providence Journal record her arrest for allegedly battering her husband, a heart surgeon, and throwing papers around his medical office; her arrest for allegedly colliding with another traffic judge's car in the traffic court parking lot(!), and then driving away without leaving a note; her screaming at police officers in the hearing of the media about not wanting to be in the newspapers; her leave of absence to attend to psychiatric issues.
This past week, Judge Yashar was arrested again for attacking her husband, and this time she spent the night in a Palm Beach Gardens, Florida slammer. (Palm Beach Gardens jail guards are used to dealing with a high class of prisoner. It's the place where ex-Montreal Expo closer Jeff Reardon got arrested, and the town recently saw one of its doctors sentenced in a gruesome fake-Botox case.)
But sympathy is tempered a bit when you read that her own chief judge filed a disciplinary complaint against Judge Yashar, and alleged that "she worked full days less than half of the time in 2004 while taking 12 full sick days and 93 half sick days." For this she was paid $108,867 a year, with entitlement to receive the same amount for the rest of her life as a pension.
Meanwhile, in east Tennessee, Thomas A. Austin, a General Sessions (= misdemeanors and small claims) judge with 26 years of service on the bench, was charged in a kickback scheme. Allegedly he received kickbacks for sentencing traffic offenders to attend a certain driving school.
The amazing thing in cases like this is how long a sitting judge can get away with it. You wouldn't have had to tell the people who took off work to appear in Judge Yashar's court, only to be told to come back in a week or a month, that she wasn't working full days. And the thing about extortion is that it takes two to tango. One of Judge Austin's alleged extortion targets was a Kingston city councilman. That type of hubris doesn't develop overnight.
A Knoxville News-Sentinel story began this way:
In Roane County Attorney Tom McFarland's view, it takes two things to take down a judge suspected of being corrupt.
A third thing is an investigative body willing to look into the matter, and a fourth is a prosecutor willing to take on the case. That's a lot.
There's a tendency for lawyers to think: Well, thank goodness they were just traffic court judges. At least they weren't real judges. But if they had been more powerful, would they have gotten away with even more?
Saturday, January 28, 2006 at 11:08PM in Crimes of Judging, Judging the judges
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