172. Injustice court

A couple readers - me-mo and Darrel Jiles - have pointed out the great New York Times series on upstate justice courts.  Read it quick, before it disappears behind the Times archive bulwark.  Here's part 1, part 2 and part 3.  (Notice I said "read it quick", not "read it quickly" - the latter isn't possible, I'm afraid.)

There are too many hilarious / hair-raising episodes to recount.  A blog like this can almost pick out paragraphs at random, like this one:

[A] 76-year-old Elmira man who contested a speeding ticket in Newfield, outside Ithaca, was jailed without even a warning for three days in 2003 because he called the sheriff’s deputy a liar.

Or this one:

A 17-year-old girl had stayed out all night, then fought with her family and wound up facing a harassment charge in court in Alexandria Bay, a busy tourist village on the St. Lawrence River. The justice, Charles A. Pennington, a boat hauler with 23 years on the bench, took her not-guilty plea on a Sunday in 2003.

But when told that the girl had no place to go, the judge did not send her to a women’s shelter or alert social service officials, as local justices typically do. He took her home.

I liked the mother's comment about that one: "Sure, he can tell the difference between the stern and the bow,” Ms. Rogers said. “But what does that have to do with making major judgments about people’s lives?”

But what's most startling about the series isn't that the justices misbehave, but that a state as rich and lawyer-ridden as New York begs them to.  "[T]justices’ pay is often meager — as little as $850 a year".   A retiree could make more than that as a crossing guard. 

As for their legal training, "Those without law degrees must take six days of classes at the start. Lawyers do not have to attend, but all justices must take a 12-hour refresher course once a year."  One justice told the toothless disciplinary board: "I'm almost like a pilot flying by the seat of my pants."  The difference, of course, is that when the pilot crashes, he goes down with the plane.

Another justice showed an even deeper insight, though it doesn't appear the Times reporters grasped what they were hearing.  They (only the male reporter got a byline, but a female "contributed reporting", whatever that means, exactly) told us about Justice Thomas Buckley of Dannemora (closer to Montreal than most of LA's suburbs are to the La Brea tar pits), who ordered the jailing of 

a 19-year-old charged with a misdemeanor, even though the law required him to set bail. In an interview, Mr. Buckley explained that the young man had been a troublemaker “ever since he was born.”

Like many small-town justices, he said many of his decisions were down-to-earth solutions. “You’ve got to use your own judgment,” he said. “That’s why they call us judges. The law is not always right.”

The real small-town atmosphere can be found in there, and that can be a strength of justice courts (though I wouldn't expect the 19-year-old to agree - but then, what can you expect of demon spawn?).  When two neighbors are squabbling over grass clippings, like Kevin Brown and the millionaire next door, having a tribal elder, some universally-respected older person, tell them to stop being so childish might be a whole lot more effective than spending thousands on mutually-spiteful discovery motions.

But the other thing the judge was telling the reporters was that the justices do something other than enforce the law.  They're living exponents of the Judge Stroessner principle (see post 159), semi-fossilized remnants of the style of judging once practiced by Cro-Magnon clan chieftains, dispensing a purely personal kind of justice.  

The law exists to restrain the powerful, and inside a courtroom all the power is concentrated in a single person.  When Justice Buckley said, "That's why they call us judges.  The law is not always right", he wasn't just giving a sound bite of bumptious ignorance, as the Times reporters seem to have assumed.  He was expressing what all Gullivers feel about being tied down.