213. Bubba judges
A World Bank paper from last year entitled "Transforming Judicial Systems in Europe and Central Asia" included this insight:
I added that paragraph break to make this passage of cushiony committee prose easier to read, and also to highlight the point that judicial corruption in Eastern European and Central Asian countries has increased with the dawning of judicial independence. As judiciaries are freed from heavy-handed political interference, they are also freed from the scrutiny of sincere and honest reformers.
I'm not sure this is a paradox, as the World Bank paper says. Rather, I think it just means that sometimes the good guys are in the judiciary and the bad guys are in the executive - and sometimes it's the other way around. Which, when you think about it, is less paradoxical than self-evident. The people who sincerely seek justice aren't necessarily the people working in the judicial system, while the people who want to use the legal system for their own personal or political advantage aren't necessarily the people working outside the judiciary.
The specific problems of the senescent American judicial system are quite different from the problems confronting the toddling states of the former Communist bloc. But that doesn't mean American judges never acquire a proprietary attitude toward our courts.
The Seattle Times recently ran a year-end retrospective on its tremendous series of articles detailing how Seattle's judicial-system insiders routinely sealed cases to avoid letting the people know what their high-status fellow citizens were up to. (See post 187.) The judges routinely violated rules regarding the sealing of cases in order to benefit People Like Us, such as fellow judges and big-wheel lawyers who would feel sullied if their legal woes were treated like those of the hoi polloi. (See post 157.)
My favorite: the judge who sealed a sex-abuse case involving a defense industry employee because the person would lose his security clearance if American intelligence agencies knew what a security risk he was. (See post 94.)
Then there's the one about KinderCare, whose website says: "We understand that you want to be certain you have made the best choice for your child." How can a big corporation ensure that parents feel they've made the best choice? Why, by preventing them from learning about a lawsuit that alleged KinderCare allowed a child to be removed from its facility by an unauthorized person, who sexually abused the child.
Doctors occasionally felt the love, too:
Now, from a quarterly-report standpoint, you can understand why a medical device manufacturer would prefer that it not be generally known that it allegedly paid money to hush up a claim that it had failed to level with federal regulators. What's interesting is that the judge shared that viewpoint.
The Times' editor-at-large claims the paper's series has had a beneficial effect on Washington judicial culture generally. I hope so - though it may be that the judges have just become more careful about leaving no paper trail.
Meanwhile, at the opposite end of the country, the Miami Herald has been running a similar series of articles about sealed cases (as described here), although - ironically enough - the paper seems to have sealed most of the articles in its pay-per-view archives. Here's a teaser:
(Mr. Buchanan continues to reap the benefits of wrongdoing by government officials, as somewhat circumspectly described in The Hill. For the unpleasant details, we can turn to The Economist: "Sarasota County, one of four (plus a fragment of a fifth) that make up the district, had an abnormally high rate of 'undervotes' in the race. More than 18,000 of its ballots recorded no vote for Mr Buchanan or the Democrat, Christine Jennings. That meant that 13% of Sarasota voters failed to choose a House candidate, compared with roughly 2% in neighbouring counties. Sarasotans cast more votes for the hospital board than they did for their representative in Washington. ... If the missing votes split at the same rate as the rest of the county, [Jennings] would easily have won." ) (Here's Carl Hiaasen's take.)
The nature of the typical case hidden by Florida judges can be deduced from the following:
Or, in more vivid terms (it sounds like Hiaason again, but apparently isn't):
Bubba judges aren't unique to southern Florida. I'm confident that most newspapers in that part of the country between Seattle and Miami could undertake a similar series of articles and find similar results. We have an extremely independent judiciary. That means, as the World Bank report so politely observes, we have a largely unaccountable one. And when people are given power without accountability - I'm sorry to be the bearer of bad tidings about this - some of them abuse it.
Monday, January 1, 2007 at 09:20PM in Covering the courts, Judicial independence/autonomy
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