Joel Jacobsen

It might seem hypocritical to be feeling sorry for someone pilloried on this blog, but it's judges' presumption in telling other people how to live their lives that makes them deserving targets for more attention - and a great deal more ridicule - than they normally receive.  Once they're off the bench, guarded sympathy may sometimes be in order. 

Even Nixon had his moments of pathos, but they didn't begin until he left the White House. 

Reynold Mason was the former NYC judge who declared the judiciary wasn't bound by the legislature's landlord-tenant laws requiring rulings within certain time limits.  His living-museum exhibit of the distinction between the rule of law and rule by judges didn't cause him any problems.  It was only rent-controlled irregularities in his personal life that brought him down.  (See post 107.)

Now his ex-wife is sharing with the New York Daily News excerpts from her memoir about the ex-judge.  I'm sorry, that's just piling on.  The guy's selling real estate in Georgia - that's punishment enough.  Time to leave him in peace.

UPDATE:  I take it back.  (From the Daily News: "A former Brooklyn judge [Mason] was found in default yesterday for stiffing his kids out of nearly $230,000 in child support, setting the stage for a judge to order his arrest.   ... [Mason's ex-wife] faces eviction from her home in a New York suburb, where she is raising two teens and a 9-year-old on the wages she makes at Wal-Mart.").  No more pangs of sympathy from this blogger!

As I was saying, for someone who's spent his whole career practicing law in New Mexico (state motto: "the Louisiana of the desert"), it's a bit hard to understand what the Daily News calls "the exploding 'judgeships for sale' scandal".  In all honesty, I don't think I had ever stopped to think that there was something criminal about political leaders selling judgeships to the highest bidder. 

In Brendan Gill's memoir Here at the New Yorker - if my memory can be trusted - he describes getting drunk with another staff writer.  He winds up spending the night on the colleague's couch.  In the morning the guy gets up and vomits loudly into the sink.  While Gill comments on it, the guy is genuinely surprised: "Doesn't everyone vomit first thing in the morning?"  That's kind of the attitude I had about selling judgeships.  Doesn't everybody?

The Village Voice has been all over the Brooklyn story, as indicated by this breathless intro:

The haunting whisper in the courthouse corridors of Brooklyn was heard for so many decades it became an axiom, as unchallenged as it was unproven.

It wasn't just that a case could be fixed. The darker secret was that the bench itself had been bought, that its polyester black robes were on a perpetual special-sale rack, that smarmy party bosses, ensconced at 16 Court Street across from the supreme court they ruled, demanded cash tribute to "make" a judge.

And now former Brooklyn political boss (that's too grand a title - bossling, perhaps) Clarence Norman is on trial for selling judgeships.  Well, not directly - the charge is that he "strong-armed" judges into hiring loyal party soldiers (i.e., allowing them to skim off campaign funds) as a condition of their nominations.  But, promises the Times, even juicier allegations are "in the air":

One came from a sitting judge who, law enforcement officials have said in recent days, told a Brooklyn grand jury that he believed that more than $40,000 was delivered to Mr. Norman by a supporter to secure his appointment to State Supreme Court in 2001.

The other came from the ex-wife of an ex-judge, who was quoted yesterday as saying that she saw her ex-husband hand a party official $5,000 to help clinch his spot on the ballot.

In New Mexico, it's simply accepted that a certain percentage of judgeships are doled out to people who have done their share for the person doing the doling-out.  Many judges get on the bench by sheer merit, others win with well-run campaigns, others just luck into it, but there's always rumors of the contributions given, or fund-raisers hosted, to seat certain somebodies (and not necessarily the worst judges, either).

Currently the rumor is that President-elect Bill Richardson, who's killing time before his inauguration by serving as our governor, already has plans to fill the next vacancy on our state Supreme Court with a certain person who long toiled in the darkest corners of the political jungle, where he bedded down with creepy-crawlies - and gave them unnameable diseases.

No matter how much money this person gives our President-elect, appointing him to the state Supreme Court would be like making a convicted pedophile the public face of a ministry that attends to the spiritual needs of the children of inmates  ... No, wait, we do that here, too. 

("'He was not around children,' attorney Dan Marlowe said in an interview after the [parole revocation] hearing. 'He was working at a ministry where children were present.'")

If I were an opposition-research aide for, say, Hillary or Obama, I'd have somebody in New Mexico looking for witnesses who might know something about Brooklyn-style judge-brokering going on down here.  I'll even provide a hint about how to find such a witness: go to downtown Albuquerque during lunch hour on a weekday and ask the first person you see wearing a dark suit.  If you need confirmation, talk to the second person you see in that get-up.