Posted by
NOTLEGALROADKILLYET on Thursday, August 24, 2006 12:22:17 AM
While it may appear that I am critical of the retention commission's decision, and I suppose I am, I am far more critical of the system. It was designed in a way that it can be gamed. I have no idea if my judge ever gave a moments thought about how to game the system, and I certainly wouldn't want to accuse him of doing so, because it isn't provable. Unfortunately, more than one of his actions make it appear that he might have gamed the system.
The public may not understand, but while a judge comes up for retention consideration once every six years, a retention commission only looks at information from cases closed in the year immediately before the election, give or take a couple of months. Five years of information is never provided to the commission. Knowing this, a judge could fairly easily manage his caseload so that lawyers and litigants who were likely to be critical of a judge's performance would be excluded from the pool of potential attorney or litigant evaluators.
Did my judge do that? I don't know. I do know that 14 months before the election my attorney asked for a default judgment and the judge did handstands to avoid granting it. I also know that the same judge was quick to grant the Defendant's motion to reverse it. See "Just one example" below.
Another way a judge might manipulate the data is by avoiding at all cost making a referral of an attorney to Attorney Regulation in that same period. After all, once it became known that a judge had referred an attorney for discipline, other attorneys might think the judge not a "team player." In that situation, an attorney who had decided to put the evaluation form in his desk rather than submit a negative evaluation might do something else. Once a judge begins referring attorneys, attorneys will want to try to get rid of the judge. It is only human nature.
Did my judge make any such decision? Again, I have no idea, but in May, 2004, he received a 30 page description of 12 different apparent ethics violations by the defense attorney and took no action. (It was at that time that I lost any fear of what this judge might do to me.)
On March 1, 2006, this judge issued an order which stated in part: "If nothing else, this is one of the worst cases of neglecting the requirements of the Rules that the Court has ever experienced." Even after making that statement, this judge could not bring himself to refer this attorney to Attorney Regulation.
The judge got good scores, though not outstanding ones from the evaluation pool.
I am going to state this flatly. The system is so flawed, so vulnerable to being gamed, that the members of the retention commission have no idea if they were dealing with a judge who was "an asset to the community," or a judge who knew how to game the system and did so successfully.