Posted by
NOTLEGALROADKILLYET on Tuesday, September 05, 2006 9:15:01 PM
I'm not going to rewrite the
statute. That's not my job. If it gets rewritten as the public interest demands, it should address the following issues:
1. Litigants must be informed that CRS 13-5-136 exists by the judges in their litigation, not by
attorneys, and not through attorneys. The beauty of requiring judges to inform their own litigants is that it almost ensures that there will be no more late decisions.
2. If a litigant makes a complaint to the Commission on Judicial Discipline alleging a violation but fails to invoke this law, then the Commission must ascertain from the litigant in writing whether he/she wishes to invoke the law before proceeding.
3. The litigant should be required to itemize all damages in the complaint, including compensation for the time the litigant himself lost. Any funds collected from the judge are to go to damaged litigants, to the limit of their damages, with the excess going into the state treasury.
4. The Commission on Judicial Discipline should be required to report annually in aggregate the total number of judges fined, the total damages claimed, the total salary forfeited, the total damages paid, and the excess funds returned to the treasury. This report should be accessible on the internet.
5. A provision requiring judges to pay the penalty even if they have resigned or retired.
6. The current statute has no statute of limitations. If one were placed on the new version of the law, it could force damaged litigants to make a complaint before their litigation was finalized.
Currently, there is no mechanism for a litigant who is damaged by a judge to be made whole. This is a partial fix to that problem.
Yes, I am aware of the secrecy requirements of the Constitution. I will be discussing their approprietness in later posts, and not favorably.