Lawyers Who Criticize Judges Are Being Punished

Andy Ostrowski points to the Pennsylvania kids-for-cash scandal, where two county judges were convicted of charges involving millions of alleged kickbacks to send children to private juvenile detention facilities, as an example where lawyers failed to do the right thing.  --M.C. Moewe

Will Complaint About Judge’s Evidence Tampering Lead to Criminal Indictment? It Should 
centerforjudicialexcellence.org
July 10, 2014

...The Marin Courts have engaged in questionable behavior for as long as anyone can  remember. The 2006 arrest of Marin’s top court official John  Montgomery on felony conflict of interest charges barely raised an eyebrow. A 2009 shredding party orchestrated by current Marin Court Executive Kim Turner, which delayed an official state audit of the Marin Family Court by more than six months, was justified in a report from the Administrative Office of the Courts (AOC)...

[Maura Larkins' comment: We can search the archives of the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany and ancient civilizations, but we destroy the records of the United States' justice system?  This is hard for me to believe.  Are the documents really destroyed?  Or are they sent to the archives in Sacramento?]

Marin Judge Evidence Tampering
 June 19, 2014
Kathleen Russell
info@centerforjudicialexcellence.org

..MARIN COURT CEO BLOCKED STATE AUDITOR WITH DOCUMENT DESTRUCTION 

Turner’s 2009 destruction of child custody mediation working files, which were frequently subpoenaed when parents wanted to challenge a mediator’s recommendation to the court about child custody, took place while she was serving as a member of the Judicial Council of California.

The evidence destruction sparked a local public protest and a call for criminal investigation. However, the Marin Court stated that the destruction took place with the knowledge and approval of the California Administrative Office of the Courts (the staff agency of the Judicial Council), and both the AOC and the Marin Court argued that the destroyed documents were not “official court records.” Read the 2010 local Marin news article about this here...
 
 ...Ironically, [Kim] Turner was the recipient of the California Judicial Council’s 2013 “William C. Vickrey Leadership in Judicial Administration Award.”  According to the Judicial Council, this award honors individuals in judicial administration for “significant contributions to and leadership in their profession.” In making the award to Turner, the Judicial Council noted that she “has been a very active member of a working group improving trial court records management.”...


Lawyers Who Criticize Judges Are Being Punished — Jonathan Turley

by MCMoewe

Daily Kos

Jul 28, 2014

One is a California family law attorney documenting alleged judicial crimes, the other a Pennsylvania civil rights attorney who has lost his law license for speaking out against judges. Both say they will continue to do what most lawyers won’t.

“They don’t speak up. The reason is you get targeted and you could lose your license,” said Barbara Kauffman of lawyers who witness judicial misconduct. Last month the California attorney contacted state officials alleging that a family court judge in Marin County tampered with court records.
Civil rights attorney Don Bailey had his law license suspended for five years in October by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court. “The reason I lost my license is because I criticized judges,” said Bailey, a former Democratic Congressman and state auditor general, in a phone interview last week.
The pattern of attorneys losing their careers or facing hefty fines after speaking out against judges has legal experts worried.

The law professor and legal analyst Jonathan Turley wrote of Bailey’s license suspension, “While some would agree with the case, there is a worrisome line of cases targeting lawyers who criticize judges.”

[Maura Larkins' comment: Pennlive.com notes: "Bailey's attitude is evident from his law firm's website, on which he says he is "well known for taking on the high-profile and controversial cases many attorneys fear..'He refuses to recognize...the harm that he is causing to his clients and to the judicial system,” members of a disciplinary review committee wrote.'" 

It seems that the disciplinary committee is saying that when Bailey criticizes judges, the judges can be expected to retaliate against his clients.  Shouldn't the judges--rather than Bailey--be called to account for such retaliation? 

A justice system that sends kids to private detention so that judges will get millions in kickbacks hardly needs any help from Mr. Bailey to get a bad reputation.  Why didn't someone disbar the lawyers who sat silently while the kickback scheme proceeded?

Many lawyers harm their clients, but as long as the lawyers don't criticize judges, they are in little danger of losing their licenses.]

America’s judicial system is extremely ineffective at removing bad judges, said Kathleen Russell, the founder of the Center for Judicial Excellence, a non-profit that is working to stop family court judges from giving child custody to domestic abusers and pedophiles. “Judges are judicially trafficking children to abusers by ignoring evidence of child abuse. Even when judges behave maliciously, there is no law that holds them accountable.”

Over the past 40 years, court rulings have given judges increasingly strong immunity from civil suits under the principle that judges shouldn’t be sued by anyone unhappy with their decisions in court. Most notable is the 1978 Supreme Court decision Stump v. Sparkman that rejected a suit filed against an Indiana judge who ordered a 15-year-old sterilized without her knowledge.

The Democratic nominee for Congress in Pennsylvania’s 11th District has made a focus of his campaign curbing judicial abuses and protecting lawyers who criticize judges. Andy Ostrowski points to the Pennsylvania kids-for-cash scandal, where two county judges were convicted of charges involving millions of alleged kickbacks to send children to private juvenile detention facilities, as an example where lawyers failed to do the right thing.

“That didn’t happen in a vacuum,” Ostrowski said. “There were lawyers who were in there watching as these children were led into the courtroom in shackles without representation and led out in shackles to prison. They all knew it was wrong. Why didn’t they speak up? Simple — because they were afraid.”

The Pennsylvania Supreme Court has taken the law license of several lawyers for criticizing judges, as described in a table that follows this story.

Fearful lawyers combined with strong immunity laws keep bad judges on the bench. Even in the kids-for-cash scandal, where the judges were criminally convicted and are serving lengthy prison sentences, experts say that civil suits filed on behalf of the children will likely have a tough time piercing judicial immunity.

In a blog post published on Thursday, Turley described how judicial immunity was used to dismiss a civil suit against a Michigan judge who was having an affair with the wife of a man before him in a custody case. “By any measure, former Wayne County Circuit Judge Wade McCree was a disgrace to the bench,” Turley wrote. “His case unfortunately could embolden other judges who consider abandoning the most basic ethical demands of their office.”

Ostrowski is one of only two political candidates in the U.S. who has signed a pledge to eradicate judicial corruption started by the Campaign for Judicial Integrity, an effort founded by disbarred California attorney Richard Fine, who was jailed for 18 months by a judge who found him in contempt.

Fine’s 2009 disbarment stemmed from court filings he submitted against judges for taking $57,000 in side pay from the county to supplement their state salaries. “Fine has long contended that the charges against him are politically motivated,” the State Bar of California summary of Fine’s disbarment explained. “The cases he filed against judges were not retaliatory, he said, but instead were based on his belief that judges who accept money from a county fund to augment their compensation have a conflict of interest in any matter involving government municipalities. 

 Fine was jailed indefinitely in March on contempt of court charges — for refusing to answer a judge’s questions and practicing law without a license.”

Fine, 74, said he is still not sure why the judge finally set him free after 18 months.  

But Allan Parachini, who was the Los Angeles Superior Court spokesman while Fine was in jail, compared his incarceration to actions more common in authoritarian countries.

“Fine was effectively a political prisoner for a year and a half,” Parachini, who no longer works for the superior court, told Full Disclosure Network in 2012. “This wasn’t about contempt. This wasn’t about getting him to disclose whatever it was he was directed to disclose. It was about getting back at him.”

[Maura Larkins comment: Judges tend to be extremely subjective regarding which attorneys are forced to turn over documents.  I have been amazed at how judges let some attorneys get away with refusing requests for production of crucial documents.]

The California Bar has not opposed three successive motions in the state Supreme Court to set aside the disbarment, but the court has yet to reinstate his law license, said Fine, a former Department of Justice prosecutor. A case to force the justices to restore his license is now before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.

“I understand why lawyers are not speaking up when they witness corruption. They want to protect their income and they want to protect their families,” Fine said. “They took an oath to uphold the laws of the United States. If they did not intend to fulfill the oath and uphold the laws, they should have saved themselves and the public from their hypocrisy.”

Kauffman, the California attorney who notified officials last month of alleged criminal wrongdoing by a judge, said protecting the integrity of the U.S. justice system can be a lonely task. Last year, she filed a lawsuit against a retired Shasta County judge who had been appointed to preside over cases 208 times since 1994, never having to face election to hold the position. “I couldn’t get anyone to serve him. I had to go to his house and do it myself,” Kauffman said. The state barred the judge from serving shortly after she filed the lawsuit.

Losing her law license is not the 58-year-old attorney’s only worry. “I have concerns about safety,” Kauffman said. “For a while my office was getting broken into on a regular basis. For months, each night the alarm would go off. I had a strange man knock on my door and tell me he knew where my kids were playing.”

Being vocal is her best protection, Kauffman said...

Legislator Calls for Audit of Court Administrative Office and Council

Legislator Calls for Audit of Court Administrative Office and Council
By MARIA DINZEO
Courthouse News Service
February 12, 2014

(CN) - Assembly member Reginald Jones-Sawyer on Tuesday asked the Legislature to audit the 800-strong, San Francisco-based bureaucracy of California's courts as well as the agency's boss, the Judicial Council. "I have a myriad of things that I want an outside audit to look at so we can stop rearranging the chairs on the Titanic," said Jones-Sawyer in an interview.

Jones-Sawyer, a Los Angeles Democrat, heads the budget subcommittee on public safety that recommends the overall budget for California's courts, a budget that has been subject to massive cuts in recent years. Los Angeles Superior Court, the largest court in the nation, has been forced into an extensive reorganization while the staff has been cut from about 6,000 to roughly 4,000 employees.

The assembly member requested an audit of the Administrative Office of the Courts, the controversial and powerful bureaucracy that sits over the local courts, by filing a letter with the Joint Legislative Audit Committee. Prior to sending the letter, Jones-Sawyer had been receiving visits and boxes of information from administrative office officials.

He said the first ever independent and outside audit will be aimed at the budgets of the Administrative Office of the Courts and the governing Judicial Council to make sure the agency and its leadership are making the most of every dollar.

"This is not a punitive or 'I got you' audit. There are a lot of people that have a lot of beliefs and an independent audit will put to bed what is really happening," Jones-Sawyer said. "The audit will help me find out a better way of spending the money. It's not about people making assumptions, it's about answering questions."

The audit was welcome news for state trial judges who have been meeting with Jones-Sawyer since budget hearings concluded last year.

"This all comes down to transparency," said Judge Susan Lopez-Giss in Los Angeles. "This is what we want to see, if in fact the money that is being allocated is being used in the appropriate way and maximized so that courthouses can stay open."

Judge Steve White in Sacramento said the priority for the use of public money should be the funding of the courts themselves that resolve the disputes and perform the many legal functions that affect the lives of Californians.

"If there ever as an operation that screamed out for an audit, it's the continued current level of funding for the administrative operations of the branch, the AOC and the Judicial Council," said White. "Neither the legislature or the Department of Finance has any clear understanding of how the AOC administers its funding internally.

If the legislative audit committee accepts Jones-Sawyer's request, the audit will be conducted by State Auditor Elaine Howle, who three years ago found extensive fault with the AOC's mismanagement of a massive statewide software project for the courts, called the Court Case Management System.

Trial judges for years had attacked the enormous amounts of public funds -- totaling more than a half-billion dollars -- being spent on the software project, while the courts were in the middle of a financial crisis. The Judicial Council pulled the plug on the CCMS project in 2012.

But the administrative office and the Judicial Council that worked with the bureaucracy had developed a spendthrift reputation with the Legislature based on a series of policies. The administrative office had ballooned from a small corps of support staff for judges to a 1,000-strong behemoth that seemed to have its own agenda, high salaries, recurrent raises, well-appointed offices, an insular and opaque process and what trial judges characterized as an arrogant attitude towards the local courts.

Among the policies that brought censure from the Legislature was a pension system that rewarded the top 30 employees with a 22% pension contribution from public funds with no match on top of already bloated salaries, criticized in a report by an evaluating committee of judges.

While the courts were in financial crisis and laying off staff, a large majority of administrative office employees were given a 3.5 percent pay raise in 2010 and another 3.5 percent raise in 2013.

The staff size has been trimmed in the last couple years but, according to statements at a Judicial Council meeting in 2012, still numbered more than 800.

The Legislature also criticized the lack of transparency at the administrative agency and the council evidenced by an attempt last year to impose a $10-per-file fee on any member of the public or press who wanted to research court records, as well as the secrecy with which the council conducts committee meetings that make policy recommendations.

Jones-Sawyer says the AOC so far has largely cooperated with his requests for financial documentation and internal audits.

"I'm looking at eight binders of Judicial Council audits and legislative reports," he said. "They've been really helpful in giving me all the audits that have been done on a regular basis. From what I can tell they've been hitting the mark on being in full compliance so far, based on a criteria they are supposed to meet."

He said a decision by the Legislature in 1997 unifying California's trial courts under one statewide-funded system may be a fundamental part of the problem.

"We're locked into these state governmental bureaucracies. Is that inhibiting then from doing their best work? Do we need to look at the structure of the AOC and the Judicial Council, is there a better way of managing it? If you look at how we put this together, the courts were put at a disadvantage," Jones-Sawyer said.

"We consolidated all these courts and brought them up to the state level," he concluded. "We did it overnight and I don't think we thought it all the way through."

Lopez-Giss in Los Angeles pointed out that Jones-Sawyer's district in South Los Angeles had suffered directly from the budget cuts and his constituents have a great interest in how the courts are funded.

"We have enormous respect for his desire to keep courts open," the judge said. "His district has been hit hard. All the funds that could be available to every county should be available and he understands that. We have confidence he's going to time this and do this in an appropriate way."

In Sacramento, White said the court bureaucracy's budget has been anything but transparent and is highly deserving of a careful audit.

"The budgets for the AOC and the Judicial Council are rather conclusory and general by way of title and it's unclear on what money is being spent on and what the priorities are," said White who is president of the Alliance of California Judges. "Even if there wasn't evidence of bad practices and mismanagement in the AOC, which there has been, this would be a smart thing to do at this time."

He added that many of the legislators, when they confer with the leadership in both houses, express concern with funding for the trial courts. "Getting resources to the courts, not the AOC, not the Judicial Council, is on their top three list. It's way up there. One way to address that would be to get an audit."

On behalf of the Alliance, White sent a letter last month to Chief Justice Tani Cantil-Sakauye, urging her to support an audit. While he did not hear back from the chief justice, she did meet with Jones-Sawyer.

"I had some initial discussion with the chief justice," said the assembly member who applauds her three-year plan to restore $1.2 billion to the judiciary. "I love her three-year plan, it's a great beginning."

But he also said the audit will determine whether the judiciary actually needs a full $1.2 billion or if money can be saved by looking at the administrative office budget.

"Part of it is accountability, most of it is transparency," Jones Sawyer said. "We just can't throw money at it. We have to use this money wisely and efficiently so we get the most bang for our buck."

"If it's status quo, and you're just rearranging the chairs on the Titanic, you're not making it better," he continued. "Whatever we give you, what efficiencies will you get from that? The only way both the legislature and the governor's office will buy into that is if they come back with specific, tangible results as to what that money will actually be used for."

White said the absence of an independent audit of the AOC is unusual for a state agency, but that lean financial times demand a departure from the status quo.

"State departments generally would never get away with the superficial and non-transparent accounting of expenditures like the Judicial Council and AOC does," said the Sacramento judge. "The reason why it has been different is we are a separate branch of government. And in flush times, before the recession, nobody much cared because there was money to appropriate."

"But when it became clear there wasn't enough money to run the courts, then it mattered," White concluded. "I would say it always mattered, but it matters in a compelling way when you have people driving four to five hours to get to a courthouse because of closures."

Court executive salaries released by the AOC

This story was published 3 years ago. The salaries are most likely higher at present, and hopefully so are the ethical standards in places like Placer County.

Survey says: Pay for state's court executives released
By Greg Moran
SDUT
DEC. 3, 2009

As the head of the San Diego Superior Court, Executive Officer Michael Roddy runs the second-largest court system in the state, with 154 judges and judicial officers and 1,709 full time employees.

For his efforts, Roddy is paid $223,953, with another $41,000 in benefits per year.

Though San Diego’s court trails only Los Angeles in size, Roddy’s salary is not the second highest for court executives in the state.

He might consider the job in Contra Costa County, far smaller than San Diego with 38 judges and 428 employees. The chief executive there makes $229,338 per year, and another $37,000 in benefits. That's the highest paid court executive salary job in the state, surpassing even Los Angeles County, with 441 judges and 5,540 employees. (The CEO there makes $220,980 per year but gets the most in benefits -- $75,388, pushing the total compensation ahead of Contra Costa).

Or Santa Clara County, with 79 judges, 889 employees, and a chief executive who earns $225,528 per year.

In tiny Inyo County, with two judges and 21 employees, the chief executive there is paid $139,869 —more than half of what Roddy makes in San Diego overseeing a system dozens of times larger in terms of judges and employees.

These wide disparities in pay and benefits among the state’s 58 court chief executives are laid out for the first time in recently-completed survey by the state Administrative Office of the Courts.

Unlike state court judges, whose salaries are the same regardless of where they serve, the pay and benefits of the court systems top executives are set on a county-by-county basis. Each county has its own policy for setting and modifying salaries of court executives.

That patchwork system is a vestige of the time when individual counties funded the courts. That all changed 12 years ago when the state took over trial court funding.

Individual Superior Courts, however, remain the employers for all court workers. Court executive officers are employees of their individual courts, reporting to the presiding judge for each court system.

All of that has led to a spectrum of pay and benefit policies, and some controversy.

The survey done by the AOC was sparked by revelations that the salary of the former chief executive in Placer County increased 11 times in seven years, rising from $162,000 in 2002 to $304,0000 in 2008. A special audit conducted by the AOC said that for many of the increases there were no records showing who approved it.

This month the Judicial Council, the policy making arm for the state courts, is expected to review the survey and propose policies and guidelines for setting pay for court executives.

The council can’t set individual policy and benefits for the state’s court systems, said Peter Allen, senior communications manager for the AOC. But it will be presented with a model personnel policy each court could use when setting CEO pay, he said. It will be interesting to see how widely that model is accepted in the current contentious environment between some trial court judges and the Judicial Council/AOC...

California courts agency called dysfunctional

California courts agency called dysfunctional
May 30, 2012
Associated Press

A blistering new report quietly released over the Memorial Day Weekend called for the overhaul of California's Administrative Office of the Courts, which it described as dysfunctional, secretive and top-heavy with overpaid executives.

The report was prepared by a committee of state judges appointed last year by Chief Justice Tani Cantil-Sakauye to investigate claims the administrative arm of the courts had grown too large and costly amid severe budget cuts. The chief justice released the nearly 300-page report late Friday night. The report chided the AOC for claiming in February that it employed "more than 750" when it concluded that the AOC has grown from 430 workers in 2002 to more than 1,100 last year with hundreds earning six figure salaries amid a supposed hiring freeze. AOC managers conceded they got around the hiring freeze by employing temporary and contract workers.

The report also said the AOC appeared guilty of violating its own work rules by allowing some workers to telecommute from long distances, including one attorney who works from Switzerland.

The report criticized the agency for a lack of transparency.

"The AOC's reporting of staffing levels has been misleading, leading to mistrust of the AOC," the report said. "Disingenuously suggesting that AOC staffing levels have been reduced in response to branch-wide budget and staffing cuts has led to further mistrust and cynicism."

The report calls for staffing cuts to fewer than 700 employees and for the agency's headquarter to be moved from San Francisco to Sacramento.

""The organization needs to be right-sized," the report concluded.

The release of the report also comes amid Gov. Jerry Brown's plan to cut $544 million from the third branch's budget.

In a conference call with reporters on Tuesday, the chief justice said the report will be considered next month by the Judicial Council, an appointed body that oversees the AOC. She said the report was a look at the past and didn't consider the AOC's current plans to grapple with deep budget cuts. She also defended the public release of the document, saying she released it as soon as she received it.

One of the agency's chief critics, the Alliance of California Judges, applauded the findings.

"The nearly 300-page report is an A-to-Z indictment of an out of control organization," the group wrote in an email Monday alerting media and others to the report's release. "It is an absolute `must read' for everyone concerned about the functionality and credibility of our judicial branch." The group called for even more staff cuts.