judges commit crimes too, more often than one would suspect…
By Egon E. Mosum
They sit higher than anyone else in the courtroom.
They look down (at least physically), upon the parties and their attorneys. They lecture the jurors.
They state law, they impose sentences.
They are distributors of money and property in divorce cases; they award compensation in civil cases, and can order the cessation of certain behaviors, while mandating the performance of others.
They are powerful people in society, the members of our judiciary.
Whether it’s the local judge in the traffic court, or the Supremes in Washington D.C., by their very position, they are entitled to respect, and the presumption of rectitude.
But it turns out that presumption is a rebuttable one.
Because judges commit crimes too, more often than one would suspect.
There is no need for all to rise when it comes to the black robes with black hearts and black hats that we will survey in this article, so remain seated.
When someone is in a position of power, they are also in a position to abuse it, to accept bribes, to grant inappropriate favors.
When those in such a position violate the law they interpret and are supposed to uphold, it is a testament to arrogance, hubris, and hypocrisy.
Exhibit A, to be put into evidence, is the ‘kids for cash’ scandal that took place in Pennsylvania in 2007.
Judges in Luzerne county Pennsylvania ‘accepted nearly $2.6 million in alleged kickbacks from two private for-profit juvenile facilities.’ They would quickly plead and bleed juvenile defendants guilty and send them off to the private jails which of course, would profit from it.[1]
One could envision a judicial bench with an American Flag on one end, and a cash register on the other. It was the best injustice money could buy.
Now while presiding over a calendar of United States District Court cases can be a taxing responsibility, nobody sent a memo to Federal Judge Harry Claiborne.
Because in 1984 he was convicted of tax fraud and sentenced to two years’ incarceration. While in prison, he still received his seventy-eight thousand dollar plus per annum salary.
Claiborne entered prison in March of 1986, and it wasn’t until October of 1986 that he was finally impeached and his salary terminated.[2]
Some of the readers may be old enough to remember that when Nixon was President, he resigned before being impeached. However, Federal Judge Walter Nixon Jr. didn’t get such a bailout.
Judge Nixon, like all judges had administered the oath to parties many times, making them swear to tell the whole truth and nothing but the truth.
One would have thought that he understood the meaning of that mandate, but it turned out no.
He was convicted of perjury in 1986 and sentenced to five years imprisonment. He had lied when questioned by authorities about his intervention in a state case involving the drug prosecution of a son of his business partner.
Three years later, he was impeached.[3]
Now, judges are people, at least theoretically. They have the emotions of people, and like some people, some of them can have their good sense overruled by their emotions. Such as happened with former Chief Justice of the New York Court of Appeals, Sol Wachtler.
As an interesting side note, it was Wachtler who coined the phrase that “a district attorney could get a grand jury to indict a ham sandwich.”
It turns out, that a district attorney got to indict Justice Wachtler, when his Honor was arrested in 1992 for extortion, racketeering and blackmail, with respect to a former mistress and her daughter.
Wachtler copped a plea to harassment and threatening to kidnap the daughter in 1993 and received a fifteen-month sentence. Apparently, someone in the Federal Prison in which he served his time was not a fan, and stabbed Wachtler in the shoulder while he slept the sleep of the not-so-innocent.
After serving his sentence, Wachtler became an author, and an adjunct professor of law(!) at Touro, a Long Island New York law school.
He wasn’t teaching ethics.
Ohio Judge Tracie Hunter was of course, a law school graduate, and a lawyer before ascending to the bench. One would presume she knew her stuff when it came to evidence. Perhaps she knew too much, because she was indicted in 2014 on two counts of tampering with it, along with theft, unlawful interest in a public contract, and forgery.
To give her credit, she was also charged with misusing a credit card, issued by and for the court.
She exercised her right to a jury trial, and in this case, it proved that exercise can be very beneficial because she was only convicted of the unlawful interest charge.
She was sentenced to six months in jail, and a year of community service.
Not good enough for our (former) Judge Hunter, and she made a variety of motions to vacate the sentence.
When all of her maneuverings failed, she had to be physically dragged out of the courtroom to serve the seventy-five days she would wind up getting.
Her law license was suspended, and in 2023, when she tried to get it back, because of the time in which it had been suspended, she was allowed to apply for reinstatement.[4]
There is no evidence found as to whether or not that happened, but, as they say, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence — with respect to whether she is once again a member of a bar somewhere.
WHY YOU SHOULD CARE
Whether it’s a traffic ticket, a lawsuit, a divorce, or perhaps even some sort of criminal charge, a significant portion of the population, sooner or later will find themselves in court, sitting and standing (depending upon which part of the procedures is being conducted) in front of a judge, who has the high chair in the room.
Often, they also take the high moral tone.
It is not a comfortable position to be in when you are in that room, for that man in the black robe can issue orders which can affect your wealth, your freedom, or even more potentially devastating, your care insurance premium.
Your author, under his real name, spent thirty-five years in the courtrooms in the state of New York, and he has seen the entire spectrum of judicial behavior. From the good guys who treated the public like the citizens with constitutional rights that they are, to the bums who brought a mixture of arrogance and ignorance to the bench.
And also the ones who got caught doing naughty things and were thrown off of their benches.
Judges are in a position of public trust. There are those who honor that position, and those that defile it.
When the law breaks the law, what does that say about our legal system?
[1] LUZERNE KIDS FOR CASH SCANDAL Juvenile Law Center 2007 https://jlc.org/luzerne-kids-cash-scandal
[2] IMPEACHMENT TRIAL HARRY E. CLAIBORNE US SENATE https://www.senate.gov/about/powers-procedures/impeachment/impeachment-claiborne.htm
[3] WALTER NIXON, Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Nixon
[4] TRACIE HUNTER Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tracie_Hunter