Undermining the public trust

Local attorney Randy Rumph thought he saw a pattern in which Family Court Judge Cheryl Moss was giving preferential treatment to people who had donated to her election campaign. So Mr. Rumph filed a complaint with the state’s Judicial Discipline Commission. And waited for a reply. And waited.

Finally, last year, the commission informed Mr. Rumph that, “Although the commission has dismissed your complaint, it has taken what it considers to be appropriate action.”

The Judicial Discipline Commission seems to use the word “dismissed” a bit differently from the rest of us. More than half of the 770 complaints of judicial misconduct received by commissioners from fiscal years 2003 through 2007 — 481 of them — were dismissed without any investigation. That’s what most people think of as “dismissed.”

But the commission privately cautioned judges on 41 occasions after “dismissing” cases against them — indicating a “dismissal” doesn’t necessarily mean they found no wrongdoing.

And on five occasions during that period, the commission went further, reprimanding judges or taking other steps to resolve a complaint they obviously felt was more serious.

But in each case, the commission acted in secret. Their records do not show which judges were reprimanded or otherwise disciplined, or why. That’s all confidential.

Mr. Rumph tried to get the commission to tell him whether the investigation had borne out his complaint, and if so what actions had been taken to discipline or punish Judge Moss, but he was rebuffed.

Judge Moss isn’t talking, either. In fact, she says she’s not allowed to. She signed a confidentiality agreement barring her from speaking about the complaint, she says.

Why? If the commission won’t allow a judge to talk about what she might have done wrong and how she might have been punished — even if she wanted to — who is it they’re protecting?

Keith Stott, executive director of the state Commission on Judicial Conduct down in our neighboring state of Arizona, may have given us the answer when he warned recently that naming the names of judges disciplined by his own commission would be “unfair,” because election challengers might cite those complaints in their campaigns.

“It doesn’t mean a judge is a bad judge,” Mr. Stott protests. It just means they’ve made a relatively minor mistake.”

What it also means is that the system is closing ranks to protect even its bad apples (sort of like medical regulators, say, dismissing the reuse of syringes with a quiet $3,000 fine?) and assuming the public is a bunch of idiots.

Incumbency is already a huge advantage in a judicial race. And if it were revealed that a given judge had faced six or eight complaints in recent years — all but one dismissed as groundless and one resulting in a letter chastising hizzoner about some procedural lapse? Are we really to believe the average voter can’t be trusted to make a common-sense judgment about how serious a matter that is?

Besides, who’s to say they’re all so “minor”?

The reason power corrupts is that human beings, finding they’ve gotten away with some minor abuse, may be tempted to push a little further. What might that rich businessman or that attractive member of the opposite sex be willing to offer to see this case go their way?

Keeping such information private erodes the public’s confidence in their judges, warns Clark County Court Administrator Chuck Short, who serves on Nevada’s Article 6 Commission, assigned by the Supreme Court to review the state’s judicial system.

“Anytime you place the veil of secrecy on the behaviors of an elected official, it undermines the public’s trust,” Mr. Short said last week.

The Judicial Discipline Commission should operate in the light of day, offering judges the same right to public justice — and exoneration, in most cases — that those judges offer their fellow citizens.

It would be best if the entire process were public. But at the very least, when some measure of wrongdoing or inappropriate conduct has been confirmed, the commission should tell the public what it found, and what it did about it.