Nearly three-quarters of the judges are not lawyers, and many — truck drivers, sewer workers or laborers — have scant grasp of the most basic legal principles. Some never got through high school, and at least one went no further than grade school.
The NYT has done an extensive study of these obscure characters.
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11 comments:
municipal court in small towns is more about keeping the order, not deciding constitutional questions. If that is the purpose, then why would you need to be an attorney?
I care more about if their decisions just than their educational background
Sounds a lot like Phiadelphia's City Council.
"People have been sent to jail without a guilty plea or a trial, or tossed from their homes without a proper proceeding. In violation of the law, defendants have been refused lawyers, or sentenced to weeks in jail because they cannot pay a fine. Frightened women have been denied protection from abuse"
See, the trouble is that I'm pretty sure if I did "an extensive study", I could find plenty of examples of "real" judges - with law degrees and everything - doing the same stuff.
"“I just follow my own common sense,” ... “And the hell with the law.” "
If you'd just put this quote up and asked who said it, my first guess would have been somebody on the ninth circuit. At least Mr Buckley is honest.
David, the municipal courts in New York deal with much, much more than just "keeping order." Read the article, which strikes me as fairly accurate based on my experience as a New York lawyer, and you'll see that New York's town and village courts are the first stop for criminal defendants on all kinds of serious charges. They make final decisions on important property matters, too. In my area, there are quite a few fully-competent local judges who are lawyers or otherwise well-versed in the law they have to apply. Unfortunately, there are also too many judges who fall into the more-alarming category described by the Times. It's a real problem.
Kangaroo Court.
Scary.
Peace, Maxine
I don't trust any "extensive study" done by the New York Times when the subject is connected to upstate New York.
It isn't just NY. I ran into this years ago in Dillon, CO. But probably worse, IMHO, is the AZ Justice of the Peace system. In Colorado, we got away from that system decades ago, but last I knew, it still operated in AZ.
JP courts are where some misdemeanors and most traffic offenses are heard, and most of the JPs are not attorneys. So, you had better not try to defend yourself based on the law.
I had one experience in PHX, where I was ticketed for exiting a freeway other than at a designated exit. So, I got the officer admit that I was in the process of exiting, and had not done so yet. And then, I pointed out that there are no inchoate traffic offenses (such as attempted speeding, consipiring to run a stop sign, etc.), and, thus, I had not violated the statute.
I lost, appealed to the district court, where the judge was an attorney, won, and it was remanded. But, instead of a dismissal, I was retried, lost again at the JP level, and appealed, again. Same district court judge, and he lost it this time. We spent my oral argument time drafting a two page rebuke for the JP court - that they are bound by AZ statutes, whether they like it or not, and when he remands, he wants a dismissal, and not to see the case again a year later.
And don't bother trying to cite Rules of Evidence to suppress, for example, hearsay. How can you expect a JP who hasn't been to law school to understand something like that complicated. Never mind that these courts are bound by them, just like any others in the state.
What is scary is sitting in the audience waiting your turn, and listening to guys going away to jail based on inadmissible evidence. Most of the defendants don't have counsel, and those who do, invariably have overworked PDs, and the JPs don't listen to their legal arguments any more than they listened to mine.
There are definitely problems with the local courts, but that article read less like a balanced analysis of the system and a lot more like just another NYT anti-upstate hatefest.
“I just follow my own common sense... And the hell with the law.”
Earl Warren? Is that you?
What a great idea. Can we replace the Supreme Court with some of these folks? I would trust their judgement far more than the elitist liberal do-gooder marxist morons that come out of our law schools. If we elected all judges, we could weed out the psychotics, unlike now, where the Ruth Bader Shitbirds and Sandra Day O'Screwballs can sit and drool for decades.
Thanks, Gerry! What would black people do without white folks like you to tell them what is and is not offensive? I mean, they only became black yesterday, you know? They're so new at this. Poor things, they just have no idea.
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