Open Complaints on Judges to View

June 29, 2008

Perspectives

An organization called HALT (Help Abolish Legal Tyranny) gave North Carolina courts a grade of D+ on a recent national analysis of judicial accountability, ranking the state the 36th in the nation.

When presented with the low grade, Archie Smith, Durham's Clerk of Superior Court, countered with his own grade for Durham courts: A+. It was good to see Smith rise to defend the local courts, although, truth to tell, he may be a tad prejudiced.

It also seems that Smith was defending the entire court operation, when in fact the HALT study narrowly focused on how judges are disciplined for errors and ethical breaches, and how public those procedures are.

In North Carolina, the HALT study cited the following negatives:

• The state allows judges to be disciplined privately, the group said, so the public may not know of misconduct.
• Citizens who threaten to speak about ethics complaints against judges may face contempt charges.
• The state doesn't have appropriate limits on emoluments judges may accept.

The one positive the group identified was that the Judicial Standards Commission has a useful, customer-friendly Web site.

On the issue of judicial accountability, Durham senior judge Orlando Hudson defended the system. He said that only those judicial grievances that reach a certain level become public, while all others are kept under wraps to protect judges.

"There can be thousands of complaints about judges that don't have any basis," Hudson said. "I don't think the public is deprived of any critical information if they don't know about every one of them." Any case proves to have merit is made public, he said.

We can appreciate that judges are frequent targets for the misguided wrath of citizens. But the question is whether donning judicial robes should provide special protection from such complaints. Certainly arrestees have no such guarantee of privacy, not should they, although their charges may very well prove baseless in the end.

Likewise, we think that citizen complaints against police officers, sheriff's deputies and other public officials should be open to unfiltered public scrutiny.

In this, we agree with HALT. A special layer of protection for judges leaves too much potential for concealing uncomfortable information and ignoring legitimate complaints.

For comparison, the federal judiciary also got a D+ from HALT, along with a dozen other states. No one got an A.