We never stopped being great. Sorry about that.
I wouldn’t worry about his future, for he even if he ceases to be a judge, he can hang out his shingle as an arbitrator and make a lot of money. What I care very much about is ensuring that people have faith in our judiciary’s ability to give them fair hearings.
If the judges with whom he works or the bar who appear before him say that he is impartial and a good judge, then reprimand and warn him, for good judges are key to the making the system work.
If, based on their experience with him, those people have reason to believe that he is not impartial or is not a good judge, then remove him, under the theory that any reason to get rid of a bad judge is a good reason.
From “A Moral AlphaBet of Vice & Folly; Embellished with Nudes & other Exemplary Materials; by Stan Washburn”
"J
A newly installed JUDGE was presented with a chair upholstered in the
hide of his corrupt predecessor.
“Let this chair remind you to be honest,” intoned the King.
“It will certainly remind me to be discreet,” joked the judge, who was
presently made into a matching footstool.
Moral: The mot juste caps the bon mot."
I think we have to hold these guys to a higher standard. It is completely unacceptable to me as a Canadian. This was in extremely poor judgement, and he is supposed to be a JUDGE. Whether it was intended as a joke or not is besides the point, it was inappropriate in any case and he should have known that. It does not matter how late he was up the night before, he is supposed to be a judge, impartial, apolitical, and he failed.
Besides all that “it was supposed to be a joke” is as grade school an excuse as “the dog ate my homework”.
I agree. While I understand why the lawyerly class believe reprimand would be sufficient, I don’t think they’d feel the same way if they were not ‘court connected’. If their’s were going into court to face a judge, they’re confident they can manoeuvre through the system well and get a fair shake.
That’s NOT the case for the average citizen, especially NOT the case for the disadvantaged, First Nations, the poor, the previously convicted, etc.
If you’re a careeer judge, you should indeed be held to a higher standard. There should be zero tolerance for this kind of horse shit, in my opinion.
Average citizens have no choice but to be respectful and deferential to judges. NO CHOICE. If I HAVE to be respectful, then the judge should HAVE to maintain that respect. If he chooses to throw it aside on a public act of poor judgement, it’s on him.
If you want citizens to have faith in the fairness of our courts there’s no room for this. No one is calling for him to be shot or stripped of his pension, no criminal charge. But it’s definitely time for this judge to go. They are not supposed to be a protected class.
There’s a reason “contempt of court” is a thing.
He’s welcome to wear funny hats of whatever sort outside the courtroom. Inside the courtroom, he is the face of the judicial system. If the judge himself isn’t going to take his own court and position in it seriously, it reflects poorly on him, his court and to some extent the credibility of the system of which he is a part. And I doubt he or many other judges would have found a lawyer appearing before them wearing a similar hat to be behaving appropriately either.
I usually don’t agree with “zero tolerance” as a policy, in any setting. It is a bad idea when it was used in schools re: drugs; it is a bad idea in a criminal setting, in sentencing policy; and it is a bad idea in this case, with judicial discipline.
Why is it a bad policy? Because it throws proportionality out the window.
Sure, this judge acted as a jackass. No-one denies that. I know literally nothing else about him. It could well be the case that he has many years of experience. There is an actual loss to the system, and to society as a whole, in tossing that aside: we already have a big problem with insufficient judicial resources.
As usual, the advocates of “zero tolerance” aren’t really factoring that loss in. Is it really worth losing a (possibly experienced) judge because he acted like a jackass?
Kick a kid out of school for smoking a joint? That’s a loss to society as well as to the individual kid - one more without an education. Unlike that example, as noted upthread, this judge isn’t likely to actually suffer - judges can make far more cash in the private system, than as judges. The loss will not be his (other than embarrassment, which he’s already, rightly, suffering), but ours.
I know the inevitable counterargument is ‘losing a judge with such poor judgment is no loss’ and ‘society loses more with the disrespect he’s brought on the judiciary’. Maybe. However, I venture to think that the person waiting an extra week to get their case heard may make a different calculation.
That’s why I say that an official reprimand, which compounds the embarrassment without the “own goal” of losing a judge, is to be preferred in such a minor case. Firing of judges should be reserved for more significant ethical violations.
The difference is the NONE courtly class DO happen to view this as a VERY significant ethical violation. Letting him off with a reprimand does nothing but fuel righteous anger against government, justice and the ‘elite’ who protect them. This IS where that rage is born. This IS the fuel for that fire. That should be more important, I feel than, ‘Gosh, but it will inconvenience everybody in the court system!’ Y,know, cops, lawyers, judges, calendars, mostly.
Keeping a disgraced judge simply on the grounds losing him will slow things down in an already slow system only reflects how those working in the courts feel.
Of course they’re willing to make that sacrifice. Their future doesn’t hang in the balance as they stand before, and are FORCED to observe respect for, a judge that has lost even the appearance of good judgement.
How much he can earn privately hardly matters in this, I should think. And kids get kicked out of school all the time for smoking a joint. Judges throw people in jail for marijuana offenders every day. That’s a pretty silly argument to my mind.
If you want the courts to have any modicum of respect from the citizens, there needs to be zero tolerance for this kind of stuff. Especially in the world we are currently living in, where every democracy seems to be under pressure from right wing nativism, born of rage against an elite system that never hears THEIR voice. And in fact routinely acts against the desires of the populous in the name of ‘knowing better’. But simply comes off as protecting their elite mates. I do not want to fuel right wing extremism in my country, simply to save this boob’s tender feelings, or some court employees some headaches.
Appearances matter. They can be everything in justice. If, as a Justice with years of experience, he’s forgotten that, then let’s remind them all just how high we set the bar.
The shortage of judges is based on government funding, so if the unexpected loss of a judge (illness, advancement out of a particular court, early retirement prior to 75, or in the very rare case, being booted off the bench) causes a significant problem in access to justice, the solution is to increase judicial resources (number of judges, support staff, courthouses etc.).
There are about 250-300 other full-time judges on this judge’s bench (OCJ), and a further fifty to a hundred supernumerary judges who can be called upon to fill-in (pedants are welcome to make an exact count here) so losing one early (at 69, Trump hat is six years from compulsory retirement), will be a minor embuggerance for the court’s administration, but will not have any real impact on access to justice.
If this judge is turfed six years early, then those years of an experienced judge will somewhere in the system be made up by an new, inexperienced judge. That is a problem, but even then, fresh blood may have some generational benefits, i.e. sensitivity to cultural/racial/gender issues simply because candidates are being vetted to a greater degree now for such things now than thirty years ago.
The idea is that I happen to think throwing kids out of school for smoking a joint is a bad idea. It’s just another example of why “zero tolerance” is usually a bad strategy.
And no, I don’t think wearing an offensive hat one day is a violation on the same scale as (for example) making a judgment based on a personal conflict of interest.
The reason I bring up the fact it won’t matter to him is that it demonstrates it is dumb as a punishment.
That’s the problem with “zero tolerance” in a nutshell: every violation becomes effectively ‘the same’. There is no sense of proportionality, that some things are simply worse than others. It is the opposite of judgment.
I seriously doubt reprimanding this guy rather than firing him will “fuel right wing extremism”. How is firing a guy for supporting a Right Wing populist President supposed to assuage right wing populists at home? Even if it would, is it even a good idea to lose our sense of balance and proportionality, just to appease right wing populists? I don’t think so. Right wing populists are fundamentally un-appeasable, since merely living in a tolerant, multicultural society deeply pisses them off.
The thing about us Canadians is that, at least so far, we by and large aren’t divided up into warring camps that hate each other like poison, at least to the extent of our friends to the south. Right and Left together dislike a judge wearing a Trump Hat, whatever their feelings about Trump, because it is a breach of court decorum.
That is how it ought to be treated - as a breach of court decorum. There is no need to propose unlikely apocalyptic results from it.
I agree that access to justice demands greater resources to be put into funding the system generally … but that is sort of orthogonal to this particular debate.
Sure, losing Trump Hat will hardly cause a systems collapse.
The issue though is whether it is good policy to turf judges for violations of equal gravity. If it is, presumably that policy ought to be employed generally, and not just on offensive hat-wearers.
The concern about delay in the criminal courts isn’t that it’s an inconvenience to lawyers, cops and judges. If a matter gets adjourned instead of going ahead, we all get paid anyway, and we just put the new date in our calendars.
The concern about delay is that it is the constitutional right of an accused to have a trial within a reasonable time. The clock is running from the moment the accused is charged, and there are strict time limits. Any delays caused by non-availability of judges or courtrooms, called systemic delays, counts against the prosecution continuing. If there are too many delays, the accused is entitled to a stay of proceedings.
How would you feel if you were the accused and you had charges hanging over your head for years? Or if you had been assaulted by someone and that person never went to trial, because of delays in the court system?
Delays in bringing a case to court are very significant for the accused and for victims of crime; that’s the concern. In the provincial court where this judge sits, if the case takes longer than 18 months to get to trial, then there’s a presumption of a Charter violation unless the Crown can show cause why the case should still go to trial.
Please check the wiki article on the Jordan case if you’d like more info on it.
If kicking out a badly behaving judge causes you to lose years, there is a huge problem in your system, and you need to get more pay. In reality, the delay will be short.
The judge demonstrated his inability to do his job. No one who goes under him can be assured of a just trial. It’s not that there’s little loss in removing a judge with bad judgment. It’s that the judge is a liability.
Someone who wants to use his job to mock liberals is a judge that will give liberals a biased shake. Even if they appeal and get this fixed, it still costs you more money and time to do this. And the accused spends more time being punished for something they didn’t do.
I pointed out that the joke make no sense for a conservative to do. I also pointed out how mean spirited of a joke it actually is, deliberately provoking liberals who were grieving. (And I do mean grieving. The U.S. we thought we have died that day.)
This guy needs to be fired, and you need to rearrange your schedules a bit to let another judge handle it until you get him replaced.
It’s not even about who he was mocking and why; it’s about him engaging in inappropriate mockery at all. He can goof around in his own time. It may be just another day in the office for him, but for the people standing before him the outcome of the proceedings could be lifechanging.
SRSLY ? By now most of us abroad think it’s a gas.
As for this wretched malefactor you have a duty as the heir to Cicero to Denounce him publicly: Write a screed and send it to [del]both[/del] all the Canadian papers, demand Canadian TV includes it on the news, send it to their senate or whatever they have, and post him a personal copy.
Decision announced: Canadian judge who wore Trump hat in court suspended for 30 days:
I guess they figure that he has learned his lesson. Pity it wasn’t more creative, e.g. 10,000 word paper on populism and the courts, or the development of the importance of both impartiality and the appearance of impartiality in the courts. I don’t think that a month without pay would make any impact on him (senior Ontario Court of Justice judges earn about $2-300K per year, and he’s been one for 27 years), but suspending him for a longer period would not be of any use because he could simply retire.