This Houston Chronicle piece reveals that “only seven judges in the last decade have faced formal disciplinary action as a result of the nation’s secretive misconduct review process. In that same period,” the article reports, “citizens filed more than 6,000 formal misconduct complaints.”

True, most of these complaints come from irate defendants who didn’t like the customer service they received in the courtroom.  I get letters complaining about judges all the time and few of them involve meaningful allegations. 

Still, are we to believe that only seven complaints over a ten-year period were worthy of review?

The problem, Lise Olsen suggests, is that judges are judging the judges.  Poor black defendants rarely get a jury of their peers but judges always do.  This isn’t exactly like having the fox guard the henhouse; but when Foxy-Loxy has a mouthful of feathers, you want a few chicken’s on the jury. 

Judges are generally good, disciplined, well-intentioned people who take their jobs seriously.  But there are plenty of judges who function as an extension of the prosecutorial arm.  To employ a pro wrestling analogy, some judges work as tag team partners for the US Attorneys Office. 

The Houston Chronicle article is primarily concerned with out-of-the-courtroom behavior like sexual harassment.  A serious matter, no doubt, but I am more concerned with what goes down inside the courtroom.

In fairness, the judges I have observed in the federal system (conservative, liberal, and somewhere in between) have generally been fair.  The tag team phenomenon is most commonly on display in thinly populated counties where due process concerns carry little weight.  When the same judges and prosecutors work together on a daily basis the independence of the judiciary is in jeopardy.

Judge Ed Self, the man who presided over the majority of the trials related to the Tom Coleman operation, once ran a campaign ad promising to work closely with law enforcement to put drug dealers behind bars.  That’s not supposed to be a judge’s job; but when you’re up for election in a rural county it’s best to talk tough.

Federal judges don’t have to worry about the electorate because they enjoy lifetime appointments.  On the whole, that’s a good thing.  William Wayne Justice, a federal judge in the Eastern District of Texas, received death threats when he ordered the public schools under his jurisdiction to integrate in 1970.  Justice had little choice in the matter since, a year earlier, the Supreme Court had settled the matter in the high-profile Alexander vs. Holmes County case.  It is questionable whether any state court in the South would have done the right thing in the face of massive resistance.

But the power conferred with lifetime appointments can give federal judges a much too high opinion of themselves.  We should hold the role of judge in high esteem while remembering that individual jurists are flesh and blood humans subject to the full range of temptation.  When federal judges are accused of misconduct there must be an independent evaluation process.  Because every judge is vulnerable to complaints from the public there is a natural bias in the direction of leniency.  When judges go bad (inside or outside the courtroom) our system of justice is in peril.