The blawgosphere was awash with the tale of Niagara Falls Judge Robert Restaino.  I’d add some links, but go to any blawg you like and you’ll find the story there.  The absurdity of putting 46 defendants in jail because somebody forgot to turn off their cellphone (my bad) is too alluring a story to miss.  Of course, I acknowledged it only in an addendum to  another story of judicial impropriety, and left it at that figuring that there were just too many upstate judge stories for one day.

So now that everyone knows the story, it’s a good time to think about what’s wrong with the story.  It was my ferverent hope that someone, perhaps the lawprofs (because they’re scholars) would do a little more than repeat the headlines on this stupid story.  Unfortunately, no one did.  So I will, even though it means that I have to post again about New York judges doing bad things.

When the story came out that Robert Restaino closed the courtroom and held around 70 people in custody during Captain Queeg imitation, everyone got to see that there was something very wrong with this guy.  But the story isn’t what makes a judge like this a problem.  My sources from the cold north of New York tell me that Judge Restaino had issues long before he went wacky.  The locals knew all about it.  This was a bad dude, and he had no place on the bench.

So it’s wonderful that our King of the Mist showed his true colors when a cellphone sparked that synapse that makes a bad judge go public, but what of the thousand lives this guy controlled before?  Judge Restaino worked the domestic violence part of the court before cellphonegate (I know it doesn’t really work, but I rarely get a chance to use “gate” after another unrelated word, so I figured I’d take a chance).  There’s a whole lot of damage that a judge do in a place like that.  

Should we engage in our legal fantasies of presuming that he was absolutely normal, judicious, maybe even Solomonic, before cellphonegate, and that was a mere aberration (as Chairman Raoul would have us believe) because the judge “snapped”?  That would save everyone a ton of effort in trying to figure out all the times he “snapped” before in deciding what would become of people’s lives, but never made the headlines.  And then, we could all roll over and go back to sleep without having to worry that there are a thousand people in jail because they let some crazy judge onto the bench.

Now I might be inclined to buy into that part of Chairman Raoul’s position that this conduct was aberrational, but for the fact that those who appeared before Restaino say that the judge was always a bad seed.  Cellphonegate was just the tip of the iceberg, and nobody wants to look under water.  To do so would be an admission that the system, “which may not be perfect but it’s the best there is” (platitude du jour), failed and nobody noticed.  This doesn’t make our guardians of justice look very good.

I realize that it sounds like I’m harping on the subject of bad judges, and I’ve made the disclaimer many times already that this doesn’t reflect all judges so I’m not going to do it again, but the hard, cold fact is that the position of judge carries far too much power and impact over the lives of others to be so cavalier about who gets to wear the robe.  It’s not acceptable to have this constant stream of “aberrations” flowing through New York courtrooms.  Nor, Chairman Raoul, is it your job to get all touchy-feely about the personal issues that judges present in mitigation of their improprieties. 

These are judges, not defendants.  Defendants at best get to walk out of a courtroom to breath fresh air.  Judges get to use the power of the State to issue orders that can destroy lives.   We can be very sympathetic to their stresses, personal issues, disabilities on a personal level, but they still don’t get to ruin people’s lives because of it.  Where’s Jackie Mason to explain it to Chairman Raoul with a Yiddish accent?  Maybe then it will sink in.