The Judge Makers

THE $500,000 QUESTION, with the system we’ve got, is whether the judges we elect are up to adjudicating cases from all those neighborhoods Erdos and his fellow candidates visited on their campaigns. Most court historians do believe that the Common Pleas bench has improved over the past two decades, after the Roofers scandal in the 1980s exposed judges on the take. As Gene Cohen, a retired Common Pleas judge, points out, “Judges who don’t show up, or show up on the bench drunk — we don’t have that anymore.” Talk about a high threshold of competence.
 
Some lawyers who argue regularly in Common Pleas Court remain highly frustrated. Defense lawyer Sam Stretton says that too many judges get elected too young, and that the legal profession has changed in that most lawyers no longer log significant time in court, which doesn’t stop them from becoming judges. Further, he says that if you go back a couple decades, the Democratic Party typically awarded judgeships to committeemen who were well-versed in the neighborhoods, who understood the lives that came before them because they were neighborhood guys themselves. (Though those neighborhoods, in the halcyon days Stretton is alluding to, would certainly be white, and the plucked committeemen would be just that: men.) These days, judges get a one-week tutorial before their initial swearing-in, but that’s it in terms of official schooling before the black robe is donned.
 
When you watch both Linda Carpenter and Mike Erdos hear cases, it’s immediately apparent how hard they’re working, how intently they listen, how much they care. Again, that might seem like a laughably low threshold in rating performance, but “black robe disease” — wherein judges strike an arrogant or disdainful pose — is all too often on display.
 
Defense lawyer Michael Coard recently had a legal dustup with Judge Leslie Fleisher over how she treated him in court. Fleisher, infamous for bizarre, imperious behavior, pitched a fit over a minor procedural matter in the delay of a case. She forced Coard to come before her — he had to leave a Temple University class he was teaching, and put off a hearing in a murder case that same day — so she could berate him in open court for, among other things, not reading the Legal Intelligencer, and for his posture: “I think you’d better sit up in my room. People sit up in my courtroom. They are not lounged back like they’re watching television or something.”
 
When Coard, who is black, responded with a formal complaint, a retreating Fleisher confided to another African-American attorney she was close to that she had “no idea who Coard was” — that is, somebody who would fight back and rally support in the small legal world of the Criminal Justice Center. As if that would be a reason to treat him with respect.
 
Out of a pool of 91 Common Pleas judges, it’s not a shock to come across some who act out, even outrageously. But a longtime public defender says the biggest disappointment of his career as a lawyer is the almost across-the-board inability of our city’s bench to engage legal issues on a deep and substantive level.