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Judge Disciplined for Friendship with Lawyer By Cheryl Miller The Commission on Judicial Performance has publicly admonished a retired judge for failing to disclose his chummy relationship with the prevailing plaintiff's attorney in a $94.5 million inverse condemnation suit. Former San Diego County Superior Court Judge Vincent DiFiglia should have told the defendants in the 2001 case that he had a long-term friendship with the plaintiff's co-counsel, Vincent Bartolotta Jr., commissioners said. DiFiglia, who retired in 2003, also violated a judicial canon by failing to disclose publicly that he had once worked for the defendant's counsel, the San Diego city attorney's office, the commission wrote. The CJP had already privately chastised DiFiglia in 1992 for allowing Bartolotta and his law partner to pay for the judge's play in golf tournaments, and then failing to tell other attorneys in his court about his relationship with the two lawyers. Chief
Appeals Judge Steps Down By Lucy Morgan TALLAHASSEE - Florida's largest appellate court has quietly replaced its chief judge amid internal rancor and suggestions of political influence surrounding the bribery conviction and prison sentence of former Sen. W.D. Childers. Charles J. Kahn Jr., elected in 2005 to head the 1st District Court of Appeal for two years, resigned the chief judge's job last month in the face of a revolt by fellow judges. A formal complaint alleging misconduct has been lodged against Kahn, documents obtained Friday by the St. Petersburg Times indicate. In a written opinion denying Childers' appeal of his bribery conviction, another judge suggested that the public might conclude that Kahn was trying to reverse Childers' conviction as a political favor. In 1991, at the time Gov. Lawton Chiles appointed Kahn to the court, he was a law partner of Fred Levin, a prominent trial lawyer who is extremely close to Childers. In 1994, Levin, Childers and Chiles hatched a plan to sneak a law through the Legislature that allowed the state to sue tobacco companies and collect $13-billion to repay the costs of providing health care to smokers who depend on Medicaid. Childers was a major player on the state's political stage for more than 30 years, wheeling and dealing as Senate president and chairman of important committees. Often dressed in bright pink or green jackets on the floor of the Senate, Childers was adept at taking home the bacon for his West Florida district. He got fellow legislators to include money in the state budget for a new football stadium at the University of West Florida - a school with no football team. Forced by term limits to leave the Senate in 2000, he won election to the Escambia County Commission. He was charged with delivering a cooking pot filled with cash to fellow Commissioner Willie Junior in return for his vote on a $4.1-million land purchase. Junior testified against Childers, who was convicted of bribery. Before Childers' appeal was decided, Junior was found under a house; the coroner concluded that Junior killed himself by drinking antifreeze. Childers' appeal Childers appealed his conviction and 3½-year prison sentence to the 1st District Court of Appeal. A three-judge panel headed by Kahn voted 2-1 to overturn Childers' conviction. Kahn drafted the opinion focusing on limits the trial judge set on cross- examination of Junior. That's when things turned unusual: The other judges on the court decided to all hear the case, "en banc," over the vehement objection of Kahn and the other two judges on the panel. The full court voted 10-4 to uphold the conviction. Childers' lawyers asked the appeal court to refer the case to the Florida Supreme Court to determine the legality of having the entire 1st District vote. In late June, again by a 10-4 vote, the 1st District rejected Childers' appeal. Judge Michael E. Allen attached an opinion defending the decision to have the entire court review the case. Allen said he was concerned that Kahn's involvement would lead to "public perceptions of partiality by this court." Attaching newspaper articles that described the friendship between Levin and Childers, Allen said some Floridians might believe that Levin and Childers influenced Kahn's attempt to overturn the conviction. Allen noted that probably would leave Childers free because Junior is no longer available to testify. "And the deciding vote would have been cast by Fred Levin's former law partner," Allen wrote. "The threat this case presented to the reputation of this court, in my judgment, made it a case of exceptional importance. ... "We should never perform our responsibilities in a manner that would cause the public to question the impartiality of our decisions," Allen wrote. "Yet I believe that is precisely what Judge Kahn did by failing, on his own motion, to recuse himself from consideration in this case." Kahn says it's for best Contacted Thursday, Kahn would not discuss the reason he resigned as chief judge except to say he thought it was best for the court. He remains on the court. Kahn said he has not maintained a relationship with Levin since he was appointed to the court 16 years ago. He said he does not review cases involving the Levin law firm. Levin said Friday that he asked Chiles to appoint Kahn to the court but said he has rarely seen him in the past 16 years. "I went to his father's funeral, and he attended my brother's funeral, but that's about all," Levin said. Levin said he believes the judges targeted him for criticism because they are jealous of the large fees many lawyers make. On the tobacco case, Levin will collect fees of about $200-million over 25 years. Judge Edwin B. Browning Jr., the new chief judge at the 1st District, did not return telephone calls. Documents Browning released say that Kahn's fellow judges met in early October to discuss "concerns within the court over leadership and personal relationships within the court." Kahn appeared at the meeting and resigned. Misconduct allegations against a judge generally are handled by the Judicial Qualifications Commission and remain secret until formal charges are brought. On Thursday, in response to a request from 12 of the judges at the 1st District, Kahn was removed from the District Court of Appeal Budget Commission. Childers, who turns 73 next week, is serving his sentence at Glades Correctional Institution in South Florida. Said Levin: "Knowing W.D., he's king of whatever prison he's in."
NY Judge Takes Stand To Defend Conduct In Murder Trial By Tom Perrotta A state Supreme Court
justice yesterday said that his former law clerk was telling "lies"
when she accused him last year of having an improper ex parte
conversation with a prosecutor before a murder trial.
By Paul Flemming Lee County Judge James Adams got a public talking to Wednesday from Florida's chief justice and was told to go try to repair his reputation after admitting to carrying on a two-month affair with an attorney who had cases before him. ''Judge Adams, when you indulged in a romantic relationship with an attorney practicing before you, you placed the public trust in jeopardy,'' Chief Justice Barbara Pariente said to Adams, who stood silently before her and the six justices of the state's highest court. ''You compromised the single most important source of your authority, the perception of the legal community and the public that a judge is impartial in deciding cases.'' The 50-year-old Lee County judge has served on the bench since 1992. He is unopposed in a November reinstatement campaign. Adams admitted his misconduct in an agreement with the Judicial Qualifications Commission after a complaint filed against him by the now-ex-husband of the woman, Kennetha Lynn Donohue. The commission found, and Adams admitted, that he granted continuances in a number of cases represented by Donohue and dismissed traffic cases against clients of Donohue. This ''gave the appearance of impropriety,'' the commission found. Adams' affair with Donohue lasted from late September to the middle of November 2004. The commission said ''the relationship, though inappropriate, was short-lived.'' Pariente said Wednesday that it was only appearances that had been violated. ''A review of the record reveals no evidence that the relationship actually influenced your actions in any of the cases,'' Pariente said. That, coupled with Adams' otherwise spotless record and his acceptance of full responsibility for his misdeeds, resulted in the official reprimand instead of harsher treatment. Pariente is concluding her two-year term as chief justice of the Supreme Court. In that time, the court - final arbiter of judicial misconduct cases - has removed two judges and reprimanded six, including Adams. Reading from a prepared text, Pariente said Adams' behavior harmed his own reputation, but also those of other judges. ''Much excellent work and good will generated by our judges can be undermined by the misconduct of a few,'' she said. ''Each public reprimand saddens me. Each is regrettable.
Lee Judge to Be Admonished by State Supreme Court TALLAHASSEE FL - The state
Supreme Court will publicly admonish Lee County Judge James R. Adams
next month for his romance with a lawyer practicing before his
court. A Judge's Affair Has Ex-hubby Seething By Sam Cook Kennetha Lynn Donohue Rhodes, 37, a defense attorney locally since 2001, had a romantic relationship with Adams in 2004 while routinely handling a number of cases in the judge's court. Thomas Donohue, 45, was married to Rhodes at the time of the affair. He filed an ethics complaint against Adams with the state Judicial Qualifications Commission
in January 2005. The Donohue says the JQC
reprimand is a slap on the hand and Adams should be removed from the
bench for his transgressions. "A judge is supposed to be
held to a higher standard.'' The JQC report says Adams accepts full responsibility for his conduct, admits it shouldn't have occurred and regrets and apologizes for conduct giving the appearance of impropriety. "The Investigative Panel in reaching this agreement notes that Judge Adams' record as a judge is previously unblemished, he is active in his community, and the relationship, although inappropriate, was short-lived extending from late September 2004 to mid-November 2004,'' says the report. Adams says he and the JQC
panel reached an agreement on punishment, but Donohue says the
reprimand trivializes the affair and he asked the Florida Supreme
Court to reject it. "Several days later, she
broke down and admitted she had a sexual relationship with him,''
Donohue says. "My ex-wife also told me she would do or say anything
to protect their careers.'' Adams, who has been an
attorney and then a judge in Lee County since 1983, says he
understands Donohue's bitterness, but doesn't believe his mistakes
call for his removal from the bench. The judge, known for his
even temperament, has always stood tall in the community. "It tarnishes my record,
but it'll be my last complaint,'' he says. "Yeah, that's about all you
can do to the guy,'' Shearer says. "He's embarrassed as he can
get.'' "When I was on the bench,
my wife, one of them anyway, worked for a law firm,'' Shearer says. Shearer says Adams or
Rhodes should have come clean in court, but affairs go on every day. "Death wouldn't be
sufficient (punishment) for the husband.'' Judge
Resigns After Allegedly By Roger Alford FRANKFORT, Ky. -- A northern Kentucky judge has resigned rather than face removal for allegedly profiting from a $200 million settlement involving the diet drug fen-phen, a state judicial panel said Monday. Judge Joseph F. Bamberger was publicly reprimanded Monday by the state's Judicial Conduct Commission, which said his actions "shock the conscience." Bamberger, who resigned Feb. 24, was a senior status special judge, a retired jurist who could be assigned to certain cases. In a letter of reprimand, the commission said the judge gave attorneys, including one of his personal friends, somewhere between $86 million and $104 million from the 2001 settlement. In addition, Bamberger allowed more than $20 million from the settlement to be put into a charitable fund, and then he became a paid director of the fund, receiving $5,000 a month plus a $350 monthly expense allowance. That left the 431 plaintiffs involved in the settlement to split about $74 million. More than 300 of the plaintiffs have sued three lawyers in the case. "If the violations described in this order had been proved at a hearing, the commission would have removed Judge Bamberger from his office as senior status special judge," commissioners said in the reprimand. There was no immediate comment from Bamberger, who was a circuit judge in Boone and Gallatin counties for 12 years. Calls to his home in Florence were not answered Monday. The fenfluramine half of fen-phen was pulled from the market in September 1997 by drugmaker Wyeth amid reports some users had heart valve damage and a few had a deadly lung condition. Fen-phen was never an FDA-approved combination. The phentermine half remained on the market. Ex-Judge's
Chumminess With Lawyers By Daniel Wise The arbitrator, former U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Francis G. Conrad, had resolved a real-estate dispute in favor of a landlord of the debtor, but Southern District Bankruptcy Judge Prudence Carter Beatty overturned the award, finding that Mr. Conrad's actions gave "the appearance of partiality." Judge Beatty's decision
In re First Quality Realty, 02-14758, set aside Mr.
Conrad's arbitration ruling which had barred the debtor, First
Quality Realty, from converting four floors of a Brooklyn building
it had rented from commercial to residential use. Did Fling Blind Judge? Legal Eagles Eye Appeals By Scott Shifrel An allegation about an illicit affair between a judge and a prosecutor has defense lawyers scrambling to check their files for what could turn into a flood of appeals, the Daily News has learned. Lawyers who had cases before Queens Supreme Court Justice Jaime Rios when he allegedly was seeing prosecutor Meryl Lutsky in 1996 and 1997 tell The News the affair charge is troubling and convictions involving their clients need to be reviewed. "I can't say anything about the validity of the accusations [of the relationship], but I have to at least investigate," defense lawyer Warren Silverman said. "If a judge has a close relationship with one of the parties, then it is improper for the judge to handle the case. If true, he should have recused himself." Silverman represented a Queens woman in a 1996 drug case heard by Rios. His client ended up serving two years behind bars. Lutsky worked regularly as an assistant district attorney in Rios' courtroom, appearing mostly on motions to suppress evidence or statements. "There's no question that any conviction obtained where both the judge and Ms. Lutsky were involved in should be reviewed," defense lawyer Todd Greenberg said. "If the allegation is borne out to be true, then the court system should look at these cases." Greenberg said one of his clients, Kishore Sumasar, 29, served three years on a drug charge after appearing before Rios. He plans to order the archived court records next week. The affair allegation was made by the judge's ex-law secretary, Judith Memblatt. Defense lawyer Ron Kuby cited the alleged affair when he sought a new trial for a convicted murderer. Kuby is arguing that Rios' relationship with Lutsky led the judge to coach another prosecutor, Eugene Reibstein, to help him convict Kuby's client in 2003. Rios, through a spokesman, repeatedly has declined to comment because the murder case is still pending. Lutsky also has declined to comment. Memblatt, 47, who was fired
by Rios in 2004, made the allegation in a $10 million
wrongful-termination lawsuit filed in Brooklyn Federal Court and in
a complaint to the Commission on Judicial Conduct. Judge Accused of Bedding ADA By Scott Shifrel
State
Commission on Judicial Conduct September 6, 2005 Key excepts from the
decision are as follows: http://www.scjc.state.ny.us/Determinations/P/pastrick.htm Better to
Know the Judge By Tom Robbins
Another
report of insider trading in the Brooklyn courts arrived in late
July from the state's Commission on Judicial Conduct. This one
produced more sighs than fury. Years after editorial pages had spent
their wrath condemning Brooklyn's judicial politics as a school for
scandal, here was another censure of another veteran judge for
failing to reveal his ties to yet an other politically wired
attorney practicing before him. Even the names were predictable. What to do? Huttner, 70 years old, caught a break. On the proviso that he will permanently retire on December 31, the panel "reluctantly" let him off with censure. Case closed. The report made for a four-inch wire service story in the Times; it never made it past the borough section in the Daily News. But not since Judge Victor Barron, another clubhouse hack, was caught demanding $115,000 to fix the case of a maimed three-month-old baby has a story penetrated so near to the rotten heart of Brooklyn's judicial politics. Batra's appearance before Huttner was on behalf of a wretchedly deteriorated adult home run by Norman's father, Re verend Clarence Norman Sr., pastor of one of Brooklyn's largest churches. In Baisden et al. v. Pacific House Residence for Adults, lawyers for the home's residents, most of them the formerly homeless with varying degrees of mental problems, were seeking to block Norman Sr.'s efforts to sell the building and evict them. At the time, Reverend Norman was trying, with Batra's help, to stay one step ahead of state regulators who were being forced to act on years of complaints of callous care and grievous conditions at the home. When I visited Pacific House in the summer of 2000 while the case was before Huttner, residents were aimlessly roaming the streets ("A Ministry of Neglect," June 28––July 4, 2000). Several told me they were terrified about what would befall them. The most cogent understood exactly what was going on. One woman, Clara Taylor, had formed a residents' council, which had sought out legal services attorneys. Taylor had personally confronted Norman Sr. about the situation. The reverend had pled poverty. While the home collected $60,000 a month from the residents' disability checks, he said he was hobbled by a poor cash flow. Additional government grants had been denied after inspectors found rampant vermin, unsanitary bathrooms, and poor care. Taylor had also cornered the reverend's son when the assemblyman attended a street fair near the home. She had pointed to a urine-soaked resident, sitting mumbling and untended on a nearby stoop. "I asked him if he would help. He said, 'I'm glad you're concerned,' and promised to speak to his father," Taylor told me. But when I got Assemblyman Norman on the phone that summer he said that his only involvement was to ask his partner Batra to represent his father. Batra got results. Before Huttner, the lawyer was able to win his client sufficient breathing room to negotiate a sale of his property minus its troubled residents, who were dispersed elsewhere in the city to another politically tied organization. It was "a graceful exit," Batra told me then. Later this month, after long delays, Assemblyman Norman is finally due to go to trial on the first of four indictments brought against him by Brooklyn District Attorney Charles Hynes. The county leader stands accused of double billing for his gas receipts, failing to disclose a $2,700 in- kind contribution from a lobbyist, misfiling a $5,000 campaign check, and compelling judicial candidates to use favored vendors. Several of the charges appear shaky. But on any moral scale, they are far outweighed by the outrage of Pacific House and the casual use of Brooklyn's Democratic judicial-political complex to defend it. Yet no law enforcement office looked to see if there were any penal code violations there. It was considered business as usual; a crassly cynical business perhaps, but not criminal. Meanwhile, conveniently for both Hynes and Norman, the first jury's verdict isn't likely to be heard until after the September 13th primary, thus sparing one or the other a major embarrassment. That Tuesday, Hynes faces his first competitive race for re-election since he won office in 1989, with three challengers seeking his job. It is an important day for Norman as well. He's hoping his candidate for D.A., an undistinguished, clubhouse-bred state senator from east Brooklyn named John Sampson, can ride a tide of African American votes to unseat Hynes. Another important goal for the embattled leader is to try to hold on to the Surrogate's Court judgeship, the single most lucrative judicial post in the borough. The position had been held by another Norman candidate, Judge Michael Feinberg, who bizarrely won the open seat in 1996 on a reform platform. Feinberg even won the Times' endorsement that year, telling its editorial board he would have a panel "screen appointments and recommend changes in how the place was run." Of course he did no such thing. He immediately appointed a longtime Norman ally, East Flatbush Democratic district leader Marietta Small, as public administrator, a job that calls for competence and sensitivity in the handling of estates of the deceased. Small brought neither to the job. Two separate audits have chastised Small, who still holds her $91,000-a-year post, with bungling multiple cases and losing track of assets. For the profitable job of counsel to the public administrator, Feinberg held no interviews, instead selecting his friend and neighbor Louis Rosenthal, whose closest experience in the surrogate business was his father's service as public administrator in the early 1960s. Rosenthal promptly began to collect an 8 percent fee for every estate that crossed his desk, 2 percent more than counsels in other boroughs. He did so without filing the required affidavits describing what he'd done to earn the money. This was not a problem for Feinberg, however, who rubber-stamped more than $8 million in payments to his friend. Such pillaging probably would have rolled merrily along had not two Daily News reporters, Nancie Katz and Larry Cohler-Esses, exposed the scheme in May 2002. In the wake of their stories, the Attorney General's Office and the Commission on Judicial Conduct each opened investigations. Rosenthal was forced out. In late June, the state Court of Appeals upheld the judicial conduct panel's ruling that Feinberg should also be removed. The judge had admitted to the commission that he had only "skimmed" the rules of office, and somehow missed the one about required affidavits. The panel found him "incredible, evasive, and unreliable." Norman's replacement candidate for the office is a protéégéé, Supreme Court Justice Diana Johnson, who attends Clarence Norman Sr.'s First Baptist Church in Crown Heights. He has a backup candidate, Judge Lawrence Knipel, who has gotten good marks on the bench but whose independence has been questioned since his wife is a district leader and Norman loyalist. The third candidate is civil court judge Margarita Lóópez Torres, who has been tilting her lance at Norman's machine ever since he refused to back her for re-election in 2002. The reason? Lóópez Torres refused to accept a political appointee as her law clerk ("The Judge Who Said No," July 31––August 6, 2002). In the surrogate's race,
Lóópez Torres has pledged to do all the things Feinberg claimed he
would nine years ago, and more. "I am going to structure the court
in a way it serves the people," she said under a hot noon sun at a
City Hall press conference last month. "The integrity of this court
has been challenged," she said. "I will change that." NY Judge Censured, Leaving Bench By Tom Perrotta Brooklyn Supreme Court Justice Richard D. Huttner has agreed to leave the bench at the end of the year after being censured for a second time in less than four years, the State Commission on Judicial Conduct announced yesterday. The commission indicated that it would have preferred to remove the judge from the bench, but said it was "constrained" by the fact that it could not have completed a disciplinary proceeding without his cooperation before the end of the judge's current term in December. In agreeing not to seek recertification, the commission said, Justice Huttner, 70, had "acknowledged his misconduct." "The judge's departure from office was an essential element of this stipulated censure," Robert H. Tembeckjian, the commission's administrator and counsel, said in an interview. The commission faulted Justice Huttner, who has been sitting in Queens since 2002, for presiding over a case in which a long-time friend, prominent Brooklyn attorney Ravi Batra, represented a party. Justice Huttner did not inform the opposition of his relationship with Mr. Batra, with whom he has frequently dined and socialized since the mid-1990s. They have visited each other's homes and Justice Huttner also attended Mr. Batra's wedding anniversary party, according to the commission. Between 1996 and 1999, Justice Huttner appointed Mr. Batra as a fiduciary in 11 cases. In one 1998 case, he appointed Mr. Batra receiver and counsel to Cypress Hills Cemetery. He continued to socialize with Mr. Batra while the case was before him. The conduct commission singled out another case for its strongest criticism: Baisden v. Pacific House Residence for Adults Housing Development Fund Corporation . Mr. Batra represented two of three defendants in the case, which involved an adult home whose president was Clarence Norman Sr., the father of the Brooklyn Democratic leader Clarence Norman, who was once a member of Mr. Batra's law firm. Justice Huttner did not disclose his relationship with Mr. Batra to attorneys, nor did he reveal that he had awarded Mr. Batra fiduciary appointments. His failure to do so violated the standards of judicial conduct, the commission found in a unanimous ruling. "At the very least, [Justice Huttner] should have disclosed the relationship so that the parties and their attorneys could have had an opportunity to consider whether to seek his disqualification," the commission wrote. The commission said a mitigating factor was that Justice Huttner ultimately played a "relatively small" role in the conclusion of the Baisden suit. The parties presented him with an agreed-upon stipulation and he signed it "so ordered." In 2001, Justice Huttner was censured for using the prestige of his office to advance private interests when he actively participated in litigation involving the board of his cooperative. Though the cases involving Mr. Batra predated the previous sanction, the conduct commission said that the timing should not mitigate the current penalty. "The record establishes that respondent lacks sensitivity to the special ethical obligations of judges and indicates the need for a severe sanction," the commission wrote. Mr. Batra was recently at the center of another judicial sanction. In April, Manhattan Acting Supreme Court Justice Diane A. Lebedeff was censured for presiding over a personal injury suit in which Mr. Batra was a plaintiff. The two have a personal relationship, and Justice Lebedeff at times excused opposing counsel so she could engage in "gossip" unrelated to the case, according to the commission's ruling. She also appointed Mr. Batra to a guardianship that paid him $84,000 while his personal injury suit was pending. The suit was eventually settled for $225,000. Justice Lebedeff was reassigned to Civil Court shortly after her sanction, the second censure of her career. In a statement after the release of the Huttner decision, Mr. Batra said the ruling had created a "new and higher standard" for judges that should be applauded by the bench and the bar. In an interview, he added that since the Lebedeff ruling, he has been telling clients and opposing counsel if he has any relationship at all with a member of the bench. "The lawyers don't have a problem, because they all have the same thing," Mr. Batra said. "No member of the bar or bench who values their lifelong reputation will sully their reputation for a case or a client, and that serves to enhance public confidence." Mr. Batra said Justice Huttner is ailing from a heart condition that recently required surgery. The judge could not be reached for comment. His attorney, Jerome Karp, was unavailable. http://www.nylawyer.com/display.php/file=/news/05/07/072705b Panel Raps Judge for Keeping Mum on Att'y Pal By Nancie L. Katz For the second time in four years, the state's judicial watchdog censured a Brooklyn judge - this time demanding that he retire because he presided over a case involving a close friend without letting the other side know. Supreme Court Justice Richard Huttner is the second jurist to get in trouble with the state Commission on Judicial Conduct for having a personal relationship with politically connected lawyer Ravi Batra - and not telling the opposing attorneys about it. Huttner has had a "close social relationship with" Batra since the mid-1990s, the commission said, and awarded the lawyer 11 lucrative appointments between 1996-1999. "They have been to each other's homes, and [he] has attended various of Mr. Batra's family events," the commission wrote. "They have had ... drinks, lunch and dinner on numerous occasions." Nonetheless, since June 2000, while presiding over a case involving Batra, Huttner did not tell the attorney general's office any of that. "Even if they did not discuss the merits of Mr. Batra's case during their out-of-court meetings, an appearance of impropriety would be inevitable," the commission said. But the commission did not charge that Huttner favored Batra in the case, which was settled. The commission demanded the 70-year-old jurist step down at the end of the year, citing its 2001 censure against him for using his judicial position to improperly sway a judge to rule in his co-op's favor in a dispute with a restaurant. Huttner otherwise could have sought state approval to stay on until the age of 76. "The retirement was an essential element of the commission's agreeing" not to pursue disciplinary charges against him, said its administrator, Robert Tembeckjian. Huttner and his attorney did not return calls. Batra declined to address the specifics of the commission's ruling. "Every lawyer
and former judge who is now a lawyer is now required to put on the
record any relationship that exists with any party or lawyer or the
court on the record," said Batra. "This will serve to ... to enhance
public confidence." The New York Times ALBANY - A Brooklyn judge has been censured as part of an agreement that calls for him to retire by end of the year for failing disclose his close relationship to a politically connected lawyer who appeared before him, officials said Tuesday. The judge, Justice Richard D. Huttner of State Supreme Court in Brooklyn, was censured by the state's Commission on Judicial Conduct for presiding over a case five years ago without telling any of the parties involved that he had what the commission called "a close social relationship" with one of the lawyers involved, Ravi Batra. Mr. Batra, the lawyer, was a close associate of Assemblyman Clarence Norman Jr., the head of the Brooklyn Democratic Party. Mr. Batra hired Mr. Norman to work at his Manhattan law firm, and Mr. Norman put Mr. Batra on a panel that helped choose judges in Brooklyn. In the case that led to Justice Huttner's censure, Mr. Batra represented Mr. Norman's father, who was closing his home for the mentally ill. 2nd Judge Censured for Link to Same Attorney Newsday Judges who are friends with attorney Ravi Batra should best tread
carefully. Judge Removes Himself From All Criminal Cases Miami Herald Senior U.S. District Judge James Lawrence King has removed himself from all criminal cases because his secretary's husband has been charged in a marijuana-growing investigation. King is not a subject of the probe. He has stopped presiding over criminal cases until the investigation is completed by federal authorities. He declined to comment Tuesday on his temporary removal from the criminal docket, which was first reported by The Daily Business Review. His secretary, Sandra Diaz, came under the scrutiny of federal prosecutors after they discovered that she passed along copies of public records downloaded from a court website to her husband, Jorge Diaz, before his arrest on marijuana conspiracy charges this spring. The online site, known as PACER, requires a subscription. Those court-record printouts dealt with the earlier arrests of two of her husband's alleged associates. Federal prosecutors are investigating whether the judge's secretary was involved in her husband's alleged criminal activities, which included a ''grow house'' in Loxahatchee. She has not been charged. Federal
Judge Skips Criminal By Dan Christensen For the second time in two months, Senior U.S. District Judge James Lawrence King in Miami has removed himself from all his criminal cases as federal and state agents have targeted his longtime secretary and her husband in a drug and money laundering probe. Federal prosecutors in West Palm Beach believe that King's secretary, Sandra Diaz, passed copies of court documents to her husband, Jorge Diaz, shortly before his April 29 arrest in Key Largo on federal marijuana conspiracy charges. In court filings, prosecutors described the items she passed to her husband as computer printouts of all court documents regarding the arrests of two of Jorge Diaz's alleged associates at his marijuana "grow house" in Loxahatchee, Fla. The printouts allegedly were downloaded from the online PACER system, which is publicly accessible to subscribers. In an interview June 8, Judge King said his initial recusal on May 16 had nothing to do with rumored legal difficulties of a member of his staff. King acknowledged that a relative of that staffer had been indicted on federal charges but he would not disclose the circumstances or further identify the individuals. There is no indication that the government suspects King of any wrongdoing. Neither King -- who's 77 and formerly served as chief judge of the Southern District of Florida -- nor current Chief Judge William J. Zloch returned calls for comment last week. Miami solo practitioner Mario S. Cano represents Sandra Diaz. He said Diaz would not comment on the matter. Observers say King's decision to abandon his entire criminal docket twice in such a short period of time is extraordinary. "I'm unfamiliar with any equivalent situation ever occurring," said Federal Public Defender Kathleen Williams, who remains puzzled by King's actions. Meanwhile, the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Atlanta last week declined to prohibit the type of direct case transfers between judges that occurred after King removed himself from his criminal cases the first time in May. The transfers from King to U.S. District Judge K. Michael Moore were done according to an unpublished and previously undisclosed Local Policy Manual. But the transfers contravened published Local Rules. The 11th Circuit, without comment, denied a petition for a writ of mandamus by Miami attorneys Howard and Scott Srebnick that sought to prohibit judges in the Southern District from using the unpublished court rule to reassign cases to each other. Lawyers Surprised and Upset Many South Florida lawyers were surprised and upset when the Daily Business Review first reported on the unpublished manual last month, and they demanded that the Southern District of Florida publicly disclose the manual. The court has refused to do so. The unpublished rule contravenes published Local Rules, which provides for the blind and random assignment of cases by the federal court clerk. Under the published Local Rules, recusing judges may not influence the selection of their successors. Howard Srebnick is defending former Hamilton Bank chief Eduardo Masferrer in his fraud and conspiracy case. King transferred Masferrer's case directly to Moore on May 16 when King initially recused himself from all 21 of his criminal cases. That spurred Srebnick to ask Moore to send all those cases to the clerk for random reassignment. In seeking to justify the direct transfer, Moore, in a written order, cited a rule in the Local Policy Manual that he said gave judges the authority to "confer and directly transfer all or any part of a case on the judge's docket to any consenting judge." Moore did not rule and sent the matter to Chief Judge Zloch for a final decision. On June 9, Zloch ruled that King's original recusal was actually not a recusal. Zloch wrote that "it is clear that said order was intended to be an order of transfer" under the Local Policy Manual. He did not explain how that was made clear to him. The Srebnick brothers appealed. Among other things, they attacked what they called the district court's "disregard of the published Local Rules in favor an unpublished policy manual. In an interview, Howard Srebnick said he was disappointed in the 11th Circuit's decision, contending that public knowledge of the investigation of King's secretary might have made a difference in the outcome. "Perhaps the appellate court would have ruled differently had these circumstances been disclosed," said Srebnick, a partner at Black Srebnick & Kornspan of Miami. Three weeks after transferring his cases to Moore, King decided to start taking criminal case assignments again. But on June 16, King reversed course again when he asked Chief Judge Zloch to reassign all his criminal cases. King's "oral request" prompted Zloch to write an administrative order that parceled out King's new criminal docket at random. At least eight of King's cases were assigned to six different judges. Pot Supply Store After King first dropped his criminal docket in May, courthouse sources identified his secretary, Sandra Diaz, as the member of King's staff whose husband was under investigation. Sources described her as a "wonderful person" who has worked as King's secretary for about a decade. On May 13, a federal grand jury in Miami indicted her 38-year-old husband, Jorge, twice on drug charges. In the first case, Diaz was charged with conspiring with an acquaintance, Tommy Rodriguez, to possess and distribute marijuana grown at the Loxahatchee house and at a residence in Royal Palm Beach. In the second case, the indictment says Diaz conspired with his cousin, Pedro Correa, 31, "to manufacture with intent to distribute" marijuana at the home in Royal Palm Beach. Diaz faces up to 40 years in prison and a $2 million fine if convicted. His attorney, Stuart Adelstein of Adelstein & Matters in Miami, did not return telephone calls seeking comment. A spokeswoman for interim U.S. Attorney R. Alexander Acosta also declined to comment. But court records say the investigation began when state agents with a money laundering task force placed under surveillance Gold Coast Hydroponics, a Fort Lauderdale store "known to supply growers of hydroponic plants, including marijuana." A truck registered to Jorge Diaz was spotted parked there. Agents used Florida Power & Light records to identify the house in Loxahatchee that Diaz owned, and conducted "trash pulls" that yielded small amounts of marijuana on clothing and dryer lint. Agents armed with a search warrant raided the home on 78th Place North on April 12. Rodriguez and his girlfriend, Kyrenia Blanco, were arrested and quickly cooperated. Rodriguez implicated Diaz, and gave agents enough to search a second grow house, where more than 100 marijuana plants were seized. After further investigation, Diaz and Correa were arrested April 29. Diaz was located by agents who tailed his wife, Sandra. He was nabbed at his in-laws' mobile home in Key Largo. Money Laundering Probe Court records say agents found in Diaz's possession "PACER printouts of all the documents relating to the arrests of Rodriguez and Blanco, documents that were believed to have been obtained by his wife, Sandra Diaz." Also found was a carbon copy of a $25,000 cashier's check from the couple's joint account, made payable to an attorney who represented Rodriguez and Blanco. U.S. Magistrate Judge Linnea R. Johnson in West Palm Beach ordered Jorge Diaz jailed as a flight risk and a danger to the community. He appealed the order to Judge Zloch. In a June 1 response to the appeal, Assistant U.S. Attorney A. Marie Villafana in West Palm Beach disclosed that Sandra Diaz also was under investigation. "Diaz's wife has recently been served with a 'target letter,' informing her that she is the target of a grand jury investigation involving charges of money laundering, making false statements to law enforcement and narcotics manufacturing and distributing," Villafana said. Zloch dismissed Diaz's attempt to get out of jail. Five days later, Zloch recused himself from Diaz's case without explanation. The clerk reassigned the case to U.S. District Judge Kenneth A. Marra in Fort Lauderdale. http://www.nylawyer.com/display.php/file=/news/05/07/071105d
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A
married Queens judge carried on a torrid affair with a female
prosecutor while handing out special favors to the DA's office,
including tips on how to win a murder trial, his former
secretary claims. 