And thus he self-destructs his judicial career in style. Judge Bill Mathesius, who was Mercer County, New Jersey’s king for what I thought was life when I was spending the second half of my childhood there, is flaming out big time on the New Jersey state bench. You just don’t see a judge write stuff like this:
I authored the opinion – “opinion” being what I thought the operative word – known as State v. Harris in October, 2002 where I was indiscreet enough to question our State’s and court’s muddling of the death penalty. I indecorously took note of the court energy and millions of taxpayer dollars which are wasted on a dysfunctional morass. Don’t try to look my opinion up because it has been deemed “wholly devoid of any function in the judicial discourse of our death penalty jurisprudence” [4] by Justice LaVecchia, the author of her very own State v. Harris “opinion.” She also allowed “[t]he balance of the court’s statements contain what only can be described as outrageous [5], sarcastic [6], and pejorative [7] comments about this State’s death penalty system and this Court’s capital jurisprudence [8], including gratuitous personal attacks against current and former members of the Court.” [9] Consequently, she proclaimed, “such statements deserve no place in the published decisions of this State.” [10][11] The Justice’s caustic and anti-intellectual comments belie the fact that with her own 100-plus additional pages of deathless prose, she affirmed my conclusions regarding the substantive issues of Harris.
[12]Notwithstanding, with Harris, I painted the bull’s-eye on my own back – no one else to blame.
I failed to sufficiently take into account that there are those justices and judges whom, as the result of little more than political happenstance, become inured to a daily showering of reverence such that it mutates into an entitlement. In judiciary circles, independent thought which deviates from the ex cathedra from above is unwelcome. [13]
By the Justice’s decree, I became then, and as far as I know, the only judge in the United States who has had a written opinion stricken (imperiously, in my view) from the “judicial discourse,” [14] such as it is. [15] For a court – never mind the Supreme Court of New Jersey – to so indulge was, at the very least, a violation of democratic etiquette, if not a rather disingenuous expedition into censorship [16], seemingly antithetical to any notion of the First Amendment [17] of the Constitution of the United States of America [18]. This is, by the way, the very same Court that regularly (and proudly) expands Constitutional rights or discovers new ones lying here and about [19].
So it goes.
And so I was brought up on charges by the Advisory Committee on Judicial Conduct (ACJC) [20], a judicial swat team of scolds led, interestingly enough by former Justice Alan Handler [21], mostly alleging my bringing of the “judicial office into disrepute.” [22][23] Moi?? Say it isn’t so.
Ouch. And, lastly, she determined that my statements “reveal a disdain for defendant.” Disrepute?
He actually has a valid point in there, but he’s a very bad writer, and that does not help. Via Above the Law (to whom I myself sent the original item a while ago).
