Concerns with Judge/Lawyer Discipline
By Doug Schafer
Candidate for Washington State Supreme CourtDoug's experiences in recent years with the Washington Commission on Judicial Conduct (CJC) and with the State Bar's lawyer disciplinary system have been very disappointing to him. Neither system appears to Doug to be functioning effectively. Both seem tainted by the corrupting influence of long-standing personal relationships among friends and professional colleagues--the "good old boy system" at work. Both seem more prone to covering-up professional misconduct than to imposing discipline for it. The CJC appears to disregard many of the strong procedural and public disclosure mandates of its Constitutional charter that the state's voters adopted in 1980, and then tightened in 1986 and 1989 after observing the CJC's ineffectiveness in its early years.
The CJC and the State Bar disciplinary authorities do not cooperate or share information with each other, so serious incidents of professional misconduct slip between the cracks of their separate jurisdictions. Both appear inadequately funded to effectively fulfill their missions, even if their leaders wished to. The present state supreme court justices do not appear to support the mission of the CJC, instead treating the CJC as "the enemy" of the judiciary rather than seeing it as the body that preserves judicial integrity and maintains public trust by investigating and exposing ethical lapses by judges. Washington's governors have tended to appoint their own political party loyalists to the citizen positions on the CJC, unfortunately giving credence to criticisms that the body sometimes pursues a political agenda.
Doug has attempted for nearly eight years to focus the attention of journalists, judicial and bar leaders upon the problems of the judicial and lawyer disciplinary systems. He sent packets of information about the CJC's problems to each candidate in the state supreme court election in 1998, hoping that some candidates (including three of the current justices) would speak out about those problems, but none did. He hopes that his supreme court candidacy will enable him to bring to the attention of the voting public, to journalists, and to judicial and bar leaders the many problems that he believes now exist with the judicial and lawyer disciplinary systems. To read some of Doug's letters and memos concerning CJC practices, click here.