The Louisiana judiciary went into
full bunker job protection mode at the latest
meeting of the body that advises on judicial policy, to the detriment of the
citizenry.
The Judicial
Council of the Supreme Court was nonplussed, to say the least, at a report
issued last month by the New Orleans-based Bureau of Government Research that
determined the state’s judiciary as a whole, but particularly in New Orleans,
was overstaffed. The Council, which has a majority of judges sitting on it with
the remainder of the 17 members from the legal community save a lone citizen
representative, spent considerable meeting time criticizing the report.
Perhaps what really irritated
them was in its calculations the BGR used the Council’s own data and formula for
deriving the ideal workload in demonstrating at the statewide level (using only
the ten largest districts) there were about a quarter more judges than needed (excluding
Orleans) and in New Orleans a stunning double-and-a-quarter times needed. This
led during the meeting to a series of attacks on the study’s methodology, the
irony being the Council ended up criticizing its own methodology. It even led
to one member to ask for redoing the formula – precisely a recommendation in
the BGR report which noted that many states followed the National Center for
State Courts' that used 25 base types instead of nine and to use time studies
rather than raw time amounts.
Making the objections seem even
sillier was that BGR compared similar courts within the state to show in
particular the glaring inefficiencies of the Orleans versions. Most of the
argumentation against the report’s conclusions came on the basis that the
methodology wasn’t good enough to capture the nuances, but there’s no reason to
expect that the “nuances” such as they are differ, for example, between Caddo
Parish’s First District Family Court and juvenile courts in Orleans, which were
calculated to have a caseload for a single judge yet has six spots, or twice as
many as Caddo’s with comparable workloads.
But the winner of the most
laughable defense of the bloated judiciary came from member Kim Boyle, an
attorney in real life, who claimed the numbers underestimated demand for court
services even after the large population decline as a result of the hurricane disasters
of 2005 because it didn’t take into account tourists. Let’s see, to make up for
the population being down approaching 100,000, or let’s say equivalent to 30
million person-days in Orleans per year, and let’s say the typical tourist
stays three days, that means 10 million more tourists a year are hitting New
Orleans every year than in 2005 just to stay even – which is more than the entire
amount estimated to visit in 2012? With this example of clarity in
thinking, you would hire this woman to represent you in court?
However, there’s no surprise that
the legal community would circle the wagons so. Unless you place a large degree
of value on making as much money as possible, securing
a judgeship is the major prize for a lawyer in Louisiana. The pay is way more
than adequate (most make in neighborhood of the governor’s salary and some much
more), you largely set your own hours, and for almost all it’s a job for life (although
the 70 retirement age does cap that); even though they are elected positions,
almost none ever lose a reelection bid and most at the lower levels can look
forward to little if any competition in any of the their reelection bids. Throw
in the fact that you wield considerable power, and it’s little wonder that when
a seat comes open there is stiff, expensive competition for it. And, having fewer
of them also would increase their workloads from the below- to extremely
below-average levels many in Louisiana now enjoy.
Thus, sitting judges have every
incentive to want to have as many spots open as possible for the rest of their profession,
if not more specifically to have spots available for friends and allies. Legislators
and other policy-makers think the same way, for many of the many lawyers among
them would like to parachute into a cushy judgeship after their elective
careers are over/term-limited. Further, informally and indirectly, judges and office
in other parts of the judicial system hold enough power among electoral elites
that their behind-the-scenes support is coveted for campaigns for other
branches and levels of government, so it takes a brave majoritarian-branch politician
with integrity to buck the judicial system’s desire to have as many judgeships
as possible – never mind the additional (using Orleans as an example) $570,000 annually
each at the local level costs to taxpayers and litigants.
For any reduction, the
Legislature would have to deal with it this upcoming session because judicial
offices can’t be eliminated before their terms end and the bulk of them
statewide are having elections in 2014. The official line coming from many
legislators, as articulated by state Sen. Edwin
Murray last session when dealing with and successfully derailing state Rep.
Helena Moreno’s
HB
607 that would have lopped off a pair of juvenile bench spots in Orleans, is
to wait on a report by the Council about this and other matters the Legislature
mandated to have available by Feb. 15, 2014 before doing anything.
Yet Murray, who heads up the
report production on behalf of the Supreme Court, only has reported information
on the three parishes with their own courts. A report dealing with the five
courts of appeal is now almost two years late, and this instills little
confidence that reports on the more than 40 district courts and dozens of city
courts will be completed in four months.
No comments:
Post a Comment