“Damage Control” by Judge Marshall Doesn’t Work
May 10, 2004

     Chief Justice Marshall responded with "spin" to the report even though it had been done at her request. Her "damage control" was successful among all the media except for MassNews. Marshall claimed that the panel recognized the "excellence" of the decisions of the courts. She said the judges must now "elevate management in our courts to that same level of excellence."

      But when questioned by MassNews whether they had studied or measured the quality of judicial decisions, and if so, by what means, spokesman John Lamontagne of Morrissey & Company, told MassNews that the panel was mainly going by the history of the Massachusetts courts.

     "The committee was not asked by the Chief Justice," he says, "to look at the quality of decision-making. In the report, the committee makes reference to the court system's longstanding 'reputation' for sound decision-making and the fact that high-quality decisions are often undermined by slow action, high cost and poor service. The committee did not specifically review decision-making practices, nor was it asked to do so."

      The spokesman says that many at the courts believe they are doing a good job. "However," he tells MassNews, "during the six months the committee was working, committee members and staff spoke with 165 people - lawyers, judges, clerks, legislators, litigants and many more. In those 165 interviews the vast majority of people agreed that while the system is slow and poorly managed, it does follow solid judicial principles. Litigants may disagree with individual decisions, but system-wide there was overall agreement that decision-making was sound."

       This means that the "excellence in the substantive decisions of the judiciary" claimed by Justice Marshall and the panel was not based on a study of public complaints, recidivism rates and appeals, but was based on the opinion of mostly insiders with a vested interest in maintaining the illusion of justice.

      Committee spokesman Lamontagne tells MassNews, "The committee kept ongoing dialog with both the Probate & Family and Juvenile Courts. For the Probate and Family Court, they talked to their administrative office at least on five occasions. Although the report did not include specific analysis on the department in the report, the committee did look at their case management statistics by division and spoke extensively with the administrative office about case management and statistical tracking.”

     Human Interest Disasters

     While the court report for the most part stayed away from human-interest stories and concentrated solely on management, it must have been deluged with horror stories to the point where it couldn't help but mention a few of them, which helps to validate the stream of complaints coming into MassNews from families suffering under the tyranny of Massachusetts Courts.

      The panel wrote: "One clerk-magistrate was accused of over 100 acts of misconduct over a period of years before action was taken. This misconduct included slowing the handling of cases filed by lawyers he disliked, suggesting that a court employee ‘go commit suicide,’ and illegally attempting to influence the outcome of a criminal case."

      In another example, "A convicted rapist was free for 16-years before serving a day of his prison sentence because of alleged health problems, missing and inaudible court records, and two appeals that took years to navigate the Court system. Until the victim herself filed a motion with the Supreme Judicial Court, no action was taken."

      In yet another egregious example, the report tells how a set of siblings had to spend their elementary school years in foster care while the courts took five years to terminate their birth parents' custodial rights. The committee took care to frame this particular example as a problem only because there existed "excellent potential adoptive parents" waiting in the wings during that time.

      There are numerous cases similar to this, however, of loving birth parents desperately fighting the state for years to get their kids back. The mainstream media routinely blacks out such reports, preferring to concentrate on carefully selected cases designed to generate calls for more funding of social services and increased scrutiny of parents by the state.

     Echoes MassNews Revelations

     Echoing what MassNews has written in the past, the Committee said, "These are but a small sample of the many grossly mishandled situations brought to our attention. During visits to courts across the Commonwealth, many stories of justice denied through delay or excessive cost came to light."

     What about justice denied through biased, unfair, illegal, incompetent and improper judicial decisions? The Committee was not charged with examining judicial decisions, but it was possible to get a glimpse of their thinking.

      In the introduction to the report, the Committee offered the opinion that "the judicial decision-making in our state has a historical reputation for quality that is second to none." No one would disagree that the state's courts have a long and proud history of excellence. But what is their reputation today?

     On another early page, the panel wrote, "Many observers believe that the courts almost always 'get the right answer' in legal disputes."

      Who were those "observers?" Do they know about the fathers and families who regularly take time off from work to hold signs and cry for justice outside Family Courts and on the State House steps? Have they heard that the Holyoke Police Chief is so disgusted with judges letting dangerous criminals walk that he is spearheading a Constitutional Amendment campaign to make judges more accountable to the people?

     The report makes numerous flattering references to a court system that turns out "high-quality judicial decisions," which is assumed to be the norm.

      Even when the panel recounted the few anecdotes about the children in foster care, the rape victim and the magistrate from hell, it softened the blow by characterizing those episodes as management failures and examples of how "poor delivery of a sound judgment undermines quality justice in Massachusetts."

      But most observers say this was a startling report, considering that it came from a group of leaders who had been appointed by Chief Justice Marshall herself, only last August. The question, they say, is whether Margaret Marshall will be successful in putting it back in the file to die a quiet death.

       On January 24, 2004, Marshall told a friendly lawyer audience at the Massachusetts Bar Association, which is the chief sycophant for everything she does, that she is making substantial progress even though the Commission had warned that “stopgap” measures would not suffice.