Opinion
Judge Coven Agrees: Judges Are ‘Burned Out’

Is This Why Coven Makes So Many Terrible Decisions?

By Atty. J. Edward Pawlick
August 16, 2001

Judge Mark Coven, who sits at the District Court in Quincy, agrees that he and other judges are “burned out.” He wants to start sitting in other courts so that he can become “refreshed and renewed,” he wrote in the Boston Globe.

We couldn’t agree more. That’s why we’ve written many times that our judges should not sit in the same court for years – particularly in family courts.

We’ve noted often that this particular person, Judge Coven, who is Chief at the Quincy District Court, is making terrible decisions because he is burned out or because he is a nasty person.

He’s the one who sent Harry Stewart to jail for six months in 1999 – because Stewart refused to sign a false confession that he had been violent to his wife.

It took another judge, Eileen Shaevel of the Probate Court, to exonerate Stewart of all charges earlier this year. But the exoneration didn’t occur until Stewart had already spent six months in Coven’s jail for something he never did. Judge Shaevel found no evidence that Stewart had ever threatened or harmed his wife since their separation in 1995.

Coven is also one of the judges who hounded Ken Newell and his children even though the wife had filed 26 false charges of violence against him, was on drugs according to the court, was diagnosed by the court with psychological problems and recommended for treatment in a hospital.

Again, it was another judge, Christina L. Harms, who tried her best to take this wife seriously last year when the wife filed a Contempt of Court charge against Newell. But Judge Harms was unable to do so. Instead, she stopped the proceedings and closed the court. Too bad Judge Coven doesn’t have the same decisiveness. He says he’s overworked but he allows this tomfoolery to occur in his court every day of the year.

Wants More Money

The gravamen of Judge Coven’s article in the Boston Globe was that he needs more money.

But he wasn’t so crass as to start his article that way. He started by saying he’s worried because Judge Shaevel (who made him look silly) is retiring early.

“Her decision means the loss of a respected colleague and a dedicated public servant. This represents not only the loss of a dedicated judge, but an indictment of the entire system, emblematic of a system that has failed to retain the energy, excitement, and commitment of one of its best and brightest.”

We couldn’t have said it better. The judiciary in the state of Massachusetts is in a shambles. And Judge Coven personifies the problem.

He finally got to his point at the end of his piece when he said, “[J]udges continue to be paid less than a first year law associate in a large law firm who might have just graduated from law school...”

The problem with that observation is that Coven never qualified for such a lofty position. That’s why he’s never received that kind of salary.

Before he became a judge, Coven was a poverty lawyer for his entire career, working for much of that time as a Senior Attorney at Greater Boston Legal Services. This is the federal- and state-funded group which represented Newell’s wife. They represented her for nothing even though she clearly has too high an income to be eligible for free legal help. But those poverty lawyers, most of whom are women, totally refuse to help any men.

How could Judge Coven possibly say he is unbiased and fair when it’s always his old lawyer-friends who are appearing before him? Do you think they get a little better treatment than most do?

But we’re happy to see that he is finally acknowledging the “failure of the judicial system” of which he is a “leader.”