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Judges's Crime and Punishment

 Saturday, January 14, 2006 3:50 PM
 

While a few groups of individuals who always like to talk about crime and punishment like politicians, company executives, lawyers (defence and prosecutors) etc have seen the inside of a prison as convicts and experienced the rigours of crime and punishment over which they had only talked about at a distance, one group who talks about this phenomenon on a daily basis has almost entirely escaped its experience and consequences. I am talking about judges. Judges commit criminal offences like every one else but they escape punishment because their conduct is not categorized as criminal and when it teeters on criminal conduct, it is excused on the basis of judicial immunity or is fast- tracked through the some kind of judicial rather than criminal conduct hearing. One judge in Barrie, Ontario, Canada, who was alleged to have committed sexual misconduct acts on seven women which would have attracted seven sexual criminal assault charges were they committed by any one else, was allowed to resign after a judicial rather than criminal misconduct process in 2004 and 2005. According to Sadakat Kadri in his book, THE TRIAL: A HISTORY FROM SOCRATES TO O. J. SIMPSON (2005), Nazi judges who clearly should have been charged with war crimes like the rest of high ranking German society during the Nazi era, improperly escaped punishment for their overzealous enforcement of Nazi crimes against humanity. So do all other judges in all societies including apartheid South Africa judges.  Occasionally, however, an unfortunate judge gets netted in the web of simple crime and punishment rather than the big world-type crimes
against humanity. One such unfortunate judge was the subject of a front page story in the New York Times of Friday the 13th of January 2006.

Judge Roland Amundson, who had been on the Minnesota State Court of Appeals had been convicted and sentenced for stealing US$300,000.00 from an US$600,000.00 trust fund he had been administering for a severely mentally retarded person. In prison, Amundson met a few inmates whose lengthy prison sentences he had upheld as an appellate judge. It is through his prison experience and interactions with the inmates whose sentences he had upheld that Amundson now preaches for the rethinking of the efficacy or lack thereof of the fascination by those who have never experienced prison life with the prison sanction. Amundson says that prison seems to now serve the purpose of warehousing rather than rehabilitation. He says that inmates come out more incapacitated to exist and survive in society than when they went into prison. People in prison need fathers more that almost any other group of people in society. Other solutions have to be found.
 Amundson is delivering the same message as another US judge who saw the inside of a prison also as an inmate. Judge Sol Wachtler had been the Chief Judge of the New York State Court and Court of Appeals when he was convicted for criminal conduct. His prison experience produced a riveting book on crime and punishment, the only one of its kind, entitled, AFTER THE MADNESS: A JUDGE'S OWN PRISON MEMOIR (1997). If only those who send people, unthinkingly to prison would read this book, they would think twice before making the inevitable ignorant utterances about rehabilitation and curative function of the prison. There are no easy solutions to criminality but we should speak from the position of informed knowledge rather than regurgitated stupidity.

Munyonzwe Hamalengwa, is a Toronto Lawyer who was detained without charge or trial during a State of Emergency in Zambia.
Email: mhamalengwa@sympatico.ca;
Website: www.munyonzwehamalengwa.ca
 

NB: If I refer to any book in any of my
articles, I am likely to have the book and it is
available for borrowing by the public.
 

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                                         Last Modified: February 20, 2006

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