Knight Chair in Investigative & Enterprise Reporting
How-to guide:
Investigation of the ‘worst-performing judge’
By William Gaines
The investigation of judicial conduct can be thorough even though the reporter may venture no farther than to the computer on the desk. A judge is accountable to an appeals court, its decisions are online and the reporter counts the number of times a decision by the judge is reversed.
The investigative reporting class at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign recently completed such a study of state-level judges in all fifty states to determine which judge in America had the most reversals. However, the project can be even more localized.
When a judge hears arguments on a case anywhere in the country, there are plenty of rules to follow. If he slips up in the procedure, the lawyer of the party slighted will object. If the judge overrules the objection, the lawyer will have the right to appeal. That means that every judge everywhere has someone monitoring every judicial utterance. If the judge does not reverse his or her trial decision that is challenged, the party claiming error may appeal. The appeal goes to a panel of judges who sit on the bench of the state appellate court. Every state has an appeals process, but in a few states, hearing the complaint against the lower court is an additional function of the state's supreme court.
The appeals court rules on procedural error rather than on high-blown sophisticated interpretations of the law. That is left to the state supreme courts. The appeals courts will look at a judges' challenged decisions and will rule whether they were in error or an “abuse of discretion” by the judge.
In Alabama, the courts give us this official description:
But many trial court judges err time after time, as the appellate dockets show. Some judges have no reversals in one year, others have as many as fifteen, and yet no one calls on them to be accountable for racking up such a large number. Who are these judges and how do they manage to escape public attention?
The local reporter is accommodated online. The decisions of the appeals courts are on the Internet in every state. They tell the basics of the case, explore the issues of the appealed decision and state their conclusions. All court documents are public documents unless a portion is sealed by a judge. There was no question in the student study about access to the information.
The idea of the class project was to count the number of reversals of every judge in a period of 32 months. When the judge with the most was identified, the students would print out and study each of the cases reversed. The highest number of cases was 39, so it was no small task.
The students found wrongful imprisonment, prosecutorial misconduct, denying of constitutional rights, and decisions that lacked common sense.