Georgia’s judicial watchdog agency could be even more secretive about its efforts to weed out bad judges under a recently revised bill moving through the General Assembly.
House Bill 808, and a related constitutional amendment, would clean house at the seven-member Judicial Qualifications Commission, created 40-plus years ago to investigate complaints against judges.
Last Wednesday, the Senate Ethics Committee amended the bill on a 4-2 vote to — for the first time — shut the public out of a judge’s disciplinary hearing before the JQC.
Open government advocates say that’s bad for the public, which can credit JQC investigations with forcing more than five dozen judges from the bench since 2007. This includes Johnnie Caldwell Jr., who resigned as a judge in the Griffin Judicial Circuit in 2010 after being accused of making rude, sexually suggestive comments to a female attorney. Caldwell won a seat in the state House two years later and is co-sponsoring two of three pieces of legislation seeking an overhaul of the JQC.
The bill’s chief sponsor, House Judiciary Chairman Wendell Willard, R-Sandy Springs, says he’ll see how HB 808 looks when it leaves the full Senate and will push to ensure the JQC’s current level of openness.
“I’m going to be sure we don’t step back as far as the public’s right to know,” Willard told the AJC.
Currently, complaints are kept confidential until the JQC gives notice of formal proceedings against a judge or the complaint is resolved or closed. Commission members will neither confirm nor deny before that stage whether a complaint has been filed or an investigation is being conducted.
Senate Ethics Committee Chairman Dean Burke, according to Senate staff, introduced the amendment to close disciplinary hearings to the public.
“I felt the amendment was necessary to ensure that false and malicious complaints against a judge would not be made public until the findings of the JQC are considered valid by their processes,” the Republican from Bainbridge said Tuesday. “These positive findings and the entire proceedings are then open to the public.”
Stephen Bright, the president and senior counsel at the Southern Center for Human Rights, said “turning the JQC into a star chamber that operates in secret will only undermine confidence in Georgia’s judiciary.”
“If passed, this will continue a disturbing trend of secrecy instead of openness in Georgia’s government,” Bright said. “It will rightly be seen as an effort to protect judges at the expense of the public’s legitimate interest in allegations of judicial misconduct and how they are handled.”
Hyde Post, a past president of the Georgia First Amendment Foundation, said the bill, as first proposed by Willard, made the JQC “a model of transparency.”
“The rewrite would cloak everything in secrecy,” Post said. “Openness builds trust in government institutions; secrecy does not. If we believe in open courts, why not an open JQC.”
Willard says the JQC has “lost credibility” with lawmakers and has to be overhauled.
“There’s not a judge that would sit down with them,” he said, “and that’s why we need to clean house and redo it.”
His House Resolution 1113 would ask voters this fall to amend the state constitution to dissolve the current JQC and allow the General Assembly to re-create it.
He also is sponsoring House Resolution 1363, which would create a committee of lawmakers to investigate the current JQC. The committee would have unprecedented power to subpoena witnesses, focusing on the JQC's handling of recent investigations of former Judges Cynthia Becker of DeKalb County and Amanda Williams of Brunswick.
The subpoenas would have to be signed by House Speaker David Ralston, a Republican attorney from Blue Ridge who has been under investigation by the State Bar of Georgia.
Becker was indicted on six felonies and one misdemeanor in August 2015, but the charges were dropped four days later. She was accused of lying to JQC officials when asked why she didn’t grant bond to former DeKalb County School Superintendent Crawford Lewis after she sentenced him to 12 months in jail.
Becker signed a consent order agreeing not to pursue another judgeship and acknowledged in writing that she had unintentionally made erroneous statements, her attorney said at the time.
The treatment of drug court defendants by Williams, a former Superior Court judge in Brunswick, was the basis of an episode of “This American Life” with Ira Glass. Lindsey Dills told Glass she forged two checks on her father’s checking account for a combined $100 and spent more than five years in drug court, including 14 months behind bars.
Williams resigned in early 2012, shortly after the JQC filed formal charges. The charges were later dropped, and she agreed not to seek another judgeship.
“That’s one of the judges they’re upset about,” Lester Tate, the chairman of the JQC, said of Williams.
Willard’s legislation is “a drastic overreaction and spot-on why judicial conduct investigations and politics don’t mix,” Tate said.
The Senate version of Willard’s bill returns say-so to the State Bar on two JQC appointments. Currently, the Bar has three appointments, the Supreme Court two and the governor two.
Under Willard’s original bill, the State Bar would lose its three appointments — one to the House speaker, one to the lieutenant governor and the third to the governor.
The Senate Ethics Committee version calls for the governor to appoint the JQC chairman.
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