Lori Douglas scandal shows how easy it is to become a judge

WINNIPEG—The checkup into the background of Canadian senior judges before they’re appointed is as light as a feather duster, it emerged at the Lori Douglas inquiry Friday.

And with that revelation alone, the Canadian Judicial Council committee looking into how Douglas was appointed in 2005 — despite the existence of online nude photos and the alleged sexual harassment of her lawyer-husband’s client — has justified its existence.

Douglas’s applications to become a judge had previously been blocked by Manitoba Appeal Court Justice Marc Monnin, who feared that the photos her husband Jack King had posted of her online would lead to embarrassment or blackmail. Eventually he became convinced that they were permanently deleted and the matter was settled.

Of course, he was wrong.

This is a case study that the administrators of Canadian law will read with care.

If we can improve the way in which judges are appointed, the whole sordid crusty tale of Douglas — innocent victim of a vicious husband, a disgrace to the bench or something in between — will have been worth enduring.

For applicants appear to undergo significantly less scrutiny than you and I would expect when applying for a job. If we say we can speak French, for instance, we might expect to be asked to chat in that language.

But it’s different for a judge. It’s genteel. It’s shallow and polite. If an applicant says he’s a ballerina, he might have to have a senior judge say the applicant can indeed stand beautifully on one leg.

But you and I would have to hop around in the interview. Judges don’t, and that’s where the sifting process failed in Douglas’s case. Nobody followed up on the details. They didn’t have to.

Appeal Court Judge Martin Freedman, head of the Manitoba Judicial Advisory Committee (JAC) that recommended Douglas’s third application in 2005, forthrightly told the inquiry how it was done.

Judges gather primary references from senior judges and lawyers, and secondary references from, oh, a pile of respected people. They send their forms to the provincial JAC.

The JAC, built of seven people from the judiciary, the Law Society and the general public, “verifies” the references. This is very different from “investigate,” a point the inquiry was careful to make.

Freedman had heard rumours about the Douglas-King scandal in 2005, when Douglas’s application arrived among 13 for a Family Court judgeship.

“I found out about it at the coffee table in the lounge with the other judges in the courthouse,” Freedman said. “Judges are former lawyers and they talk about things.”

All he knew, he told the inquiry, was that there were nude photos he had not seen, they had been “permanently removed” from the Internet and that her husband had tried to lure a client into sex with her.

He did not know that the pictures were graphic, including handcuffs, a difficult issue for judges who order people into handcuffs as part of their job. He didn’t know that the Dark Cavern website was interracial, which is complicated for judges who must be above racial judgments.

And he didn’t understand the nature of the Internet. King had earlier testified that he wrote to the Dark Cavern website and asked them to take down his ads featuring photos of his manacled wife.

One can imagine the correspondence. “Dear Mr. Dark Cavern. My interaction with your publication has gone wobbly. Do assist.”

The Internet doesn’t work that way, but kindly judges Monnin and Freedman were not to know that. Neither was the nice Margaret Rose Jamieson, the official who attended JAC meetings across the country and organized applications and the final reports that conclude, “Yes, you’ll be a great judge,” “Yes, you’re a judge” or “Forget it.”

Everyone on the JAC was told Douglas’s pasteurized version of the scandal. But Freedman, still uneasy, asked Jamieson to call Douglas and verify the paragraph in her application that said the scandal was old news. He wanted to flag the “very unusual situation” for the federal minister who gives the final OK.

“We didn’t want him to be blindsided,” Freedman said.

The problem is that almost no one else on the committee remembers this 2005 discussion at all. After a judge is appointed, all records are destroyed, for reasons that are unclear.

Jamieson remembered years later that she had in fact called Douglas, who allegedly said some very questionable things.

She said King had given the photos to a “friend,” which is the last thing King client Alex Chapman was. She didn’t say anything about luring, or bondage, and said the whole thing had been resolved through a “signed confidential settlement” with the Law Society. In fact, the society had only started asking questions.

Who knows what Douglas’s response will be to Jamieson’s story? It will be “she said/she said,” and more is expected of a judge than that.

The whole inquiry nearly derailed on Thursday after Douglas’s lawyer and an independent counsel complained that a cross-examination of the devious King by the council’s expert lawyer, George Macintosh, was rude and awful, revealing the inquiry’s bias against Douglas.

The inquiry, headed by Alberta Chief Justice Catherine Fraser, smacked down the complaint entirely, praising Macintosh’s “crisp, organized and fluid style” and reasserting its defence of the public interest.

The hearing will reconvene, perhaps in December, to finally hear from the case study herself, Associate Chief Justice Douglas. We wait agog.

Original Article
Source: the star
Author: Mallick, Heather