THE PROPOSED Judicial Council is not an adequate response to the need to reform the judiciary, according to an article in the current issue of the Jesuit magazine Studies.
In a highly critical article Michael Williams, a retired solicitor and former mediator, castigates the way in which judges are appointed and the conduct of a number of former judges, and claims that an informal “wall of silence” operates to prevent the public knowing what went on.
Mr Williams, who was formerly a partner in McCann FitzGerald solicitors, said that in his 30 years of practice up to the mid 1980s, he knew of judges who failed to leave their advocate role behind them when they became judges.
These judges failed to give a hearing to those who would have been on the other side when they were advocates and they had addictions, mainly to alcohol, which seriously interfered with their ability to do their job.
Their indecisiveness led them to constantly reserve judgments that never got delivered, he said, and they failed, in the Supreme Court, to show independence of judgment, instead agreeing with another judge without giving reasons.
“There was also one judge whose tendency, as an advocate, to be a bully developed on the bench into full-blown sadism, so that in his court administering justice took second place to humiliating advocates who had to appear before him,” he said.
“Practising lawyers knew about these people . . . but we did not tell the ‘outside world’ about their weaknesses or incapacity,” Mr Williams added.
This was due to either a fear that they would be punished or to an unconscious schoolboy distaste for “sneaking”, he surmised.
He said this wall of secrecy had been breached by a number of recent scandals, citing the Sheedy affair, where a Supreme Court and a Circuit Court judge resigned following uproar over the early release of a man convicted of drunk driving causing death; and the Curtin affair, where a Circuit Court judge eventually resigned on the grounds of ill-health following his acquittal on legal grounds of charges of possessing child pornography.
Mr Williams also referred to a case where the Supreme Court set aside one of its judgments after it emerged that the brother of the Chief Justice, Mr Justice John Murray was a partner in a firm employed by the defendants in the case, Trinity College.
He was also critical of the handling of the “A” case by the Supreme Court in 2006, where the court overruled a High Court decision to free a man jailed for sex with an underage girl, saying this decision “got the Minister for Justice off the hook”.
Turning to the qualities judges should possess, he said personal qualities were more important than knowledge of the law.
“I think a good judge will be calm, not volatile; thoughtful rather than brilliant; slow to make up his mind rather than incisive; profound in his intelligence and have a steady moral compass, formed by experience, not by study alone, which will inform his work, including leading him to treat with courtesy and consideration all other human beings who appear before him,” he said.
He said the system of appointing judges militated against such an ideal. Governments were inclined to appoint their cronies and the appointment was not, unlike the constitutional office of Comptroller and Auditor General, discussed by the Dáil.
The fact that successful lawyers were overpaid (which he attributed to greed) meant they were unlikely to make the sacrifice of having to live on a judge’s salary.
Reducing the incomes of practising lawyers and having a judicial council with a substantial supervisory role composed of judges and outsiders, would address some problems, he said.
Recent Government proposals for a judicial council made up of the judiciary, with a judicial conduct committee containing just three lay people, none of whom would be a practising lawyer, was not adequate, he said.