Opinion ID: 2520026
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 3

Heading: factual background of the conduct at issue

Text: ¶22 Judge Anderson was appointed as a juvenile court judge in the Third Judicial District in 1995. He was retained by the voters at the general election in 1998. During his term of office, Judge Anderson has been required, as are his colleagues, to hear cases involving the abuse, neglect, and dependency of children. These cases, generally referred to as child welfare cases, are managed under strict time requirements imposed by statute. Although many of these deadlines are onerous, and often force equally important matters involving children to be delayed, they are the law, and have been during Judge Anderson's term of office. ¶23 During the period from which the original Judicial Conduct Commission complaints arose, 1999-2000, Judge Anderson had significant difficulty managing his child welfare cases in compliance with statutory deadlines for hearings and action. His difficulty resulted in parties before him seeking the intervention of the court of appeals to force timely compliance. On repeated occasions, the court of appeals ordered Judge Anderson to comply. Judge Anderson, for whatever reasons, did not fully do so. ¶24 One of the regular participants in child welfare cases is the Office of the Guardian ad Litem. A guardian ad litem is appointed to represent the interests of the child, as required by statute. [7] The participation of the Office of the Guardian ad Litem is not optional in child welfare cases. [8] Similarly, the Attorney General is most often a participant in child welfare proceedings before the juvenile court, as required by statute. [9] ¶25 Both the Office of the Guardian ad Litem and the Attorney General participated in efforts in 1999 and 2000 to resolve the difficulty with the timely handling of child welfare cases in Judge Anderson's court. In part because Judge Anderson refused to accept responsibility for the difficulty, no solution was reached in either a formal or an informal way, although both were attempted. ¶26 Noting these difficulties and the fruitless efforts to correct the problem, in June 2000, the Director of the Office of the Guardian ad Litem submitted a request for investigation of Judge Anderson's conduct to the Judicial Conduct Commission. Specifically, the request sought investigation of Judge Anderson's inability to timely conduct hearings or issue decisions in child welfare matters, to the prejudice of children represented by the Office of the Guardian ad Litem. ¶27 By fall 2000, the investigation was underway, with the Judicial Conduct Commission staff conducting a series of interviews to pursue an understanding of the facts and circumstances related to the complaint and its allegations. On December 8, 2000, the Judicial Conduct Commission, pursuant to its rules of procedure, issued a notice of the commencement of formal proceedings against Judge Anderson based upon facts and issues generated by the complaint from the Office of the Guardian ad Litem, and the staff investigation. ¶28 At about the same time, Judge Anderson entered, on his own motion, orders of disqualification in a number of cases in which attorneys from the Office of the Guardian ad Litem, or the Attorney General, appeared. The Attorney General was included because attorneys from that office had responded to the process of the Judicial Conduct Commission and given statements regarding Judge Anderson's performance. In his order, Judge Anderson said that the Office of the Guardian ad Litem had filed a Judicial Conduct Commission complaint against him, and that the office of the Attorney General had provided support for the complaint and had vowed to force him from the bench. As such, said Judge Anderson, his impartiality could reasonably be questioned, and he was ethically required to recuse himself from cases involving those two offices. Although it was only in specific cases that Judge Anderson then disqualified himself, it was clear at the time, to both Judge Anderson and his colleagues on the Third District Juvenile Court, that having taken that position, Judge Anderson should not, and likely could not, hear any other child welfare matters since they all involved attorneys from the Office of the Guardian ad Litem and the Attorney General. ¶29 Since November 8, 2000, the date of Judge Anderson's notice of his disqualification from hearing child welfare cases, he has not heard cases of that type. His share has been handled by other judges who volunteered or were assigned to do so for discrete periods, or the cases were absorbed by his colleagues on the Third District Juvenile Court bench. ¶30 Although Judge Anderson has since expressed willingness to reassume his load of child welfare cases, the circumstances originally leading to his disqualification from those cases have not been resolved, nor has Judge Anderson taken sufficient action to do so. ¶31 During late 2001, Judge Anderson chose to file a civil complaint in the United States District Court for the District of Utah, naming the executive directors of the Judicial Conduct Commission and of the Office of the Guardian ad Litem, as well as the Chairman of the Judicial Conduct Commission, as defendants. The suit alleged various deprivations of Judge Anderson's protected rights under the United States and Utah constitutions, by virtue of the complaint, process, and proceedings of the Judicial Conduct Commission. The allegations of the suit were verified as true by Judge Anderson. ¶32 The federal lawsuit makes specific allegations regarding the conduct of the Director of the Office of the Guardian ad Litem and attorneys under her direction, indicating that their representation of children in Judge Anderson's court was deficient in a number of important respects. The federal complaint specifically accuses the Director of the Office of the Guardian ad Litem of initiating the Judicial Conduct Commission complaint knowing that the issues had been previously resolved and corrected, and of conspiring to deprive Judge Anderson of both his position on the bench and his constitutionally protected rights in the process. ¶33 Judge Anderson filed an amended complaint in the federal suit on December 20, 2001, in which he named the Director of the Office of the Guardian ad Litem as a defendant personally, not only in her representative capacity as in the first complaint, and sought money damages against her. As before, the amended complaint made direct allegations against the Director of the Office of the Guardian ad Litem in which Judge Anderson asserted, among other matters, that filings from the Director with the Judicial Conduct Commission constituted retaliation against Judge Anderson, and that the complaint to the Judicial Conduct Commission contained false statements by her about him. ¶34 When questioned about the amended complaint, Judge Anderson indicated that the filing was in response to the filing of a second Judicial Conduct Commission complaint by the Director of the Office of the Guardian ad Litem against Judge Anderson. However, Judge Anderson had been notified of the second complaint more than two weeks prior to the filing of his first federal complaint. No further explanation was forthcoming. ¶35 Since the filing of the amended complaint by Judge Anderson in federal court, any matter involving representation by the Office of the Guardian ad Litem assigned to Judge Anderson has generated a motion to recuse Judge Anderson for reason of expressed bias against the attorneys of that office, including the Director. ¶36 By August 2002, Judge Anderson's inability to hear child welfare cases had reached a point of severely affecting his relationships with his judicial colleagues and resulted in an effort by the then-Presiding Judge of the Third District Juvenile Court to reassign Judge Anderson to child welfare cases involving the Office of the Guardian ad Litem despite concerns for Judge Anderson's expressed bias. A motion by the Office of the Guardian ad Litem resulted in an order denying the attempt to recuse Judge Anderson on twenty-one specific cases. In that order, the Presiding Judge cited, among other reasons for his denial of the motion, the horrendous and appalling impact on the ability of the Third District Juvenile Court to meet its statutory obligations to hear cases as a result of Judge Anderson's prior disqualification, as well as the fact that it was administratively impossible for another juvenile court judge to assume Judge Anderson's cases, handle their own cases as well, and meet the time constraints of the Child Welfare Act. Noting the difficulties inherent in disqualifying a judge from a significant portion of the judge's caseload for a protracted and indeterminate period of time because of antipathy between the judge and a lawyer or firm, the Presiding Judge denied the motion to disqualify Judge Anderson, relying on the absence of proof of actual bias. ¶37 The court of appeals reversed the presiding judge, [10] not only ordering Judge Anderson's disqualification in the twenty-one enumerated cases, but in all cases then pending, and to become pending, that involved the Office of the Guardian ad Litem. Thereafter, the Attorney General sought a similar order of disqualification. The Presiding Judge again denied the request, and again the order was reversed by the court of appeals, again with present and prospective effect. [11] The Presiding Judge sought our review of the second decision of the court of appeals on petition for certiorari, which was granted and consolidated for decision with this matter. See State v. Oddone, 2004 UT 8. ¶38 Since November 2000, when Judge Anderson entered his original order of disqualification with respect to cases involving the Office of the Guardian ad Litem and the Attorney General, Judge Anderson has been assigned a variety of matters ranging from juvenile court delinquency proceedings in which neither the Office of the Guardian ad Litem nor the Attorney General appeared, to temporary assignment as an acting district court judge. He has not, however, been given a full assignment of the duties of a juvenile court judge in more than three years.