Court Opinion

ID: 9588492
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-21 23:34:54.591127+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:00:59.178029
License: Public Domain

NEELY, Justice,
dissenting:
I respectfully dissent to the majority opinion in this case on the grounds that Magistrate Pauley has been made the scapegoat for an egregious, systemic institutional failure. The death of Mr. Alfred Jackson while incarcerated in the Kanawha County Jail is a tragedy; however, the proximate cause of that tragedy was not any culpable behavior on the part of Magistrate Pauley. Although Magistrate Pau-ley’s office is hardly a model of judicial competence, the drastic sanction of suspension that this Court has imposed on the Magistrate is more related to the system’s embarassment that a defendant killed himself while in our custody than it is to any action taken by the Magistrate.
I
The majority opinion adopts the sanction recommended by the Judicial Hearing Board. This recommendation, in turn, is based solely on the earlier record of the 3 May 1982 hearing concerning Magistrate Pauley after Mr. Jackson hanged himself. The now defunct Judicial Review Board that conducted the hearing proposed, in a letter of 22 October 1982, that no formal action be taken against Magistrate Pauley. Apparently this Court was dissatisfied with that recommendation because it returned the case to the Review Board (which subsequently became the Hearing Board as part of a general reorganization) with directions to make more specific findings. The unmistakeable signal was that the Board had reached the wrong conclusion. The Judicial Hearing Board then reinterpreted the same transcript by which the Judicial Review Board exonerated Magistrate Pauley and heard no new testimony or argument of counsel. On this basis the majority renders an opinion that affirms the Hearing Board!
My point concerning the scapegoating of Magistrate Pauley is probably well demonstrated by the fact that the majority opinion deals very briefly with the facts of the case. In fact, it is uncontroverted that when Mr. Jackson was brought before Magistrate Pauley he was at least mildly uncooperative, and abusive. Mr. Jackson was in jail without a lawyer to help him not because Magistrate Pauley failed to speak the magic litany, but rather because of incompetent handling of the paperwork. Mr. Jackson was brought to Magistrate Pauley at a satellite office early in the morning before the magistrate’s secretary arrived and Mr. Jackson was committed from there directly to the Kanawha County Jail. Appropriate forms were not completed to effect the appointment of counsel and Mr. Jackson was in jail without outside assistance.
Although the record before the Judicial Hearing Board indicates incompetent performance, nothing demonstrates corrupt or improper motives, nor deliberate refusal to follow the administrative directives of either the Circuit Court of Kanawha County or this Court. All that is shown is simple negligence and it requires a feat of imagination to find that this negligence was the proximate cause of Mr. Jackson’s death.
II
All bureaucracies dislike receiving bad news. Inevitably bureaucracies find the *480generation of on-the-ground intelligence disconcerting because it discloses problems that then imply additional work. Accordingly, bureaucracies tend to measure performance by statistical criteria that disclose but one or two dimensions of the total operation — as for example, in the judiciary, the number of cases disposed of or the hours courts are open for business. When, however, a tragedy occurs as a result of factors that the bureaucracy refuses to measure — exactly because they imply systemic failure — the easy and time-honored way to propitiate all sins is to find a low-level employee scapegoat, cast the blame on him, impose a sanction, and proceed with business as usual. It is the bureaucratic equivalent to general confession in church and I believe that this is what has occurred in Magistrate Pauley’s case.
The death of Mr. Jackson should forcefully point out to us that our system for handling difficult or obstreperous defendants is not what it should be; furthermore, it should point out to us that the management of our magistrate courts needs to be substantially improved. In the death of Mr. Jackson there are numerous places where the blame can be placed to far better effect than upon the magistrate in this case. If, indeed, Magistrate Pauley is not a paradigm of competence in the judging business, much of the blame should be placed at the feet of the Legislature. The ballot for election of magistrates in Kana-wha County provides a “vote for ten,” at-large race, which means that the electorate cannot focus upon defeating poor magistrates or reelecting good ones. Thus, as a result of legislative inattention to a problem that requires no money to cure, the elective process for magistrates in Kana-wha County continues to be a joke. All that is required in a race where ten persons will be nominated from a potential field of fifty or elected from a field of twenty is a militant, provincial consistency. Such an absurd system allocates all its rewards to those elected magistrates willing to play the most vicious and provincial politics.
The Kanawha County political climate, providing as it does that circuit judges all run at large in a field of seven, does not encourage strong leadership (since leadership implies making enemies). At the time this incident occurred the Chief Judge of the Circuit Court of Kanawha County had not staffed the nonjudicial offices in the system with strong personnel and had not consistently set high standards, demanded appropriately high performance, and applied sanctions such as complaints to the Judicial Inquiry Commission when those standards were not met. Finally, and in my opinion most egregiously, this Court in 1976 designed a system for magistrate courts that did not work and could not work.
The current magistrate system needs a complete redesign employing the research done in the last ten years by major foundations (as for example the Ford Foundation through the National Center for State Courts) on proper systems of conflict resolution in small claim courts on the civil side and preliminary proceedings courts on the criminal side. This Court, being a multi-member body, has been paralyzed by a lack of consensus that has prevented the type of leadership that we should have given. Some delegation of responsibility for magistrate court affairs should have been given to a person or persons capable of concerted action.
As a court we have not:
(1) Inspected magistrate courts critically and on a formalized basis with our own members, rather than junior personnel;
(2) Provided the level of intensive training necessary to convert lay, elected personnel into competent judges;
(3) Insisted on first-class administration by local chief judges; and,
(4) Taken into receivership incompetent magistrate courts like Kanawha County's where the political process makes strong local leadership impossible, and operated them for as long as necessary to establish proper procedures.
Wlien an organization fails to work and a tragedy results, it is the fault of the commanders and not the junior officers, unless some moral turpitude on the part of junior officers can be shown. Making Magistrate *481Pauley a scapegoat is not only an injustice to him, but it gives the illusion that his punishment absolves the entire system in some symbolic way. In fact the system is not absolved and it is currently constructed as to guarantee new tragedies in the future.