Legal News

Might the End be Nearing for N.O. Federal Judge Thomas Porteous?

By Ashby Jones

The lead to an AP story Sunday about troubled New Orleans federal judge Thomas Porteous Jr. is a gem, dripping with a deadpanned sense of understatement:

It is not the lifestyle of a typical federal judge: five or six vodka cocktails at lunch; gambling with borrowed money; bankruptcy under a phony name; and cash, trips or home repairs from lawyers and a bail bondsman with business before his court.

Indeed, those things do not typically comprise the lifestyle of a federal judge. But such is the portrait being painted of Porteous by witnesses in his Congressional impeachment case.

Congress ended its hearings last week on Judge Porteous, for whose judicial career the bell seems to be tolling ever more loudly. Were Porteous impeached and convicted by Congress, he’d be only the eighth in U.S. history to have suffered such a fate. According to the AP story, Lawmakers appear poised to take their advice and bring charges early next year, setting up a trial in the Senate. Click here, here, and here for previous LB coverage of Porteous, dating to 2007.

Judge Porteous, so far has offered little in his defense. And while his lawyer, Ober, Kaler’s Richard Westling, acknowledges that the evidence does not look good, he says the House has disregarded significant facts and circumstances.

So far, however, witnesses and investigators have testified that:

Porteous’s 2001 bankruptcy was initially filed iunder the name "Orteous," with a hastily arranged post office box as the judge's address to keep his name out of the newspaper.

Judge Porteous's defense is likely to focus in part on the fact that he previously survived such an exhaustive investigation without prosecution and that much of the activity in question occurred before he became a federal judge.

Full post as published by Law Blog - WSJ.com on December 21, 2009 (boomark / email).