Legal News

Down in Mississippi, No Judgerly Love

By Ashby Jones

About two and a half years ago, we blogged a law-review article by University of Tennessee law professor Benjamin Barton which asked whether judges “systematically” favored the interests of the legal profession.

It was Barton’s contention that the answer was, well, yes, that judges did, as a group, issue rulings that favored the legal profession. It was a bold and interesting finding, and ever since then we’ve looked at rulings on lawyers and judges through a slightly different lens.

And that might explain why a federal-court ruling down in Mississippi, in which one judge stuck it to another judge, prompted us to sit up and take note.

Federal judge Tom Lee, who serves on the Southern District of Mississippi in Jackson, last week declined to dismiss a libel lawsuit filed against a state judge in Mississippi. That judge, Hinds County Judge Houston Patton, was sued for allegedly stating that another man, James Jennings Jr., and Jennings’s lawyer had tried to bribe Patton. Click here for the story, from the Jackson Clarion-Ledger; click here for the opinion; here for further commentary from something called Jackson Jambalaya,

According to the story, in 1997 Patton accused Jennings and Jennings’ attorney of trying to bribe him over a complaint Jennings filed against Patton with the Mississippi Commission on Judicial Performance. Patton reportedly told authorities that Jennings had proposed dropping his complaint for $25,000 and the reinstatement of an earlier $35,000 judgment that Patton had earlier dismissed. Jennings and Shelton were indicted but never tried, and the charges eventually were dismissed.

Last week, Judge Lee declined to dismiss the suit on the grounds that Patton was protected by some form of judicial immunity.

In response to Lee’s ruling, Patton told the Clarion-Ledger: “It’s still in litigation. I have no comment on it.” Jennings and his attorney were not reached by the paper.

In his defense, Patton had argued that reporting a suspected bribe and cooperating in a subsequent investigation qualifed as as judicial acts, and therefore couldn’t form the basis of a suit.

In his opinion, however Lee disagreed. “Jennings’ position, in support of which he has produced competent evidence, is that there was never any attempt to bribe and/or extort Judge Patton, or anything that could have been interpreted as such, but rather a settlement overture relating to a civil action he planned to file against Patton.”

Full post as published by Law Blog - WSJ.com on March 01, 2010 (boomark / email).