Public Defense

All for $53

By Gideon

Down under, the very curious tale of Judge Marcus Einfeld is unfolding in tragic fashion. The judge, a 70 year old champion of human rights, is now facing 2 years in jail - all for thinking that he could get out of paying a $53 (£36, really) fine for going 6 miles above the speed limit (yes, they have “strict” cops in Australia to0).

It wasn’t even really about the money - it seems he could afford that - but rather about those dastardly points that get added to one’s license for traffic infractions. Apparently he was close to whatever limit there is and risked losing his license. So he did the simplest thing he thought of at that moment: told the judge that someone else was driving his car:

So he said he had lent the car to an American friend, Professor Theresa Brennan. Satisfied, the magistrate dismissed the case, and the judge walked free. In just such a way, King Oedipus believed himself to be in the clear when he left Corinth.

If he - I mean the judge, not King Oedipus - had said that he had lent the car to an Australian government secret agent whom he could not name without rendering him vulnerable to attack by terrorists, Marcus Einfeld might still be enjoying his place at the top of the heap, admired by all.

Yes, of course, there was a problem. And the problem was an insurmountable one. Professor Brennan was dead and had been dead for three years. And it didn’t stop there:

He said he didn’t mean that Theresa Brennan. He meant another Theresa Brennan. A Greek chorus at this point might have said that the judge was anything but a natural liar, because he lied so very badly, just like most of us.

Further proofs of his amateur status followed in quick succession.

Finally, in a skein of inventions that we needn’t bother to unravel, he managed to implicate his own mother, aged 94, when he claimed to have been using her Toyota Corolla that day, so he couldn’t have been at the wheel of his silver Lexus.

Alas, there was security camera footage to prove that his mother’s Toyota Corolla had not emerged from the garage of her apartment block between daylight and dusk. We were left with the thought picture of a team of trained investigators examining a whole day’s worth of CCTV footage to establish that a Toyota Corolla had remained stationary throughout. With that thought picture, and with the thought picture of a man of true stature with his life in ruins.

Here was a man, much accomplished, who had devoted his life to the uplifting of the downtrodden. A man of virtue, honesty and equality. Yet, in what might be the final chapters of his storied life, he stumbled and fell. Fell so hard over something so trivial. And now he’ll spend at least the next two years of his life pondering a simple lie and the disastrous consequences.

Ibsen wrote a play about that, called The Wild Duck. None of this means that lying is a virtue. Almost always, it’s a vice to be avoided. But it’s a universal vice, and its prevalence is the very reason why any properly functioning legal system has a harsh law against perjury, because a court is where the lies have to stop, or there can be no justice.

Certainly, a justice system should not encourage lies and lying, but what occurs to me as well is that we are not well served by a rigid judicial system where there is no room for judicial discretion. I don’t think it is debatable that a judge in Einfeld’s position should have lied repeatedly (and so poorly) to avoid paying a simple ticket, but there seems to be no room for consideration of his lifetime’s worth of work. Does he deserve to spend 2 years in jail, even for being a judge who lied? I think the answer has to be a resounding “no”.

Full post as published by A Public Defender on April 12, 2009 (boomark / email).