Today's "whoops!"

I've heard of legislating from the bench before, but campaigning from the bench?

Comments

[Rivrdog]

I was wondering: if a judge is removed/resigns for corruption, do any of the cases he judged get re-visited on that basis alone?

[Gullyborg]

No. Assuming your case has already had its appeals, you'd have to be able to make a good faith showing that the corruption actually affected your sentence AND that you were unable to address the issue in your appeal.

The problem is that odds are, any problem that would have affected your verdict (say, the judge decided to allow the state to use certain evidence against you, even though that violated your rights), then that is the kind of thing you would take to appeal, and the court of appeals would decide based on the simple legal question of whether or not the evidence was proper. The judges' motivation behind his error won't come into play.

In other words, if the judge screwed you intentionally, or through an honest mistake, either way the court of appeals is supposed to make it right.

So just going back and saying "the judge was crooked" doesn't mean anything, because anything he did wrong, you should have had a chance to address in your appeal.

The corruption angle is probably most important if you need to argue that the judge abused discretion (for instance, he can sentence you to anywhere from 1 year to 50 years, and he chose 50 years when he gave others in similiar cases 1 year). Usually, it is next to impossible to get an appeals court to reverse a judge for abuse of discretion, simply because the law is created to allow the judge to work within that range based on what he sees in the courtroom. After all, the court of appeals is not there during your trial, can't hear the emotion in the witnesses voices, can't see how your react to things, etc. So they usually trust a judge implicitly. If you have solid proof of corruption in general, this might be a good tool to allege that a judge used discretion improperly to advance his own personal causes.