Seems to me that this judge has just injected himself and his courtroom into the middle of a political campaign in a very inappropriate way..

The straight-and-narrow proceedings of federal court took a striking political detour yesterday during a hearing in Camden for six men accused in a terror plot against Fort Dix.

The U.S. district judge presiding over a pretrial hearing for the group known as the "Fort Dix Six" threw sharp words from the bench when shown a campaign flyer being circulated by Republicans vying for state legislative seats in Burlington County.

The flyer, which was entered into evidence because of its potential impact on jurors, implies that Democratic Assembly hopeful Tracy Riley is a terrorist sympathizer.

The reason? Her husband, Michael Riley, is defending one of the men accused in the alleged plot to gun down soldiers at Fort Dix, the Army base in Burlington County. One of the men is expected to enter a guilty plea today.

Judge Robert B. Kugler, who examined the flyer for its impact on potential jurors, did little to conceal his shock.

"Wow," Kugler said, inspecting the mailer that Riley had handed him. "I had heard this was going on. . . . It's pretty despicable stuff, honestly."

When I was a seminarian, the brother of my moral theology professor was representing Jeff Dahmer, and Fr. Pat pointedly reminded us that ensuring that a clientÂ’s rights and interests are protected is appropriate to the degree that one neither lies to undercut justice nor acts to become enmeshed in the clientÂ’s crimes (like Lynn Stewart did). After all, no sane person would have argued that my professorÂ’s brother was condoning or supporting murder or cannibalism by representing his client.

Now I’m not going to get into the propriety of the ad – after all, if we are going to continue to follow the misguided policy of treating terrorists as criminals rather than enemies of the state, we are going to have to afford them the right to an attorney. It is a part of our system, and an attorney for a terrorist is no more responsible for his client’s crimes than is the attorney for a murderer or a child molester. Based upon this belief, I know that as a candidate I would not have signed off on this campaign flyer for that very reason.

That said, I don’t believe that the issue of the flyer should have been dealt with in the manner it was, especially not in open court. The attorney in question, the husband of the candidate opposed in the flyer, expressed concern about contamination of the jury pool. It was his job to raise the issue. But for the judge to make the comments that he did from the bench – in particular, the attack from the bench on one of the candidates supported by this campaign literature – seems to me to have crossed a line into inappropriate political involvement by a judge. By making said criticism from the bench, he implicitly endorsed the defense attorney’s wife. Such criticism should not have been made at all. As such, Judge Kugler ought to be sanctioned for unethical conduct.

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Posted by: Greg at 10:03 AM | Comments (3) | Add Comment
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