Saturday, January 3, 2009

New Code for Judges

The new year will bring a new code of ethical conduct for Montana judges, mandated by the Montana Supreme Court and updating judicial conduct rules that hadn't been revised for 45 years.

The Code of Judicial Conduct takes effect Jan. 1.

Justice Karla Gray: "while the old canons were couched as permissive guidelines, the new code is a set of specific, enforceable rules. It will give the Judicial Standards Commission much better tools to work with when they receive complaints about judicial misconduct."

Full Article and Source:
Court adopts new code for judges

3 comments:

tvfields said...

Many years ago, probably sometime in the mid or late 1980s, I heard that 60 Minutes produced and aired a story on the Sunshine Gold Mine. If someone can obtain a copy of this video, I would be interested in viewing it.

My interest in this video stems from a call that I received from the Gold Mine's owner in 1983, while I was having some success in exposing negligence and fraud within the Montana Supreme Court. The owner was hoping that I could help ...

25 years later, our legal system is as prone as ever to negligence and fraud.

Back in 1983, I was naive and thought I was exposing an isolated case of negligence and fraud. I now realize that such negligence and fraud saturates our legal system. I expect it always will so long as the conflict between the business of law and the purpose of law is ignored by so many victims of this conflict ...

Tom Fields
tvfields@oh.rr.com

Anonymous said...

Let's hope the Judicial Review Board is not a SECRET process and it is OPEN to the Public for accountability. Transparency in these Boards will prevent 90 to 99% of the complaints from being thrown away. Let's hope they allow for anonymous complaints so those who work in the Judicial System can file complaints without fear of retaliations. Let's hope the penalties for violations of laws by these Judges are severe so these demiGods will come back down to earth and Civil courts will have the INTEGRITY that they are expected to have by the laws of higher courts.

Anonymous said...

But will these new guidelines lead to action and a clean up of the system? That's the question.

You're right, tvfields, negligence and fraud saturates our legal system. Very well put.