Bar Association to Offer Invite to Hoyloke’s Chief Scott
by Bill Dusty
In a recent newsletter (dated July) to fellow Hampden County Bar Association members, Association President Mark J. Albano announced that he would be inviting Holyoke Police Chief Anthony Scott to a public forum for “examination, discussion, analysis and debate of his proposal for the election of judges in Massachusetts.”
A cordial invite this is not. The context of the message leaves little doubt that Albano’s intention is to skewer the firebrand Chief under an intense cross-examination by the Bar Association. From the newsletter:
Chief Scott has been on a long crusade to establish judicial elections in the Commonwealth. According to Chief Scott, a recent murder in Holyoke demonstrates “that the judiciary is protecting criminals at the expense of taxpaying, law-abiding citizens.” He said that “with the low bails and light sentencing, judges are not living up to their oath to protect the citizens of the Commonwealth.” Recently, he has also used the media to vigorously criticize a Superior Court judge for invoking the exclusionary rule in a major drug trafficking case.
Earlier this year, Scott was highly critical of Hampden Superior Court Judge Cornelius J. Moriarty II’s decision to exclude important evidence in the trial of defendant Jimmy Roman Rosario, accused of drug trafficking in Springfield. The Judge had ruled at the time that $2 million worth of cocaine which prosecutors were using as evidence against Rosario had been obtained in an illegal search of the defendant’s residence. (Rosario was subsequently indicted by a federal grand jury.)
Judge Moriarty is listed as a sustaining member of the Hampden County Bar Association.
Since his appointment as Holyoke’s police chief at the beginning of the decade, Scott has been a vocal critic of what he views as lenient judges in the county and has routinely held press conferences to air his complaints to the general public.
In his message to members, Albano ripped Chief Scott for his “tenacious” habit of using the media to further his cause. “The Republican has described him as a ‘traveling road show’,” wrote Albano.
Albano went on to lament Scott’s efforts to bring judicial elections to Massachusetts, first citing state Senator Michael R. Knapik’s proposed legislation to appoint judges to 6-year terms, with the judges names thereafter being placed on a ballot for re-appointment by voters. “The various accusations and proposals made by Chief Scott are all very serious and all quite troubling,” Albano went on to write. “They go to the heart of our justice system and the rule of law at its core: the right of all to a fair hearing before an impartial judge who is untainted by money or special or extraneous interests.”
On the latter point, Albano criticized the election of judges, writing that in states where elections are held for judges, “there has been a distinct tendency towards money and special interest driven judicial races, complete with sound bytes, attack ads, spin and all of the other indicia of common partisan politics.”
Albano’s assertion, however, does not appear to hold up in at least one study authored by three Law School professors back in 2007. The study, entitled Professionals or Politicians: The Uncertain Empirical Case for an Elected Rather Than Appointed Judiciary, indicates that whether or not appointed judges are superior to elected ones remains largely a matter of viewpoint. In its abstract, the study cites a lack of evidence supporting claims that appointed judges are superior to elected judges. From the paper:
Using a dataset of state high court opinions, we construct objective measures for three aspects of judicial performance: effort, skill and independence. The measures permit a test of the relationship between performance and the four primary methods of state high court judge selection: partisan election, non-partisan election, merit plan, and appointment. The empirical results do not show appointed judges performing at a higher level than their elected counterparts. [emphasis added.] Appointed judges write higher quality opinions than elected judges do, but elected judges write many more opinions, and the evidence suggests that the large quantity difference makes up for the small quality difference. In addition, elected judges do not appear less independent than appointed judges.
Continuing on with his message, Albano noted that judges are for the most part prohibited from publicly responding to Chief Scott’s charges of leniency towards defendants. “Indeed,” Albano wrote, “any such public response, even if permitted, would most probably be marginalized as common, if understandable, self preservation.”
The Bar Association President then got frosty: “The continuing antics of Chief Scott are a direct challenge to the wisdom of our present system. As a law enforcement official, he is right to raise questions on matters of public safety. The problem is that his criticism fosters an unwarranted loss of confidence in the judicial system and, even worse, a gross misunderstanding of the inner workings of that system. Most dangerously, he is contributing to a growing lack of comprehension of the clear necessity for an independent judiciary.”
The time had come, wrote Albano, for the Bar to respond. “We will therefore invite the Chief and his representatives or associates to an open and public (and hopefully publicized) forum, all to engage him and to discuss and analyze the questions he has raised in a respectful, analytic and educational format.”
No word yet on whether or not Chief Scott will take Albano up on his offer.
4 Responses for “Bar Association to Offer Invite to Hoyloke’s Chief Scott”
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It's a good cause.
Sounds like it would be an interesting debate. One well worth having on this subject. I hope that the Chief accepts the invitation.
I cannot wait for Scott to not only be lambasted and showw to the public to be the fool he is, but also to showcase his lack of knowledge of MA law. This man is a joke of an enforcer, he fails to respect the sovereign right of our judicial appointment process, and his media attracting antics, just seek to stifle the debate on how bad a job he has done in Holyoke.
Let this be the first salvo in an organized movement to replace him with someone who knows the real law and respects it.
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