Sometimes the truth is indeed stranger than fiction; and sometimes you don’t really know what’s truth and what’s fiction.
Recently, District Attorney Scott Ballard, along with Chief Public Defender Joe Saia, released the results of their so-called, “investigation” into the Judge English affair.
I have to give the DA’s office credit. It took them just a few short days to determine that English’s affair with public defender Kim Cornwell didn’t affect any of his rulings in well over 200 cases, many of which had been reassigned to English’s courtroom.
Wow, that’s some fast investigating. Ballard must have Sherlock Holmes, Magnum P.I., and Horatio from C.S.I. Miami working for him.
Ballard didn’t want to investigate the English affair. He said it wasn’t the role of the DA’s office to investigate such things. I don’t know whether it was the DA’s role to investigate or not, but I know that it’s certainly goofy to expect a one hundred percent objective investigation, when these men have been basically working together for years.
It’s just as goofy to have the chief public defender investigating one of his own employees.
I’ve been in courtrooms on more than one occasion, and it’s very clear that judges, prosecutors, and public defenders are all very familiar with one another. These people work in the same courthouses and the same courtrooms on a regular basis, and we’re supposed to expect an objective investigation?
Heck, if they did it the same way on the federal level, they could have saved the taxpayers millions of dollars a few years ago. They could have just let Al Gore investigate Clinton.
Chris Edwards said that he was concerned that because of English’s antics, there could be people in jail that shouldn’t be, and there could be people on the streets who ought to be in jail.
That’s a real big, “Duh.” Despite Ballard’s “investigation,” it insults one’s intelligence a bit to be expected to believe English and his lady friend in their private moments never discussed any cases.
It would be a little too easy for her to offer her opinion about which of her clients deserved a break, and which ones didn’t; and even more unfair if her clients in those “reassigned” cases were shown favoritism because of her relationship with the judge.
I would certainly be a little upset to know that I was sitting in jail because English’s cul-de-sac kitten either didn’t like me or wasn’t my lawyer.
Everybody can slip up, but in my humble opinion, English didn’t just slip up; he engaged in a pattern of behavior with potential to hurt a lot of people.
If the car salesman, the truck driver, the accountant, the butcher, the baker, or the candlestick maker has a “slip up” like English’s, no one but he and his family is affected. English could affect a lot more people than his family.
English, in a matter of seconds, had the power to reduce a person’s wardrobe to an orange jumpsuit and a pair of flip-flops. With one swing of the gavel he could turn a prince into a pauper by cleaning out his bank account. Folks, that’s a lot of power for a man to have.
So, it does matter when his behavior could possibly affect the one thing absolutely crucial to a judge’s ability to render justice. That would be his sense of objectivity.
A dark cloud of doubt now hangs over every single case which involved English as the judge, and Cornwell as counsel for the accused.
Nobody’s perfect, but those who judge others need to be a little more perfect than the rest. English apparently didn’t feel like standing up to a little scrutiny, so he simply threw in the towel as fast as he could.
That’s kind of unbecoming of a “survivor,” don’t you think? it appears that English is more cul-de-sac Casanova than “Survivor.”
And what about Johnnie Caldwell? All I can say is that a man of his stature should know what to say to whom, and what not to say to whom. He got in trouble by making crude comments to yet another female public defender.
Darn, these public defenders must be hotties! I kind of feel bad for Johnnie. Maybe he was just jealous because English was having all the fun.
Jerry Bivens
Concord, Ga.
