When a judge can’t get justice

But it ignores the fact that judges are entitled to not just the same sort of justice given citizens, but rather to the highest procedural fairness in the land because of the value that in our democracy is placed on their independence — from politics, from government, from everything.

In other words, it’s meant to be difficult to remove a judge from the bench, and it ought to be similarly difficult to dispatch one to the waiting rooms of hell.

Given that standard, what’s happened to Judge Douglas is nothing less than disgraceful.

You may recall that she first agreed to stop hearing cases and sitting in court in September of 2010, this in the wake of a CBC-led media firestorm over sexual pictures of her that were posted years earlier to a hardcore website by her husband, Jack King.

Judge Douglas has always denied knowing what Mr. King was doing, while in the midst of a mental breakdown, with their bedroom pictures, and there is considerable evidence on the record from the stalled hearings to support what she says.

Yet here we are, almost three years later, with the inquiry slated to resume this September, the very impartiality of the inquiry panel impugned and still very much undecided, and Judge Douglas firmly in limbo.

As a reminder, it was in the summer of 2003 that a man named Alexander Chapman, a former client of Mr. King’s and a fellow suspicious and litigious by nature, had a lawyer send a demand letter for $100,000 to Mr. King’s firm.

Mr. Chapman claimed he’d been sexually harassed and, as a black man, humiliated by Mr. King. He had emails and pictures, from the website where Mr. King directed him, to prove it.

Mr. King eventually paid him $25,000 in exchange for his signature on a confidentiality agreement and a promise to destroy all the pictures.

Judge Douglas, who was then a lawyer at the same firm as her husband, was never alleged to have had any part of all this.

The story didn’t become public then, but it was well-known among the local bar, even by judges. But Judge Douglas, or lawyer Douglas as she was then, was widely seen as having been victimized by Mr. King. He was asked to resign from the firm, and did so, spending a year being treated for depression.

She stayed at the firm, and two years later was appointed a judge, four years after that being named as Associate Chief Justice.

In the late summer of 2010, Mr. Chapman re-surfaced, this time at the CBC and the Canadian Judicial Council, where he filed a complaint alleging the judge had been a part of it.

Two years after that, the inquiry committee, composed of three judges and two lawyers, began hearings in Winnipeg.

Judge Douglas faced four allegations of wrongdoing, chiefly that she participated in her husband’s sexual harassment of Mr. Chapman and that she’d failed to disclose this in her application for the bench.

(In fact, as testimony revealed, the chair of the appointments committee knew all about the mess and he said he told the others.)

The hearings fell apart about the end of July last year.

When it adjourned, Judge Douglas’s lawyers were alleging the panel was biased against her, and within weeks, no fewer than three parties had filed separate applications for judicial review in the Federal Court.

One of them, unusually, was from Guy Pratte, the so-called “independent counsel” to the committee and a most principled man.

He had been long at loggerheads with the panel over what his role ought to be and, really, over the fairness of the process to the judge.

A week later, Mr. abruptly resigned.

He has said nothing publicly since, but his distress is on the record.

In their application for judicial review, meantime, Judge Douglas’s lawyers, Sheila Block and Molly Reynolds, sought a finding that the panel’s conduct of the hearings “gives rise to a reasonable apprehension of bias” — in other words, that the hearing isn’t fair to the judge.

But when that process dragged on and the commit-

Pratte tee revealed this April that it was determined to resume the hearings (with a new “independent counsel,” who wants to start from scratch), the judge’s lawyers then applied to stop them — to stay the hearings, in other words, until the judicial review has been heard.

It seems pretty straightforward to this non-lawyer brain: The committee is alleged to be biased against Judge Douglas and the issue hasn’t been heard in court yet, so how can the same committee just press on with more hearings?

Then, surely showing it is rather invested in its view of its own purity, the committee applied for intervenor status in the stay application itself.

That, at least, was dispensed with this month by Madam Prothonotary Mireille Tabib (a prothonotary is a judicial official, akin to a judge), who denied the committee standing.

She ruled that since the panel’s “impartiality is directly at issue … if it is perceived to be defending its decisions or taking an adversarial position” toward the judge, the public may perceive it as, well, biased.

(To this, I would say, no s---, Sherlock.)

And the bill keeps growing. As Judge Douglas’s lawyers note in their filings, as of March 2012, before the hearings were held, the legal tab alone was $1,035,758.

Should the panel appeal the prothonotary’s ruling, the costs — actual, to the administration of justice and to the judge in exile — will only rise.