There is a better way to fix Georgia’s judicial oversight process

The Chattahoochee Judicial Circuit you see today was reshaped in 2010 and 2011 largely due to the work of one man.

Richard Hyde was an investigator for the Georgia Judicial Qualifications Commission, a small state watchdog organization controlled primarily by judges to monitor the state’s judges. He is now a JQC commissioner.

He began to focus on Columbus in a direct and forceful way when Superior Court Judge John Allen was the chairman of the JQC and the chief judge in the Chattahoochee Circuit.

Hyde spent a considerable amount of time in Muscogee County investigating local judges. The first one to fall was Superior Court Judge Robert Johnston III in February 2010. Johnston was in bad health, but he didn’t resign until after a meeting with Hyde in the Government Center parking garage. During the investigation of Johnston, Hyde moved in and out of the Government Center without anyone noticing.

In August 2011, Superior Court Judge Doug Pullen met with Hyde, and when that meeting was over submitted his retirement papers. By that time, people inside the Government Center knew when Hyde was snooping around.

In a year’s time, two long-serving, well-connected judges decided it would be better to tender resignations rather than go through a public process which likely would have disclosed the full context of those private conversations with Hyde. And this was not limited to Columbus — Hyde was operating in the same manner across the state, taking out dozens of judges with very few of them electing to put the complaints in a public forum.

Why is this news today, more than five years after the fact?

Because the future of Georgia judicial investigation and oversight will be on the ballot next month. The question state voters face requires a yes or no vote.

A "yes" vote on Amendment 3 would replace the Judicial Qualifications Commission with a new commission designed and governed by the General Assembly. A “no” vote would keep the current commission operational.

The key phrase in the above paragraph is “designed and governed by the General Assembly.”

It is safe to say, most Georgians who cast a vote on this issue will have little to no clue as what they are voting on and why it even matters. Either way, politics will always be involved in the way judges are judged, right?

To me, the primary question here is: Do you want the Georgia General Assembly directly involved in disciplining and removing judges?

And the answer to that is not complicated.

At the end of the day, at least from the view here that was shaped by reporting on the JQC’s work in Columbus, Georgia’s citizens will be better served by a commission that doesn’t operate directly under the fist of a General Assembly.

Take what happened in Muscogee County as an example. If the oversight process was overtly political, you can bet the two Columbus judges who found themselves in judicial hot water would have placed calls to their buddies or political allies in the General Assembly and state government to derail the process.

If you don’t think that would have happened, you are kidding yourself. If we open that door, both sides of those conversations will be uncomfortable and riddled with potential conflicts — or worse.

That said, the current system is not working as it was designed. The director has resigned. It has plowed through two chairmen this year, one a north judge leaving after she was accused of retaliation against an editor in her circuit. It’s clearly not working as designed. But before you trash a system, make a real effort to fix it and properly shape it in a way that gets rid of the bad judges and provides due process for those accused.

A yes vote would create something that in the end is purely political. That is scary when you are talking about the oversight of the very people in this state empowered to take away your freedom, your money and your kids.

We have plenty of smart people involved in the judicial process in this state, and they need to get into a room and figure this out. The answer is not to put a measure on the ballot that very few people will, or can, understand.

There is a right way to fix this, and this isn’t it.

This story was originally published October 15, 2016 at 4:40 PM with the headline "There is a better way to fix Georgia’s judicial oversight process."