Nothing new under the sun
I got a kick out of these recent stories from my old east coast stomping grounds: They're kicking several Jersey City, N.J. municipal judges off the bench for fixing parking tickets for their friends, and even themselves.
OMG, someone fixing tickets in Jersey City? I'm shocked -- shocked!
I mean, come on. What's the point? That's the way it works back there. You can put everyone who does it in jail, and within a year, their successors will be doing exactly the same thing. It's a way of life. Deciding once every 10 or 20 years to bust a few of the many practitioners of this age-old craft -- more or less at random -- is kind of silly.
The funniest part of the whole caper is what one of the Hudson County Superior Court judges had to say about it: "The shadow that has been cast over the integrity of the Jersey City Municipal Court is unacceptable." As the kids say, ROTFLMAO.
| Posted at 12:25 PM | Permalink |
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Comments (4)
At least these are just parking tickets, unlike the cop who testified for a cop killer in Essex County without notifying her superiors that she was under a defense subpoena per department policy. Interesting that the case also involved witness intimidation in the form of gangsters posting photographs of a key prosecution witness on telephone poles. Jersey sounds like a pretty darn scary place alright.
Posted by Usual Kevin | October 17, 2007 1:48 PM
Easy there, tiger. My brother's the prosecutor on that case, which ended in a compromise verdict.
Posted by Jack Bog | October 17, 2007 1:53 PM
Yeah Jack, I remembered your post about the Essex case involving your brother in September, so I Googled it. I was thinking at the time of your first post that the cop killer was a really bad dude, and that hopefully he would be locked up for life. It's a good thing that he's going away for 10 or 15 years or so, and it sounds like your brother did a good job under circumstances even if it was compromise verdict. It certainly didn't help that another cop was working against him and the bad guy's gang was intimidating potential witnesses.
Posted by Usual Kevin | October 17, 2007 5:31 PM
You can't swing a dead cat in Jersey without hitting a crooked legislator or a genuine gangster, and Corzine's crime-busting A.G. nails traffic ticket fixers.
McGreevey's guy cracked down on Blockbuster.
Go figure.
Posted by Cousin Jim | October 17, 2007 6:30 PM