Time for Journalists to Start Covering What Happens in Our Courts

Too many judges act like oligarchs. See the ABA Journal and Washington Post articles, below. Too few journalists bother to cover what happens in Court on a regular basis. As a result, judges grow more unaccountable.

When I was editor of the Appalachian Observer, we had a United States District Judge -- Robert L. Taylor -- appointed to the bench by Harry S Truman. That judge routinely fell asleep on the bench, yelled at lawyers and litigants, and once threatened a University of Tennessee student journalist with jail for not wearing a tie.

The first time I covered a trial in Judge Taylor's courtroom, a Knoxville insurance defense lawyer showed him my article, which accurately reported on Taylor's conduct.

Judge Taylor ordered the United States Marshals to go to Clinton, Tennessee to arrest me. They refused.

Judge Taylor then directed the Chief Deputy United States Attorney for the Eastern District of Tennessee to sue me civilly. He refused. The Chief Deputy United States Attorney, Jimmy D. Baxter, later told me that he read my article and "I agreed with every word."

That was 1981.

Some three years later, Knoxville newspapers called out Judge Taylor on his behavior, which they had no choice but to cover because of the Jacob F. Butcher and C.H. Butcher bankruptcy and fraud cases involving United American Bank and City & County Banks. Knoxville journalists had known about Judge Taylor's behavior for years.

It turns out Judge Taylor had water on the brain, which caused his neurological symptoms. Taylor had once side-swiped a car on the way home and kept going, leading Marshals to drive him to and from work each day. He once took home a hedge clipper (evidence in a products liability case) and used it to cut down his hedges to the ground!

If journalists had done their job earlier, Judge Taylor might have sought medical help, and his condition might have improved.

Instead, the compliant, complacent, enabling Chain Gang Journalists at the Knoxville Journal and Knoxville News-Sentinel (Gannett and Scripps Howard) kept the secret of the United States District Judge's brain boogers. Hick newspapers are often better at keeping secrets than they are at telling them, as Tom Wicker writes in his 1977 book, On Press.

The moral of the story: whatever limited resources local newspapers have, they need to cover the Courthouse, and not just handouts and press releases from judges and sheriffs.

These are our courts, and these are our rights that are being violated, as the Georgia and Illinois stories (below) show.

What do you reckon?