JUSTICE FOR MS. BLACKBURNE

Justice for Ms. Blackburne

Perhaps the easiest way to explain why Laura Blackburne had to be removed as a Queens Supreme Court Justice is to cite her own words about the incident that cost her the job.

In testifying before the State Commission on Judicial Conduct about how she came to aid the escape of a suspect in a violent assault from her courtroom, Ms. Blackburne stated that the Assistant District Attorney who was present didn't do enough to persuade her that what she was doing was a serious breach.

This is the sort of justification we might expect from a teenager who hasn't yet gained the maturity to take responsibility for his or her bad acts. Coming from a veteran judge who is complaining that an authority figure whom she outranked did not sufficiently assert her authority, it sounds more than a bit pathetic. The two Court of Appeals Judges who dissented from the other five members of the state's top court regarding Justice Blackburne's removal contended that the penalty was much too harsh for a judge being found guilty of poor judgment for the first time.

This was hardly the first instance in which Justice Blackburne showed abysmal judgment, however; it was merely the only one for which she faced sanctions. Four years ago, she freed a man accused of shooting a cop on the grounds that the Queens District Attorney's Office had denied him a speedy trial. She did so despite evidence that some of the delays in bringing the case were attributable to the suspect's lawyers.

When critics charged that she gave the slide to the suspect, William Hodges, because his mother belonged to the same NAACP chapter that she did, Ms. Blackburne retorted that she did not know his mother. In some ways, this claim made her decision look even worse; absent the excuse of doing a favor for a friend, how could any judge with a sense of the equities have cut loose a suspected cop-shooter on such specious grounds? Eventually Mr. Hodges was brought to justice, and is now serving a 25-year sentence for the shooting.

Even if the dissenting judges did not consider that incident in deciding on an appropriate penalty for Ms. Blackburne in this one, it's hard to imagine them believing this case was not unique enough to place her in a separate category from other judges who misused their discretion for the first time.

Ms. Blackburne decided to aid assault suspect Derek Sterling in slipping away from Det. Leonard Devlin because she claimed that the Detective misled her about his intentions in her courtroom on June 10, 2004. Before leading the suspect into her chambers and out a private exit, she stated to him in open court, "I am not trying to keep you from being arrested. I'm trying to keep you from being arrested today in my courtroom based on obvious misrepresentation on the part of the Detective."

Detective Devlin has insisted that he made plain his intention of arresting Mr. Sterling after he appeared before Justice Blackburne on another matter. Let us assume for a moment, however, that he did not do so. Justice Blackburne had other options she could have taken to express her displeasure: she could have admonished the Detective or complained to his superior.

Instead, she chose to retaliate against the Detective by facilitating the escape of a man sought in connection with an assault so violent that the victim's eye socket was damaged. In doing so, Justice Blackburne didn't merely frustrate a Detective or make a mockery of the judicial process; she placed the public at risk.

There are many words for such conduct: rash, brazen and reckless come to mind. None of those adjectives are associated with the phrase "judicial temperament."

But then, Ms. Blackburne never was one for letting inconvenient standards affect her judgment. She conducted a review of the 1990 boycott of a Korean grocery store led by hate-monger Sonny Carson that absolved then-Mayor David Dinkins of blame for the failure of his administration to enforce a court order obtained by the store's lawyers after the protest quickly degenerated into an ugly, racist campaign. A short time later, she became Mr. Dinkins's choice to chair the Housing Authority, where she got into trouble for spending $340,000 to redecorate her office, including a $3,000 pink leather couch that seemed to gain tabloid notoriety as much for its color as its cost.

Despite that past, she was appointed to the bench. There is a certain irony to the claim by some of her supporters that she has been brought down by a right-wing political cabal that was holding a black judge to a different standard than is applied to white jurists. Ms. Blackburne was appointed a judge in no small measure because of her political connections - her husband is a district leader in an influential Democratic political club in southeast Queens.

The forces her supporters complained about are presumably police and court officer unions, newspaper editorialists, and Mayor Bloomberg and Governor Pataki, all of whom expressed outrage over her allowing a suspect to evade a cop trying to arrest him. That is not a right-wing conspiracy, but rather several entities of varying ideological views. They came together in this case because of a shared belief that judges are supposed to interpret and apply the law, not to engage their inner outlaw to allow a potentially dangerous suspect to get away from the police.

Ms. Blackburne thumbed her nose at the justice system in an unpardonable way. She asked for what she got, and she deserved it.