Archive for February, 2009

From the Toronto Star:

Bob Mitchell
Staff Reporter

A Brampton Justice of the Peace has been exonerated of any misconduct, including being drunk on the job.

JP John Farnum, 65, is expected to soon return to his duties on the bench at a Brampton courthouse.

He was paid to stay home for the past year until allegations, some dating back five years, were investigated and heard by the Justices of the Peace Review Council. He has been a JP since 1988.

In finding no basis for misconduct, Madam Justice Mary Hogan said Farnun’s “pattern of behaviour put the public first” and that he appears to always try to not “inconvenience” the public “or keep them waiting” in the course of his duties in one of Canada’s most demanding courthouses.

Farnum made mistakes but they didn’t amount to the pattern of misconduct alleged by Crown counsel Gavin Mackenzie, she said in her recently-released written decision.

“Everyone can make mistakes in these circumstances,” she said. “JP Farnum testified that he learned from his mistakes.”

Five allegations of misconduct were levied against him, including that he was intoxicated at work on Feb. 14, 2006 and that he had abdoned his duties.

A fellow JP testified she thought he was drunk but three other JPs denied ever telling her they agreed with her or smelled alcohol on him.

She testified she smelled alcohol on him when he passed her in the hall as well as in an office he was using.

The inquiry heard that another JP sent Farnum home because he was ill, not because he was drunk.

Farnum denied he was intoxicated when he testified at the inquiry. He felt ill and didn’t hear himself being paged to a courtroom. Nobody phoned his office.

He was also accused of using a van of a paralegal while on duty on Aug. 13, 2003. He admitted driving it and parking it in the secured indoor parking area not for the public.

He testified he was called to attend court that day after being at another court but his car was in the shop. Not wishing to be late, he accepted the paralegal’s offer to use his vehicle.

Hogan found he also simply made a mistake when he convicted a man of a traffic offence on Jan. 15, 2004 but registered a conviction for a lesser offence and a smaller fine.

He was accused of hearing a matter involving two friends in his office on May 18, 2004 when he wasn’t scheduled to be the intake justice before the cases went to trial the same day. He was found not guilty of showing favouritism.

He was also found to have made an error in judgement in re-opening a criminal matter on Aug. 16, 2004 without having documents or recording the matter.

Farnum could have been suspended with or without pay or fired had he been found guilty .

http://www.thestar.com/article/588783

From the Economist:

Sir John Mortimer, barrister and freedom-fighter, died on January 16th, aged 85

EVERY true-born Englishman knows that the law is an ass. Rules are better honoured in the breach than the observance. Judges are best represented in a chorus line at the D’Oyly Carte. The English constitution is a vague formulation in someone’s head, and that foundation of English liberties, Magna Carta, is best known for banning eel-traps in the Thames. The firm clip of the law is for the other fellow. Behind the furled umbrellas and decorum, Englishmen are anarchists. Or, as John Mortimer liked to think of them, votaries of “my darling” Prince Kropotkin.

Mr Mortimer’s great service to his country was to sum up in one person both the weight of the law and a sharp, rollicking scepticism of it. He was an eminent lawyer, entering chambers in 1948 and becoming, in time, a Queen’s Counsel and a master of the bar. Few excelled him in cross-examination (the art of which, he liked to say, was “not to examine crossly”). Yet the law was only his day job, giving him the money and the material to write novels. At the bar he dressed scruffily, lest anyone take him for a conventional lawyer. He made fun of the “old sweethearts” on the bench, who would pass a death sentence and then go out for buttered muffins. And as for the law itself, “the great stone column of authority which has been dragged by an adulterous, careless, negligent and half-criminal humanity down the ages”,

Those words were not exactly his, but those of Horace Rumpole (seen above right, played by Leo McKern), whose adventures at the criminal bar Mr Mortimer tirelessly depicted in books and TV plays from 1975 onwards. He denied that Rumpole was entirely himself. There was much of his barrister-father in him, especially in his habit of quoting poetry to ward off unwelcome conversation, as well as borrowings from colourful colleagues. Rumpole was a cheroots-and-cheap-claret man (“Pommeroy’s claret keeps me astonishingly regular”), where Mr Mortimer favoured cigars and, at the dawn of the writing day, champagne. He often lost his cases, where Mr Mortimer was notably successful. Home for Rumpole was a mansion flat off Gloucester Road, where he lived in a state of miserable, snappish fidelity to Hilda, “She Who Must be Obeyed”. Mr Mortimer graced the well-heeled, pretty Chilterns near Henley-on-Thames, where children, stepchildren, a love-child, two wives called Penelope and the “Mortimer-ettes”, a claque of intelligent, charmed women, paid court to him and he to them.

A golden thread

Where Rumpole and Mr Mortimer fused together was in their sense of how lawyers should behave. Both were freedom-fighters. They refused to prosecute: their role was to defend the individual against the weight and follies of the law. Rumpole, grubbing round the Old Bailey cells with their “perpetual smell of cooking”, refused to let his clients plead guilty while the smallest doubt remained. He liked to quote Lord Sankey’s words on the presumption of innocence, the “single golden thread” that ran through English law.

Mr Mortimer, also tracing that thread, took on the most celebrated free-speech cases of the 1970s, and won them all. Largely thanks to him, the lord chamberlain’s censoring hand was lifted from the theatre. Thanks to him, Englishmen could read “Lady Chatterley’s Lover” and “Inside Linda Lovelace”, could see Rupert Bear with an erection in Oz magazine, and could endure a Roman soldier’s tryst with the body of Jesus in Gay News. Mr Mortimer hated pornography. But “Liberty is allowing people to do things you disapprove of.”

He took that conviction into politics, too. It led him to support foxhunting and to resume smoking in old age, just to defy the ban. He played the devil’s advocate on behalf of freedom everywhere, from the Oxford Union to the dinner table. Bishops were a favourite target, rapiered for the “absurdity” of life and the worse absurdity of heaven, which had to resemble “the lounge of a Trusthouse Forte hotel”. People, he thought, should be regularly shocked. Offence “makes society move”.

All this, he admitted, came close to anarchism. Yet at its base was something different. He took up the law, which made all else possible, out of obedience to his father. Clifford Mortimer was blinded when John was 13, yet continued his law practice and his life as though nothing had happened. For his son—as he explained in his play, “A Voyage Round My Father”, in 1971—a career at the bar was an extension of all the other duties he assumed for his demanding, unseeing parent, from tying up the dahlias and trapping earwigs to handing him his boiled egg, or his coat.

The freedom-fighter defied most laws but not this one, family love.

http://www.economist.com/obituary/displaystory.cfm?story_id=13012615