Tuesday, Jul. 08, 2008

What it means for senators to keep magistrates on short leash

YOU’VE dropped by your office on the weekend to go over some paperwork, and you accidentally lock yourself inside a storage room. The door can only be unlocked from the outside, and the only person who has a key is your assistant. You call your wife and tell her to find your assistant and have him come rescue you.

A half hour passes, and you’re still trapped.

You call your wife back. She says your assistant is entertaining friends and suggested you sit tight and wait until morning.

I can’t print what you say — or what you plan to do when your good-for-nothing assistant finally drags his sorry self to work in the morning.

Suffice it to say you are livid, understandably so. This person works for you — not in the sense that state employees work for people, but as in you can fire him on the spot — and you’re in the middle of a crisis only he can solve.

I paint this scenario to help you understand what must have been going through Sen. Randy Scott’s head as he sat in the Dorchester County jail on a DUI charge, fuming because his wife had not managed to roust a magistrate out of bed to come set bond for him, and exploding, after his chosen magistrate said he wanted to wait until morning: “It ain’t (expletive) best if he waits until in the morning. He’s too (expletive) lazy to come down here. That’s his damn trouble.” (When he called his wife a third time and was told the magistrate was on his way but was worried about how his midnight run would look since the two men are relatives, Mr. Scott told her to contact additional magistrates.)

Mr. Scott has since been booted from office by angry voters and the charges against him thrown out on a technicality, which actually increases the value of his story, because it makes it easier to focus on a problem that is much larger than a single senator.

Mr. Scott’s opponent in the June 10 primary called his tirade arrogance. But it was really a reflection of power. You see, the magistrates in Dorchester County worked for Mr. Scott, and he could fire them at practically a moment’s notice.

That may strike you as odd, because judges aren’t supposed to work for anybody. Nobody’s supposed to be able to fire them on the spot. And officially, no one can. But in reality, state senators, particularly those from small counties, can put themselves in a position to do that fairly easily.

Officially, magistrates are appointed by the governor and confirmed by the Senate, for four-year terms. In reality, the senators who represent a given county select someone, the governor appoints that person, and the entire Senate goes along with the pick. That’s problematic, particularly since our requirements for magistrates are not very stringent. (We do require them to graduate from high school these days.)

It gets worse. As The State’s Rick Brundrett reported over the weekend, when a magistrate’s term expires, senators can sit on their hands rather than asking the governor to reappoint or replace him. If the governor acts anyhow, the Senate can just ignore him. So the magistrate serves in holdover position — sometimes for years.

This is not laziness. This maneuver magically transforms the magistrate from someone who serves a fixed term to someone who can be fired at a whim.

In large counties such as Richland, there are several senators, with differing political viewpoints, to check the worst abuses of this system. In small counties, the local Senate delegation might consist of a single senator or, in the case of Dorchester County, of one senator who represents such a large portion of the county that the other senators don’t get a say.

Statewide, at least 107 magistrates are serving in appointment limbo. That’s 34 percent of our magistrates who know they can lose their jobs in an instant if they displease their Senate patron.

Among those in limbo are the magistrate summoned by Sen. Scott and five of his six fellow Dorchester County magistrates, as well as all 11 magistrates in Orangeburg County, where SLED is investigating why a Highway Patrol trooper took it upon himself to dismiss the charges against 10 drunken driving suspects who were all clients of the local senator, Brad Hutto.

Mr. Hutto says he knew nothing about the situation, and I have no evidence to the contrary. But without his saying a word to anyone, it’s easy to understand why an overworked trooper might figure there were more productive ways to spend his time than trying to convince a magistrate to convict clients of the senator who could yank him off the bench at a moment’s notice.

While these two situations were bubbling up, Mr. Hutto joined with Sens. Vincent Sheheen and Greg Gregory to introduce a bill that would take senators and the governor out of the loop and have the Supreme Court appoint magistrates.

It’s good to see someone realizes we have a problem, but there’s a simpler change that might do the trick: Treat magistrates like other judges, and don’t let them continue to serve after their term expires.

This could cause a temporary shortage of magistrates, if the local senators can’t agree whom to appoint or if the senators and governor can’t reach an agreement. But that seems a small price to pay to restore a hint of judicial independence to the only judge most South Carolinians will ever encounter.

Ms. Scoppe can be reached at cscoppe@thestate.com or at (803) 771-8571.