In the Manhattan Supreme Court, Justice Jane Solomon told Liza Minnelli and her former husband David Gest to stop their “whiny garbage” of litigation. This year was notable for the quantity of whiny garbage to be found in courtrooms round the world.
There was particularly hot competition in 2006 for the prize for judge of the year. William A. Carter, of the Albany City Court in New York, was a strong contender after being censured by the State Commission on Judicial Conduct for his behaviour when presiding at a preliminary hearing of criminal charges: he removed his judicial robe, walked up to the defendant and asked: “You want a piece of me?”. In Washington State, Superior Court Judge Beverly G. Grant began a manslaughter sentencing hearing by asking everyone in court to join her in a Super Bowl cheer of “Go Seahawks”. She later explained that she was simply trying to ease tensions. Judge Donald D. Thompson was convicted by a jury in Oklahoma on four counts of indecent exposure by surreptitiously using a penis pump in Creek County Court while sitting as a judge hearing (or at least pretending to hear) trials in 2002 and 2003. The judge picks up a consolation award for the least contentious statement by a defendant in a criminal trial this year: “In 20-20 hindsight, I should have thrown it away.”
Those were the runners-up. The award for judge of the year goes to Judge Florentino V. Floro Jr, whom the Supreme Court of the Philippines sacked from the Regional Trial Court in Malabon City for regularly opening proceedings in his courtroom with the statement that he was “a Bar topnotcher” who passed the 1983 Bar examinations “with an average score of 87.55 per cent”; for changing from blue court robes to black each Friday “to recharge his psychic powers” as “the No 5 psychic in the country”; and for claiming to have the assistance of “three dwarf friends named Luis, Armand and Angel”, who, unseen by others, provided him with assistance in court.
Alternative dispute resolution order of the year was made by Judge Gregory A. Presnell, of Orlando, Florida. When lawyers in an insurance dispute (whose offices were in the same building, four floors apart) were unable to agree where to hold a deposition the judge ordered the lawyers to report outside the federal courthouse to play one game of Rock, Paper, Scissors, with the winner to decide the location of the deposition. Judicial puzzle of the year was contained in the High Court judgment by Mr Justice Peter Smith rejecting the contention by Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh, two of the authors of The Holy Blood and The Holy Grail, that their copyright had been infringed by Dan Brown’s bestseller The Da Vinci Code. The judge included a coded message of his own — a disappointingly mundane statement about Jackie Fisher, the early 20th-century admiral.
Judicial e-mail of the year was sent by the immigration judge Mohammed Ilyas Khan to his lover Roselane Driza, a Brazilian cleaner, telling her she was “real chilli-hot stuff”. She was imprisoned for 33 months for blackmailing a female immigration judge, Judge J, by threatening to send to the Lord Chancellor videos of Judge J having sex with Judge Khan, and another 3 months’ imprisonment for theft of videos.
Advocacy of the year was by David Breitbart, representing the model Naomi Campbell in New York on a charge of hitting her housekeeper on the head with a phone: “I know Miss Campbell and she is as beautiful inside as she is on the outside.” A special mention in this “what’s your next point?” category for the comments of Muddassar Arani, solicitor to the fundamentalist Muslim cleric Abu Hamza, jailed for seven years for incitement to murder and possessing a document useful to terrorism. The solicitor commented that Abu Hamza “considers himself to be a prisoner of faith. He is subjected to slow martyrdom.”
Witness of the year was Gail Sheridan giving evidence for her husband, Tommy, in his successful libel action against the News of the World for alleging that he had taken part in orgies. Mrs Sheridan told the jury that her husband was so “boring” that his only interest on weekend evenings was to search through dictionaries to find long words to boost his scores at Scrabble. Legal mistake of the year was by Mr Sheridan’s junior counsel, Graeme Henderson, sacked along with the rest of the legal team after he cross-examined a witness and wrongly accused her of having a conviction for credit card fraud.
In the foreign case of the year, the Iraqi High Tribunal sentenced Saddam Hussein to death after finding him guilty of crimes against humanity for his role in the killing of 148 Shia villagers from Dujail, north of Baghdad, in 1982 after a failed assassination attempt against the Iraqi President. The ten- month trial was disrupted by the murder of three defence lawyers, the departure of two chief judges, boycotts by the defence team and shouting matches in court.
In the domestic case of the year, the liquidators of BCCI abandoned their marathon claim against the Bank of England on Day 256 of the trial. In his judgment on costs, Mr Justice Tomlinson revealed that during the trial he had formed the view that so hopeless were the contentions of the claimants that “the case was a farce” based on “hopeless inconsistencies and implausibilities”. He added that a singular feature of the proceedings was that “the two leading counsel for the claimants had made diametrically opposed legal submissions as to the principal legal issue in the case”, and the judge confessed that he should have done more to control the “sustained rudeness” to his opponent by one of those leading counsel, Gordon Pollock, QC. The Governor of the Bank of England, Mervyn King, understandably observed that it was outrageous that the legal system should allow such a case to continue for 13 years, at a cost of more than £100 million.
The award for bizarre conduct by a lawyer in 2006 goes to the New Zealander Bob Moodie. Facing contempt proceedings in the High Court in Wellington, he appeared in women’s clothes, asked the judge to call him “Ms Alice” and explained that this was because he wanted to draw attention to “the old- boy network” within the New Zealand judiciary. Legal cartoon of the year was by Leo Cullum in The New Yorker. One judge tells another: “My basic judicial philosophy is ‘Guilty’.”
Hopeless lawsuits of the year included the plan by a French lawyer to challenge the result of the World Cup final (in which France lost to Italy) because of the way in which the officials dealt with the sending off of Zinédine Zidane. A Russian lawyer is to take to the European Court of Human Rights his complaint that the cartoon series The Simpsons should not be shown on Russian television because it “promotes drugs, violence and homosexuality”. But even those cases have some prospect of success by comparison with the winner in this category, which is the completely hopeless litigation announced by a German lawyer, Jens Lorek. He wants to hear from people who believe that they were abducted by aliens so that he can bring, on their behalf, compensation claims against the State. “The trouble is,” he complained, “people are afraid of making fools of themselves in court.” There is no reason to doubt that there will be many people doing precisely that in 2007.
The author is a practising barrister at Blackstone Chambers in the Temple and a Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford
