Shekarchi’s Judicial Quest Tramples Ethics Reforms - H. Philip West Jr.

Shekarchi’s Judicial Quest Tramples Ethics Reforms - H. Philip West Jr.

Rhode Island’s Judicial Nominating Commission faces a defining test on July 28: whether it will honor the state’s revolving-door ban when it interviews former House Speaker K. Joseph Shekarchi for a lifetime appointment to the state Supreme Court.

Shekarchi’s candidacy tramples revolving-door rules adopted after political insiders triggered the state’s worst banking scandal on January 1, 1991. The Rhode Island Ethics Commission then adopted its Revolving Door prohibition, and the General Assembly followed in 1992.

Both rules require legislators to wait one year after leaving the State House before seeking any paid state job, particularly one that requires approval by the body where they served. Rhode Island Supreme Court justices are confirmed separately in the House and Senate.

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The “cooling off” period was designed to block the insiders’ path that legislative leaders and top State House lawyers had routinely followed to lifetime judgeships without review and with generous compensation.

In 1993, the Supreme Court unanimously affirmed both revolving-door rules: “The revolving-door legislation addresses the imbroglio of public officials who use their present positions and contacts as unfair bargaining tactics in gaining future employment with the state or a municipality . . .”

Yet Shekarchi seems to have an inside track. After publicly considering a race for governor, he announced that he would not run. Then, on May 7, he stepped down as speaker and announced his bid for the lifetime judicial appointment.

Roger Williams University law professor Michael J. Yelnosky immediately filed an ethics complaint charging Shekarchi with violating the revolving-door rules.

Yelnosky’s complaint cleared its first hurdle on June 2, when the Ethics Commission determined that the alleged facts, if verified in a full investigation, would constitute a violation of the revolving-door rules.

Shekarchi then sued to stop the Ethics Commission from investigating the complaint any further. Shekarchi and his attorney claim an exemption that rests on a tortured and unhistorical reading of the law.

Superior Court Judge Richard A. Licht has ordered the ethics panel to halt its probe, virtually guaranteeing that Shekarchi’s revolving-door dispute will not be resolved before the Judicial Nominating Commission meets on July 28.

Months before this became a public controversy, Speaker Shekarchi asked me to meet with him alone in his State House office. I explained the revolving-door rules and urged him to seek an advisory opinion from the Ethics Commission. I predicted that the commission would advise him to wait out the one-year “cooling off” period before he might apply for the next Supreme Court vacancy.

As daylight faded outside his corner office, Speaker Shekarchi mused that after a year’s hiatus, he might not have enough “juice.”

He did not seek an advisory opinion from the Ethics Commission and is currently lining up witnesses to testify on his behalf before the Judicial Nominating Commission on July 28.

History holds warnings. Fifty years ago, when Supreme Court justices were still chosen by the House and Senate meeting together “in Grand Committee,” House Speaker Joseph A. Bevilacqua orchestrated his own election as chief justice of the Rhode Island Supreme Court. He had risen through the legislative ranks while serving as defense counsel for members of the New England Mob.

Nine years later, the Providence Journal reported that Chief Justice Bevilacqua had continued his contacts with mobsters, a pattern confirmed by State Police surveillance. Impeachment hearings later exposed additional corruption, including unpaid work on his home by a court-system contractor and meetings with organized crime boss Raymond “Junior” Patriarca.

In 1986, Bevilacqua resigned in disgrace.

House Speaker Matthew J. Smith then managed the Grand Committee election of his business partner, House Judiciary Chairman Thomas F. Fay, as chief justice.

Fay returned the favor by hiring Smith as administrator of the entire state court system. But Smith continued as chair of an obscure board that set salaries for judges and department heads. The former speaker engineered raises that soon made Fay the highest-paid state supreme court chief justice in the United States.

In 1993, it was exposed how Smith and Fay had transformed the court system into a patronage mill, awarding jobs to cronies and family members while driving the judiciary’s budget dramatically higher. The investigative team wrote: “Patronage has a corrosive logic all its own. Inherently unfair, it coddles incompetence and discourages achievement.”

The scandal forced both Fay and Smith to resign. They were prosecuted and convicted.

These scandals involving two successive speakers of the House stoked public fury and calls for reform. In 1994, Rhode Island voters overwhelmingly approved a constitutional amendment that ended the General Assembly’s power to pick justices of the Supreme Court and established a Judicial Nominating Commission responsible for interviewing applicants.

These reforms were not abstract good-government ornaments; they were designed to stop powerful insiders from converting temporary political power into lucrative lifetime judgeships.

This history focuses attention squarely on the Judicial Nominating Commission’s July 28 interviews. The commission is charged with recommending three to five “highly qualified nominees.” The governor must appoint from that list.

Members of the panel are politically appointed, and the question remains whether they will resist or succumb to backstage pressure from powerful politicians who owe the former speaker.

The Rhode Island Constitution requires that public officials “be open, accountable and responsive, avoid the appearance of impropriety and not use their position for private gain or advantage.”

If Rhode Island’s revolving-door rules, judicial reforms, and Constitution mean anything, the Judicial Nominating Commission must not list Speaker Shekarchi as a “highly qualified” nominee for appointment to the Supreme Court.