The Wisconsin Ethics Board has long been seen as a paper tiger, so weak that the legislature recently put it out of business, replacing it and the State Elections Board with the new Government Accountability Board.
Yet the weakling ethics board had the gumption to find that Judge Annette Ziegler violated the state ethics code, fining her $5,000 and making her pay an estimated $12,000 in attorney fees. Meanwhile, Ziegler’s peers have rolled over for her: A three-judge Judicial Conduct Panel last week released a finding that recommends the state Supreme Court merely “reprimand” Ziegler.
Conservatives have long argued against stiff punishment. Isthmus news editor Bill Lueders, a liberal who dislikes Ziegler’s politics, wrote a column that joins them, arguing that liberals are merely partisan in calling for Ziegler’s head.
I don’t think this issue has anything to do with ideology. The three judges who made this decision, Ralph Adam Fine, Charles K. Dykman and Ted Wedemeyer Jr., are neither a liberal nor conservative cabal. Indeed, Fine once won a bitterly contested race against Wedemeyer. What all three judges have in common is a willingness to protect their own.
Their sloppy 27-page ruling tells every judge in the state, whatever their politics, that serious ethical violations don’t matter.
Ziegler presided over 45 cases involving the West Bend Savings Bank despite all kinds of financial connections to the bank. Her husband served on the bank’s board of directors, earning $20,000 per year for this. Ziegler and his wife borrowed $2 million from the bank, using their home as security, money that helped support her campaign for the state Supreme Court. Ziegler’s husband was also part owner of a company that rented commercial real estate to the bank.
The judicial panel’s finding describes the $2 million loan as an “arm’s length” transaction without ever disclosing the rate of interest paid. Call me suspicious, but it’s just possible a bank board member might get a little better deal. The decision also dismisses the landlord-tenant relationship since the first rental payment to the company co-owned by Mr. Ziegler was made after the cases on which his wife deliberated. I see. So it wasn’t possible for the bank to thank the Zieglers afterward with just a little better deal?
I raise these questions not to suggest any corruption by Ziegler, but to show the judges preferred not to dig deep on these issues, and dismissed any messiness quickly.
The panel describes 11 cases on which Ziegler directly ruled, and Ziegler regularly sided with the bank. Banks, of course, typically win these kinds of cases, and the panel notes that not one participant to these cases has filed a complaint with the Wisconsin Judicial Commission. So maybe they had no complaints about the fairness of the decision. Or maybe they doubted the commission would take action against a fellow judge.
The panel concludes, in an extraordinary fashion, that even though Ziegler clearly did something wrong, “there is no likelihood that Justice Ziegler’s violation of the Code will recur – either by her, or by other judges.”
This remarkable prediction, doubly emphasized with the italicized “no,” flies in the face of a February 2007 Milwaukee Magazine feature story that found a pattern of judicial conflicts. Writer Geoff Davidian looked at Circuit Court decisions for just Milwaukee County for 2004, 2005 and the first eight months of 2006, and found 202 cases in which judges had a financial conflict. Judge Michael Dwyer presided over 51 cases involving companies in which he reported a financial interest between $5,000 and $50,000. If every other county (of Wisconsin’s 72) is as lax as Milwaukee (and as Ziegler’s supporters have noted, smaller counties have fewer judges and could have less flexibility in who gets assigned to cases), then there could be thousands of cases each year in which judges have a financial conflict.
But no need to worry, the panel assured judges across the state: Even if you have a $2 million conflict, the most you deserve is a reprimand. Rather than guaranteeing the end of such conflicts for judges, the ruling has all but invited them to do it more.
The Wisconsin Democracy Campaign has condemned this ruling, noting that attorneys guilty of misconduct have in the past been dealt with more severely than Ziegler. “Judges should he held to a standard of accountability that is at least as high as the standard for lawyers,” WDC executive director Mike McCabe declared.
Surely a higher standard must be expected for judges than for lawyers. And the very highest level of integrity must be demanded of judges who serve on the state’s Supreme Court. If the Zieglers got a loan or lease deal at sweetheart terms (and this has yet to be fully investigated), then Judge Ziegler should be thrown off the court. If not, she should be suspended. Only this would truly warn judges across the state to avoid such conflicts. Only this would assure citizens that justice is truly blind.
Finally, a postscript: The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel has never reported the $2 million loan, the leasing deal, or the true number of cases at issue in the Ziegler affair – even after last week’s 27-page ruling discussed all this in detail. The state’s biggest newspaper has simply gone to sleep on this issue, making it easier for judges to shield a fellow judge from full scrutiny, and making it harder for citizens to understand their government.
Crime on Campus
On Sunday, the New York Times education supplement did a rundown of crime on urban campuses derived from federal data provided by the Office of Postsecondary Education. The paper looked at some 150 of the nation’s largest urban universities and totaled crimes on campus in 2006, including rape, assault, burglary and robbery. The campuses were listed in order from largest enrollment (New York University, with 52,000) to smallest (Baylor; 13,300), with number of crimes for each.
Burglary was by far the most common crime. Thus, UW-Madison (enrollment 41,500) had 176 crimes in 2006, including 157 burglaries. UW-Milwaukee (28,300) had 46 incidents, including 37 burglaries.
Looking at 26 other urban campuses with enrollments similar to UWM (from 5,000 less to 5,000 more), there were 17 with more crime and nine with less. The number of crimes ranged from 16 at Georgia State to 341 at Harvard.
Of course, UWM is more of a commuter school, with fewer students living on campus. So it probably should have lower crime. Still, the statistics (which universities are often reluctant to reveal), suggest UWM is relatively safe – something it could use as a promotional tool.
The Buzz
-Obituaries on the colorful ex-Gov. Lee Sherman Dreyfus left out something reported in Milwaukee Magazine back in the early 1990s. Dreyfus was part Jewish, something he learned only in his later years. Like a number of German Jewish families that originally immigrated to Milwaukee in the 1880s, the family gradually assimilated into “German American-ness.” The Dreyfus family had been Lutheran for two generations by the time the future governor came along.
-Buried in the news last week was the fact that former police union president Bradley DeBraska will run against Ald. Terry Witkowski on the city’s South Side. DeBraska was a very savvy union leader and is very knowledgeable about city policy, but it remains to be seen how he fares at courting the votes of average citizens.
-After getting fired by the Waukesha Freeman, Dennis Shook landed a job at the Shepherd Express, only to announce last week that he was no longer with the paper. The revolving door of journalists in and out of the weekly never seems to stop.
And just who was the one sportswriter to vote for Brett Favre over Tom Brady for most valuable player? Check The Sports Nut.
