HUGE CORRECTION, April 22, 2022

When someone makes an error, she should acknowledge it and correct herself.

I made a huge error when I wrote the following post.

The Arkansas Constitution says what I wrote, but apparently the Constitution does not limit the pay for circuit court judges.

A site called transparency.Arkansas.gov lists Judge Susan K. Weaver’s pay as $180,129.

So, my question is answered. Even paying a judge a wage that is higher than the majority of hard-working folks does not guarantee the judge will be honest.

Here is a link to the site and here is the original article.

**************************************************

I never thought I would be arguing to pay a government employee more…especially not a judge. But my problem with judges is only when a judge acts corruptly, like Judge Susan Weaver appears to me.

I wondered why a judge would be greedy enough to jeopardize her career and even risk prison for helping her favored attorneys. I just found out one reason.

The Arkansas Constitution Amendment 15 specifies the monthly salary “for Judge of the Circuit Courts and Chancellors, each, the sum of $3,600.00.”

That is a livable wage, but most attorneys in Arkansas charge about $300 per hour. That means a judge, who is an attorney first, would need to work only 12 hours per month as an attorney to earn the same salary as she would earn honestly as a judge. Add another couple hours to cover the medical insurance and other benefits.

There would be a lot of temptation and easy rationalization for a judge in Arkansas to take bribes. She might not call it a bribe. She might call it a dinner out, a gift, a campaign contribution or a screaming good deal on something.

When I was a building inspector, which is a position of power similar to a judge, my husband at the time told me to never take anything from the contractors or superintendents. He said taking a gift was the same as taking money out of their pocket.

Once I was offered a gift. It sounded exceptional. I tried to get my ex on the phone to see if he wanted me to take it. He didn’t pick up the call, so I declined the gift.

When I told my now ex about it after work, he blew a fuse. He remembered telling me not to take gifts, but he had to alter that opinion. He said “the rule does not apply if, as here, the gift offered is a pair of tickets to the final game of the World Series!”

Probably government employees who are paid more but are of irreputable character still take the bribes. But it must be difficult to entice the higher quality people to take the cut in pay, to become a judge rather than a lawyer.

My first suggestion is to cut the pay of all attorneys. Their jobs are not so difficult or dangerous as to deserve 10 times the pay of a blue-collar worker or 20 times the pay of an entry level employee.

Realistically, we should raise the pay of judges. And then be quick to fire and incarcerate the judges who take a little something on the side.

There is nothing sweeter than finding a judge who does the right thing, treats people respectfully and gives more than he or she takes. I’ve met a handful. If I learned that any one of them earned $250,000 per year, I’d have no problem with that.

I heard that the investigation of one judicial officer who I helped remove from the bench cost taxpayers $1,000,000. That price tag does not take into account the countless hours of time volunteered by concerned citizens like myself.

A judge like Weaver can financially devastate a “person” by purposefully making bad calls, and often times does. She recently transferred title to a 40-acre property with house from a trust that could not retain representation to a person who admitted in writing that he was trying to defraud the trustee and beneficiary of the trust. The trustee was dismissed as an individual on the merits. The trust held no other assets, but Judge Weaver gave the fraudster plaintiff a blank check for attorney fees, repairs to the structure, personal property that was not placed in the trust and even a box truck which title was given to the individual, not the trust. The trust was devastated.

What do you think? Do we get what we pay for, or would the bad apples always supplement their income by throwing the game in favor of those that gave some form of illegal or unethical compensation?