State High Court Removes Judge Furey From Bench

For the first time since 1983, the state Supreme Court on Thursday ordered a judge removed from the bench, saying Catalina Justice Court Judge Robert Furey had been vindictive and abusive to people appearing before him.

In a unanimous decision, the court found Furey guilty of eight acts of “willful misconduct.” Six involved a woman he ordered jailed several times after she complained to a state commission about him; the other two concerned a case in which he said he would always believe a police officer over a defendant.

Furey’s lawyer, Dennis Fischer, said he was disappointed in the ruling. He said the acts cited by the court were “aberrations” from the first year and a half of Furey’s more than three years on the bench.

He also said he had hoped that the court would accept Furey’s suspension from office since June 1986, when the Commission on Judicial Performance recommended his removal, as an adequate punishment.

Furey, now 58, is a former civil engineer who graduated from law school at age 49 and spent two years each in the Los Angeles County district attorney’s and public defender’s offices before his election in 1982 as the only judge in the town of Avalon.

He spent one day a week on the Catalina Justice Court, and the rest of his time on temporary assignments to other Justice and Municipal courts, mostly in Los Angeles County. The job pays about $27,000 a year.

Furey is the first judge removed by the court since Los Angeles Municipal Court Judge Mario Gonzalez was ousted in 1983 for a variety of misconduct--including interceding in criminal cases for friends and benefactors and making ethnic and sexual slurs. Four other judges have been removed since 1973.

One case cited by the court happened in February, 1984, when Furey was hearing traffic cases in South Bay Municipal Court.

According to the ruling, Furey first told a group of defendants that if their version of the facts conflicted with a police officer’s, he would always believe the officer, who was not likely to risk loss of a career by committing perjury. Then, as one defendant was about to question a police officer, Furey cut him off, found him guilty and imposed a fine. The conviction was reversed on appeal.

The Supreme Court said Furey’s actions had “interfered with fundamental precepts of our judicial system.” The court accepted a fact-finding panel’s conclusion that the judge had been trying to coerce guilty pleas.

The court also cited Furey’s run-ins with a woman named Nancy Cuskaden.

After learning that she had sent a letter to the Commission on Judicial Performance complaining about him, Furey summoned her to court, ordered her to another court to defend herself against a contempt charge and barred her from being a spectator in his courtroom, the high court said.

Furey later sentenced her to five days in jail, then asked her whether her son was renting a hotel room in violation of another law and sentenced her to another five days when she remained silent.

On another occasion, he fined her and sentenced her to five days in jail, apparently for violating a dress code in his courtroom that did not apply to spectators, the high court said.

Another incident involved Furey’s actions after Cuskaden had him removed from a case against her. He wrote to the judge hearing the case with a warning that anything Cuskaden said “should be viewed with skepticism.”

Furey, who had written a similar letter about someone else the previous year and then apologized, acted out of “vindictive and punitive motives,” the high court said.

Furey’s lawyers had defended his actions by saying he was dealing with a disruptive and dangerous person. The high court said the record described Cuskaden as “a foul-mouthed and intentionally disruptive spectator and litigant,” but that Furey still was required to “deal with such difficulties by proper and lawful means.”

Citing several other cases in which Furey was found to have abused his power of contempt of court, the court said Furey did not appear to have learned from his mistakes and cannot excuse his conduct by pointing to his lack of judicial experience.

“If (Furey) did not have the legal background and temperament to avoid committing malfeasance in office, he should not have sought election to the court,” the justices said.