What goes on beneath our judges’ robes

Manitoba judge Lori Douglas has stepped down after incriminating pictures of her were posted on the internet. Does it matter what our judges do in private?

A superior Winnipeg judge has stepped down after pictures of her engaged in sexual acts surfaced on the internet. Worse, the pictures of Justice Lori Douglas were apparently posted by her lawyer husband to lure one of his black male clients into a sexual scenario that would satisfy his fetish for an interracial threesome. Surprise, surprise, our judges do naughty things when they’re not on the bench. Should we care?

Absolutely, says the Winnipeg Free Press. The scandal “raises legitimate concerns about her appointment” argues today’s editorial. “Aside from being held to a higher standard, judges -- like anyone wielding power or influence in public office -- cannot be seen to be vulnerable to extortion or bribes” and “federal Justice Minister Rob Nicholson needs to launch an independent review of Judge Douglas' judicial appointment” forthwith.

Not so fast, writes Heather Mallick in the Toronto Star, “We are all naked beneath our clothes.” And in case you’re unclear on that point, Mallick assures us “I checked.” She suggests that Douglas’s alleged quest for a non-white mate would have gone smoother if she had been living in that latter-day Sodom on the shores of Lake Ontario. “Toronto’s very multicultural, your chances on the subway alone are excellent,” she writes, and no scandal would have ensued because “(w)hat Toronto considers homespun is thought of as wildly exotic in a Prairie city.” Anyway, this was probably all her husband’s idea; after all, “men are weird.”

One of the “august pointy heads” serving as CBC television’s legal expert “stopped just short of saying that lawyers, particularly those with ambitions for the bench, should simply stop screwing altogether” according to the Globe and Mail’s Christie Blatchford. This shouldn’t matter because a judge’s “credibility depends on legal knowledge, fairness, experience and courtroom manners, not what he does with his member, or what she does with it,” Blatchford argues in a most off-putting fashion. But have pity for Douglas, she “is but another woman … done in either by the actions of a man she trusted or by her own sexuality or by both.”