Dispute between Hatch, judge in court

08/25/2006

BY TIM NELSON
Pioneer Press

Ramsey County Chief District Judge Gregg Johnson heard sharply contrasting views Thursday during a hearing about whether one of his colleagues overstepped his bounds.

A lawyer for the state argued that Judge William Leary told the attorney general’s office to expect no better than pennies on the dollar in a settlement with a New Jersey collections agency the state had sued for bullying debtors.

Leary allegedly then offered to “dress up” a ruling “to satisfy the attorney general office’s political needs,” Assistant Attorney General Alan Gibson told Johnson.

“We think the comments of the judge here are over the line, in terms of showing bias,” Gibson argued at a hearing on a motion to remove Leary from the case, filed in St. Paul in 2004.

But attorneys for the collection agency and a Twin Cities law firm sued for the same thing said it was Attorney General Mike Hatch who had been doing the bullying in the case by calling Leary personally and threatening to plead the case on television news.

“This is a party that will stop at nothing to get a judge taken off the case because of their sense of which way the wind was blowing, that they may not like the way this judge will rule,” said Mike Klutho, attorney for the Messerli & Kramer firm. He asked Johnson to let Leary to continue to preside over the suit.

The case has turned into a rare dispute between the state’s chief law enforcement officer and a sitting judge, brewing since settlement talks in the matter, mediated by Leary, came to naught in June. The matter has come to focus on what the judge has termed an “improper” attempt by Hatch to meddle in the case being argued by his assistants.

Neither the attorney general nor the judge attended Thursday’s hearing. Leary has declined to comment beyond the rulings he has made in the case thus far. Hatch’s spokeswoman, Leslie Sandberg, said Hatch did not want to comment beyond what was argued before Johnson.

The chief judge was essentially asked to decide if one of his colleagues had become something other than an honest broker in shuttle negotiations between the attorney general’s office and the defendants in the suit. The matter was set for a bench trial, without a jury, that Leary is to decide. Gibson argued that the judge had privately taken sides in the case with his “aggressive” efforts to get the parties to work the matter out between themselves.

Gibson said Leary had taken a “distinctly adversarial tone” regarding the state’s case.

But Chuck Shreffler, attorney for the New Jersey collection agency, said Leary had already rejected his client’s proposed findings in the case and denied the judge had shown the defendants any quarter.

“I’m not going to say judge Leary is in our pocket or that he’s doing everything we want him to do,” Shreffler said. “I don’t think any judge is doing his job if my client comes out of a settlement conference feeling great about his case.”

He told Johnson that the proper course of action is for the state to argue the facts of the case, rather than try to throw the judge out. He said removing Leary would encourage attorneys to simply try to throw out more judges if rulings went against them in other cases.

Johnson took the matter under advisement but didn’t indicate when he might rule.