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Comment by ck2 | Hacker News Reader

I was reading up on Jeremy Hammond as I knew less about him and this caught my eye:

The judge's husband has an email address released in the Stratfor disclosure and works with Stratfor clients, but the judge refuses to recuse herself (while threatening Hammond that he faces a life sentence).

Unmitigated gall.

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Jeremy Hammond has been around for a while: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeremy_Hammond

He created a whole site like Stripe's Capture the Flag back in 2003: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HackThisSite

This part of his history is also sad:

Hammond attended the University of Illinois at Chicago on a full scholarship. In the spring of 2004, during his freshman year, he pointed out a security flaw on the computer science department’s website to department administrators, offering to fix it. For pointing out the flaw, Hammond was called before the department chair and ultimately banned from returning for his sophomore year.

Yet another example of when full, public, and anonymous disclosure should be employed.

I met Jeremy at HOPE Number Six.

He was absolutely convinced that hacking was going to be the way that we protest in the future. He likened it to doing a sit-in of a restaurant, protesting outside of a business, or chaining yourself to a tree.

Everything he did was focused on this goal. Helping people learn to hack was going to be a required part of a functioning society. He led by example and some people followed.

I can't help but wonder if he is the first of his kind: a political prisoner of the Internet age.

This strikes me as unusual - the judge is clearly going to be biased by her husband's involvement, how is it that she gets to judge whether to recuse herself? Hopefully this means any the eventual verdict can be overturned by a future appeal, if necessary.

If you ask lawyers (and I have done so) then they say that the reason judges rule on their own recusal is because otherwise every trial would get interrupted for a trip to appeals court to decide on whether a recusal is appropriate. The existing system allows an appeals court to decide AFTERWARD whether the recusal decision was appropriate (although the judge is given a great deal of latitude and only egregious cases would be overruled). They can then order a new trial.

I am not sure I agree with this: it seems to me that a quick ruling could be made on recusal and that it would arise quite rarely. But I'm not familiar with the system, and the lawyers I have heard from are. I suppose if judges are nearly always making good choices about when to recuse themselves the system should work fairly well.

What happens to the judge if the appeals court finds they should have recused? I'm betting the answer isn't "jail time".

You are correct. In my jurisdiction (the US), judges have complete, 100% immunity for actions they take in their capacity as a judge. Deciding wrongly is NOT something a judge can be prosecuted for. There are a lot of reasons why this is a good thing and in egregious cases there is usually a different reason that can be found. (Like the judge in my state convicted of sending kids to private jails just in order to receive kickbacks. He could NOT be prosecuted for the decisions he made. But he was successfully prosecuted for accepting bribes and kickbacks.)

> (although the judge is given a great deal of latitude and only egregious cases would be overruled)

This does depend on where you are, different jurisdictions will draw the line in very different places. E.g. England has particularly strict rules on bias and the appearance of bias in judges: in a famous recent case, Augusto Pinochet successfully got a ruling that he could be extradited to Spain overturned, because one of the judges on the five judge panel (Lord Hoffmann) was a director of a charitable trust linked to a body (Amnesty International) that had submitted an amicus brief in the case.[1]

(Not that it did Pinochet much good, since a differently constituted court later came to the same conclusion as the original one).

[1] http://www.parliament.the-stationery-office.co.uk/pa/ld19989...

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