Hurray for San Francisco, Jimmy Carter's rotten apples, the late news on sex roles, and other matters. THE CASE OF THE CROOKED BENCH
By DANIEL SELIGMAN REPORTER ASSOCIATE Patty de Llosa

(FORTUNE Magazine) – Your servant instantly winced upon turning to the recent indictment of U.S. District Judge Robert F. Collins of Louisiana, as he happened to open this document at the place where the grand jury was signing off on it, and the first word he stumbled on, just beneath the signature of foreman Bruce H. Taylor, was ''foreperson.''

The indictment turned out to be even more winceable in matters of substance. It charges Judge Collins with accepting payola from a drug dealer up for sentencing, and offers numerous supporting details: a meeting in Pete's Pub in New Orleans, at which the judge is said to have received an initial cash payment; monitored phone conversations between the judge and a ''fixer'' in touch with the drug dealer; and the discovery of cash hoards in the judge's chamber (raided by the FBI). Oh, yes, Collins denies everything. The mission of this item is to figure out why corruption in the federal judiciary has been rising. Between the Thirties and the Eighties, no federal judge had been indicted while on the bench. But Collins, a Jimmy Carter appointee, now becomes the fifth federal judge indicted since 1981. The other four, all district judges: -- Harry E. Claiborne of Nevada, also appointed by Carter, was convicted of tax evasion and found guilty by the U.S. Senate in an impeachment trial. -- Alcee L. Hastings of Florida, appointed by Carter, was charged with taking bribes from racketeers and was also found guilty by the Senate. -- Robert F. Aguilar of California, appointed by Carter, was convicted of notifying a mobster that he was under investigation, and then lying to the FBI about it. (Since his conviction is being appealed, Congress has not yet acted on impeachment.) -- Walter L. Nixon of Mississippi, appointed by Lyndon Johnson, was convicted of perjury in a grand jury drug investigation, and was also found guilty by the Senate. Whence this burst of crookedness? Our analysis begins by zeroing in on the inescapable fact that, in a period when the federal judiciary was about evenly divided between Democratic and Republican appointees, all five of the fellows above were named by Democratic Presidents -- four of them by Carter. The science of statistics tells us that if it is even money the average indicted judge will turn out to be a Democratic appointee, then it is 31 to 1 against five Dems in a row. Suspicious, eh? But what reason is there to suppose that Democratic appointees are more indictable, on average, than their Republican counterparts? You cannot plausibly argue that we are looking at a case of Republican Justice - Departments in the Eighties vengefully sniping at earlier Democratic appointments, since the impeachment votes were in every case overwhelming. In thinking about those 31-to-1 odds, it seems obligatory to relate them to the long-running, often quite vicious, argument in the Eighties about Republican and Democratic appointment procedures. This argument, which culminated in the blood bath over Robert Bork's nomination, featured liberal assaults on Reagan's appointees as white male ideologues and conservative groans about Carter's ''quota'' appointments. The Reaganites always denied that their appointments were ideological -- their main concern was to find candidates committed to a philosophy of judicial restraint -- but Jimmy made no bones about his attachment to quotas. He once famously said: ''If I didn't have to get Senate confirmation of appointees, I could tell you flatly that 12% of my appointees would be black, and 3% would be Spanish-speaking, and 40% would be women, and so forth.'' Back to the indictable five. It turns out that three of the five are Carter- appointed minority-group members: Hastings and Collins are black, and Aguilar is Hispanic. Assuming (a bit uncharitably) that all three were nominated pursuant to affirmative action goals, we must still tell ourselves that they represent only a small fraction of all such appointees; altogether, Carter appointed 38 black and 16 Hispanic judges. But, of course, the three represent a rather sizable proportion of all the federal judges indicted in the past half-century. Possibly our sample is not large enough for incisive statistical inferences, but there do seem to be more bad apples in the affirmative action barrel than in the judicial restraint barrel. In a world where quotas recurrently predict substandard performance, that result somehow seems unastonishing.