A Panel Tries to Judge a Judge

By Michael S. Serrill

A jurist is challenged for his blunt courtroom remarks

With an audience like this," said U.S. District Judge Miles W. Lord as he gazed around the courtroom, "I should make a speech. It's very tempting." But throughout the two-day hearing last week in St. Paul, the outspoken judge was uncharacteristically quiet. The reason: the subject of the proceeding was Miles Lord.

At issue was Lord's treatment of three top A.H. Robins Co. executives who appeared in his courtroom last February to sign a $4.6 million settlement of seven lawsuits involving the pharmaceutical firm's Dalkon Shield. The intrauterine birth-control device, which was on the market in the U.S. from 1970 to 1974, has been linked to severe pelvic infections and septic abortions; the Shield is also alleged to have caused 18 deaths. Ten thousand women have filed lawsuits and claims against the company, which has thus far paid out $220 million in compensation and $13 million in punitive damages to 5,500 claimants.

Lord, the chief judge of the U.S. District Court of Minnesota, subjected the three Robins officials to a stinging rebuke. He said the executives should acknowledge their responsibility for the damage done by the birth-control aid. "You planted in the bodies of these women instruments of death, mutilation and disease," he said. "This is corporate irresponsibility at its meanest."

The Robins executives subsequently filed a complaint with the U.S. Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals, arguing that the judge had "methodically destroyed their personal and professional reputations" and "grossly abused his office." The complainants asked that he be reprimanded.

A protege of the late Senator Hubert Humphrey, Lord, 64, was appointed to the federal bench in 1966. He has been a hero to environmentalists since the mid-'70s, when he presided over a case involving charges that the Reserve Mining Co. had been polluting Lake Superior. Lord was eventually removed from that case after a higher court accused him of "gross bias" against the company. In another case that had ecologists cheering, the judge refused to permit a trapping season for Minnesota's Eastern timber wolf; the decision caused considerable upset among farmers, who maintained that the wild predators were killing their livestock.

Blunt and strongwilled, Lord is a resolute populist who has challenged large corporations both inside and outside his courtroom. Lambasting business wrongdoing in the U.S. in a 1981 speech, he declared, "Even Hitler, when he was butchering people, articulated a reason to his madness. We don't even do that." Earlier this year, Lord reluctantly approved a plea bargain with the Sperry Corp., which had been accused of overcharging the Defense Department. "It hasn't been called to my attention," he complained to the Justice Department attorneys, "that any individual has been punished."

At the St. Paul hearing, attorneys for the Robins executives charged that Lord's diatribe in February was an example of judicial irresponsibility at its worst. Five federal judges, including the chief judge of the Eighth Circuit, heard the case, and three other federal judges gave statements in Lord's defense. Representing the Robins executives were former Attorney General Griffin Bell and Jimmy Carter Confidant Charles Kirbo. Leading Lord's defense team was Ramsey Clark, Attorney General in the Administration of Lyndon Johnson.

Bell told the ethics panel that Lord's speech was unfair, since the three executives had not been convicted of any offense. He said the judge has a "professional philosophy that the American corporation is evil."

Clark contended that the traditional detachment of judges is not always appropriate. To say that they can "have no passion for justice, see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil, would be a tragedy." Clark further argued that the Robins complaint was a threat to the independence of the judiciary and should be thrown out.

The five-judge panel is expected to make a recommendation to the Eighth Circuit's judicial council later this summer. Should the council find against Lord, the penalties could range from expunging his offending statements from the official case record to a recommendation of impeachment. But the federal judiciary takes no pleasure in upbraiding its membership, and Judge Lord is unlikely to suffer any sanction for his outspokenness. Of the hundreds of complaints that have been brought against federal judicial officers since 1981, only one has resulted in any action, and that was a mild request for voluntary retirement. --By Michaels. Serrill. Reported by J. Madeleine Nash/St. Paul

With reporting by J. MADELEINE NASH