Subject: [Fwd: King County Superior Court Judge Jim Bates Should Resign]

Date: Wed, 09 Feb 2000 17:18:58 -0800
From: Doug Schafer <d_schafer@bigfoot.com>
To: [a former King County Superior Court Judge]

Dear [name redacted for web-posting purposes]:

I'm guessing that you are a sufficiently close friend of Judge Jim Bates
to possibly counsel him wisely to retire as a judge now and become an
arbitrator, as my letter below urges. Perhaps if some of the late Judge
Gary Little's friends had counselled him to get counselling, he might
still be around. I prodded former Judge Robert Petersen in 12/97 to
counsel former Judge Grant "Cadillac" Anderson to do the right thing--to
quietly resign-- but one or the other of them apparently was unwilling.
Because I do not know Jim Bates as a person, I judge him from the
perspective of the general public.

The CJC and Tom Fain can negotiate a sanitized stipulation of Mr. Bates'
revolting behavior, but neither they nor any judge can seal the
seattletimes.com and other databases by which any curious litigant or
other interested person may easily research Mr. Bates' background. I
wish to spare future occupants of Judge Bates' courtroom the horror of
fearing that he may be verbally or otherwise defiling autopsy
photographs of their injured or lost loved ones or making vulger jokes
about their injuries. No one should have such doubts about a judge. I
ponder: considering how he behaved in his first decade as a judge, how
will he behave when he gets "old and crotchety"? I'd rather that he only
preside over financial disputes between parties who choose him as their
arbitrator.

Background Seattle Times articles:
http://archives.seattletimes.com/web/ search "Judge & Bates & conduct".
Last Friday's CJC Stipulation is posted at:
http://www.cjc.state.wa.us/announcements.htm#recent_decisions
Tacoma News Tribune's editorial on 2/8/00 at:
(http://www.tribnet.com/opinion/0208a63.html)

Thank you for any efforts you may make to prod Judge Bates to "do the
right thing."

Doug Schafer, Idealistic Lawyer in Tacoma.

[Appended to this message was my e-mail message to journalists and CJC officials of 2/6/00.]