What the Judge Said
Page’s columns painted Thomas as a vindictive “Republican party heavyweight” from a hostile political camp in the western suburbs. According to Page, when the supreme court met to choose Gorecki’s punishment, the chief justice was “pushing hard for very severe sanctions–including disbarment.” But in the end the court took away her law license for four months. “Ah, yes. Politics,” Page wrote. “The four-month suspension is, in effect, the result of a little political shimmy-shammy. In return for some high profile Gorecki supporters endorsing Bob Spence, a judicial candidate favored by Thomas, he agreed to the four-month suspension.”
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If I’d traded my vote that way, Thomas protested, I’d have committed a felony. So he sued Page and the Chronicle.
McMorrow went on to explain that her original answer was “substantively inaccurate.” She said she’d confused the Gorecki case with another the court was considering at the same time. “In Timpone, Justice Thomas and Justice Garman voted for disbarment, the sanction that the ARDC Administrator was urging, and filed a published dissent to that effect. Justice Thomas and Justice Garman did not urge disbarment in Gorecki.”
Page, by the way, resigned his column in the Chronicle as of August 4.
July 27: “Pakistani officials have promised to review investigative records and reveal government information on the deaths of seven Pakistani journalists killed for their work since 2002, as well as official records in 20 other cases in which journalists have been assaulted or improperly detained.”
On a related subject, the annual Harris poll of honored occupations in America was just released, and as usual journalists finished near the bottom. The question was lamely posed: “I am going to read off a number of different occupations. For each, would you tell me if you feel it is an occupation of very great prestige, considerable prestige, some prestige or hardly any prestige at all?”
