Wednesday, March 5, 2008

We’ll be the judge of that, thank you, your honor.

Judge [or maybe soon to be ex-judge] Fred Kieser, Jr. has a unique sense of what is a 'racial slur'. He seems to think that it is OK to make a racial slur during a trial, so long as it is not one against the ethnic or racial group to whom it is articulated. Go figure.

Judge Kieser is up for a tenured appointment to the bench, and was appearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee, and was being questioned by Senator Nia Gill of Essex County.

It seems that during a child-support case three years ago, Judge Kieser told an African-American woman seeking financial support from her ex-husband for her daughter’s college tuition to not use him as a “cash register” and called the daughter a “sponge”.

And when the woman could not provide immediate proof of her daughter’s matriculation at college, the judge cited the anti-Asian racial slur “No tickee, no laundry”. Wonder what law school the judge attended ---- I do not remember learning that in any class at Seton Hall School of Law.

Kieser defended himself by saying that,
“The litigants were African-Americans and the racial slur, I think, was a slur against Asians. Again, there's no excuse for it. All I'm saying is, there is a difference - at least in my mind there is."
Perhaps this is a judge that should be benched. But who am I to judge?

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

You are calling the judge a racist based on one comment in his whole service. That is the real offense here. The term "no tickee no washee" or "no tickee no laundry" is a colloquialism for "no ticket, no laundry"... meaning "sorry, without the documentation we can not believe you on words alone" etc. If the people in the court were asian.. MAYBE you could make the case this was racial. But other than that this is a blatant case of political correctness run a muck. I am ashamed to be a NJ native that we deal in such minutia and treat it with high ideals.

NJ = PC nation

Let's scare the next generation of judges into having zero personality whatsoever, better yet let us scare them into favoring minorities because that will never be scrutinized, only lauded.

Anonymous said...

I never called the judge a racist; I simply stated that I thought he had a unique perspective on what constituted a 'racial slur'.

And the phrase "No tickee, no washee" or "No Tickee, no laudry" is not just an innocent "colloquialism".

An example of a colloquialism is "It was raining "cats and dogs". Or "There's more than one way to skin a cat." Or He's as "dead as a doornail".

A colloquilism is a word or phrase that is used by common folk, sometimes regionally. Like a person who lives in New Jersey referring to traveling to New York as "going in to the City". The folks from New Jersey are the "bridge and tunnel crowd".

Colloquilisms are not in the dictionary, and yet everyone knows what they mean. When an expression like "No tickee, no washee" originates from an expression used by white people observed in another race or ethnicity, it takes on the quality of a racial slur.

You may not justify its use because it is simply a "Colloquilism". It is not PC run amok to be courteous and not use expressions that offend the sensibilities of those of race/ethnicity/gender or sexuality than you. It's simple good civics for public servants and simple good manners for the rest of us.

And just because the woman in the court room was African-American, that does not make the comment any less offensive. Racial slurs are not a function environment; that's like saying that it would have been OK for the judge to say racial slur against an African-American if and only if the woman was Asian?

And just because the Senate wishes to make sure that judges are not making racial slurs does not mean we will have judges lacking in "personality".