Clerk-magistrates, with lifetime tenure and no mandatory retirement age, rule the roost in Massachusetts courthouses.
Ronald Arruda is the clerk-magistrate of the Bristol Juvenile Court, which is a little like saying he is the king of his court.
He was appointed to the job by former Gov. Edward King in 1982 and, while six governors have come and gone since then, Arruda hasn’t budged. The 66-year-old clerk-magistrate can keep earning his $110,000-a-year salary as long as he wants because the job is the only one in state government that comes with lifetime job security and no mandatory retirement age. Some of his fellow clerks work into their 80s; some even into their 90s.
Arruda’s 20-person kingdom may be small, but he has practically absolute control over it. Arruda, who has six assistants, has used that power to hire into assistant clerk positions Angelo Ligotti, the son of Hingham District Court clerk-magistrate Joseph Ligotti, and Susan Correia, the daughter of former House majority leader and Fall River mayor Robert Correia. He also hired Mark Tobin, the son of longtime Quincy District Court clerk-magistrate Arthur Tobin, who has since transferred to Norfolk Juvenile Court in his hometown of Quincy.
Arruda says it’s “just a coincidence” that he hired relatives of fellow clerks and politicians. A former probation officer himself, Arruda says there is no similarity between the situation at his office and the widespread patronage hiring at the Probation Department that has spawned numerous task forces and law enforcement investigations. “There is no problem here,” he says. “We don’t have that situation like they do in Probation.”
Yet there are remarkable similarities between the oversight of Probation and the clerk-magistrate offices across the state. At Probation, the Legislature in 2001 gave the commissioner exclusive authority to hire, fire, assign, and discipline within the Probation Department, which employs 2,000 people. Less well known is the fact that the Legislature at the same time took away from judges the power to hire assistant clerks at the court and gave that authority to the 82 clerk-magistrates. The clerk-magistrates now have the power to convey lifetime job security on their 400 assistant clerks. They also oversee thousands of other clerical staff.
“It doesn’t make any sense whatsoever,” says Linda Carlisle, a former member of the Court Management Advisory Board, which advises judges on the best way to operate the court system. “There’s virtually no way whatsoever to get them out of the office…They have, pretty much, little fiefdoms.”
The keys to these kingdoms tend to go to politically connected people. Despite an increase in the judicial powers given to clerks, there is no requirement that a clerk-magistrate or the assistants have a law degree—or any college degree, for that matter.
Link:
http://www.commonwealthmagazine.org/Investigations/Investigative-Reports/2011/Spring/Reigning-supreme.aspx