JUDGING CRIMES

A young woman becomes a cop, at a time when female cops were still rare, and proves her toughness on the streets when, at age 23, she shoots and kills a suspect.  (More details on the shooting here.)  The young woman, Sherry L. Freebery, rises to become police chief, then makes the move into civilian politics, becoming the chief administrative officer of Delaware's New Castle County.  (Delaware has only three counties, and New Castle is the one on top.)  That's the county's number two position.

While running the county, Freebery took out "a $637,500 mortgage on an oceanfront condo in Dewey Beach" and "a $504,000 mortgage on a home in Hockessin", according to the Wilmington News-Journal.  (Dewey Beach looks like a pretty nice place, and you can get a peek at the Hockessin house here.)  She was able to qualify for the mortgages because "had more than $1 million in the bank" - the kind of liquidity that hits the soft spot in a loan officer's heart.

The apparent source of Freebery's million dollars in cash was a du Pont heiress (this is Delaware, remember) who, out of the goodness of her heart, gave Freebery $2.3 million, never expecting to be repaid.  At least, that's what the heiress testified to under oath.  Despite having previously signed what the paper calls a deposition, but which sounds more like an affidavit, stating the opposite.  (More here.)  Despite twice accepting interest payments "of more than $125,000" from Freebery.  And despite happening to be invested in a golf course project that received the necessary county approvals only after the money changed hands.

No matter.  The really interesting thing is what Freebery did with $600,000 of the du Pont money.  She passed it along to a Delaware federal judge, Joseph J. Farnan, Jr.  The judge and his son then took care of Freebery by introducing her to the loan officer who approved those mortgages.  Judge Farnan repaid Freebery at the rate of $4,000 a month.  That's $48,000 a year -- a pretty rugged repayment schedule on a yearly salary that, Chief Justice Roberts recently reminded us, is now a piddling $162,100, and was even lower at the time the $600,000 changed hands.

But there's no need to worry about the soundness of Freebery's (or the du Pont heiress's?) investment - we learn from Freebery's lawyer that "Judge Farnan was a successful real estate investor who ... spent a lot of money on real estate transactions."  Six hundred thou was nothing special to the judge, apparently.

Because of Judge Farnan's involvement, the corruption/fraud prosecution against Freebery was assigned out of the district, to Philadelphia's Senior Judge John P. Fullam.  According to Dana Garrett at Delaware Watch, Judge Fullam "is widely believed to be the oldest person alive. He was appointed to the District Court by President Andrew Johnson in 1866."  Judge Fullam once received national publicity for entering an order of acquittal, notwithstanding a jury's guilty verdicts, in a prosecution arising from the Abscam scandal.  His order was reversed on appeal.  (U.S. v. Jannotti, 501 F.Supp. 1182, rev'd, 673 F.2ds 578.)

Perhaps that publicity embittered the old man.  He sealed 40 percent of the filings in Freebery's prosecution, according to the News-Journal,  including even the order setting the trial date.  He apparently entertained a number of ex parte communications from Freebery.  Most bizarrely, he permitted a person identified in court papers as "the Honorable John Doe" to intervene in the criminal prosecution.  The Honorable John Doe's every filing was sealed.

Gee, I wonder what's the real name of the Honorable John Doe?  My guess - and, mind you, it's no more than a guess - is that he might know somebody who's related to somebody who works with a certain federal district judge in Delaware who borrowed $600,000 from a person who borrowed it from a du Pont heiress. 

And why was this mysterious person permitted to interject himself into a public prosecution under a cloak of secrecy?  Delaware politics is a mystery, by which I mean it's all-too-transparent but I'm leery of the libel laws.  As Dana Garrett says, "What is fascinating about the incestuous entanglements of power is the assumption that their nakedness isn't obvious to all, especially in a small state like Delaware." 

But it appears that the "rat's nest of interwoven connections"  - to quote from a comment on Dana's blog - extends upriver to Philadelphia.  Ancient Judge Fullam seems not to have cared that his bias, like a lady's slip, was showing: when the prosecutor cross-examined that nice du Pont heiress, the one who provided that nice $600,000 that wound up in the pocket of Judge Fullam's colleague, the judge answered from the bench for her.

Would the judge have been quite so solicitous if the person up to his eyeballs in the muck with the heiress and the defendants had a different day job than federal judge for the District of Delaware?  Hard to believe.  Does that mean the $600,000 was money well-spent?  Does the Senate Judiciary Committee, whose Delaware-based senior Democrat was recently casting about for a new mission, care?