James M. Redwine

National Judicial College

Suffer The Little Children

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In the JPeg Osage Ranch Bunkhouse. Photo by Peg Redwine

Some of you know and remember I recently was sent via the National Judicial College to work with judges in the country of Georgia that is located where the border of the Old Spice Trail used to be. Peg and I had an interesting and fulfilling time there and whether we taught the Georgian people anything worthwhile, we learned a great deal. One very happy and useful thing we learned was Georgians celebrate two Christmases.

Because about half of the country dates the birth of Jesus using the Julian calendar, December 25th is Christmas for them. The other half recognizes the Gregorian calendar for the Nativity so they celebrate Christmas on January 07. The calendar established by Julius Caesar was gradually abandoned in most countries in favor of the calendar adopted by Pope Gregory XIII in 1582. Many, but not most, Christian churches still use the Julian date of December 25 for Christmas. Regardless, whatever one finds in the heavens (wise men indeed), it results in what every child dreams of, two Christmas mornings. As for me, as a family court judge and one-time family law attorney, I see two Christmases as a potential blessing. I suggest parents who cannot seem to put their children’s interests ahead of their own might be able to use both Christmas days.

Each of the various Christian sects may define Christmas and how it is celebrated a little differently.  But hope, love, joy and generosity are a part of every church’s Christmas doctrine. And because Christmas is rooted in the story of Jesus’ birth, children have always been the main focus for most people.  We might decry the commercialism of Christmas, but we recognize this is supposed to be the most special time for every child of every family. However, one thing that is more certain than the arrival of credit card bills in January is the special acrimony that raises its ugly head in court in the weeks leading up to Christmas; Advent, where is thy joy?

There is something about the season that should bring out the best in loving parents that can sometimes bring out the worst.  One sad statistic that Domestic Relations Courts can foretell with unerring accuracy is a sharp rise in divorced parents fighting over where and how their children will spend the Christmas holidays. One parent may want the children to spend every second of Christmas Eve and Christmas Day with that parent and that parent’s family.  Another parent may want to control whether some new significant other can even be in the same house with the children.  Perhaps a parent will want to remove the children from the state for the entire holiday.  Parents may try to control every aspect of the other parent’s lifestyle when the children are with the ex-spouse.  Believe me, we have not skimmed the curdled milk off the top of the many permutations of how parents set out to ruin their children’s Christmas.

Of course, in most situations, if both parents simply applied their Christian principles to the sharing of their children, these destructive behaviors would disappear.  Unfortunately, there are some truly bad parents from whom children must be protected.  Fortunately, they are extremely rare.  For most situations, children are happier, healthier and more successful when both of their parents and both extended families are there to give love and support.

The Dutch philosopher, Benedict de Spinoza (1632-1677), posited that each human does, and should, strive to advance their own interests.  When the interests of two people collide, both people will achieve more of their desires if they compromise.  Spinoza believed that this pattern of competing self-interests is the basis of civilization. Instead of denying our own desires, we should recognize that we are more likely to achieve what we want if we assert our desires while accommodating others.

In Sunday School or when our parents were explaining why we could not have everything our own way, this was called The Golden Rule.  If you want justice, you should do justice.  If you want all of the toys, you must realize so do your siblings.  More importantly, you should learn that if you and your siblings fight over who should get one hundred percent of a toy, the toy may be destroyed by your fighting.

According to Spinoza and virtually every rational human since we began forming groups of humans, this is how societies are built and prosper.  Of course, societies and families collapse when people do not compromise and refuse to acknowledge the desires and needs of others. In other words, self-interest is not a bad thing.  It helps motivate us to advance as individuals and groups as long as we accommodate the self-interests of others.

So when parents of minor children no longer live together, it can make their children miserable, especially during Christmas, if one or both of their parents or members of the extended families demand to control one hundred percent of the children’s lives. Most states have addressed these issues by promulgating Parenting Time Guidelines.  These guidelines can be helpful as an ultimate fallback position, but the children can still be torn, confused, frustrated and angry.  The best guideline remains The Golden Rule.  If the parents would put themselves in the place of their children or the other parent or the other parent’s family, the one size fits all guidelines would not come into play.

As a family court judge who has from time to time seen the destructiveness caused by pride, jealousy, hurt feelings and stubbornness in domestic relations cases, I respectfully suggest that both parents are always happier if their children are happy. And my experience has been that children have a much happier Christmas if the people they love most, their parents, put the children’s interests first. Perhaps if we just all start using the Georgian Christmas dates both parents could be happy. On the other hand, maybe then they would just have another time to fight about.

There is no need to cut the children in half.  Recognition that one’s own self-interest will be advanced by accommodating the self-interest of others is all that is required. And, perhaps a quick reference to Matthew, Ch 18., vs. 1-5 might be of help before any discussion is held as to how the Christmas holidays should be arranged concerning the children. Merry Christmas!

Other Countries Heard From

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Photo by Peg Redwine

President Kennedy gave his inaugural address January 20, 1961 when I was a senior in high school. He was concerned about the Soviet Union’s 1957 Sputnik achievement and challenged American youth to respond. That September I entered Oklahoma State University and boldly majored in physics. By June 1962 I had learned how to smoke but not learned anything that would raise concerns in Russia. I changed my major to English and then in June 1963 decided to “ask what I could do for my country” without the headaches of college level studies. I became a 1960’s Okie and headed for California. On the way I took my first foray out of the United States to Nogales, Mexico.

My friend and fellow OSU dropout, Ed Kelso, and I drove his 1954 Mercury down to the Mexican border and were waved through without so much as a question, much less a visa. We stopped at the first bar we came to and ran into my old high school classmate Jim Reed and a few other guys from Pawhuska, Oklahoma who were there on a similar journey of cultural discovery. What I noted from my brief sojourn was my high school Spanish was sufficient as long as we had U.S. Dollars. I also received my first faint awareness of how lucky I was to have been born north of the border.

Another foreign country experience was when as a member of the National Judicial College faculty I was sent for two weeks (December 1999-January 2000) to Ukraine to teach Ukrainian judges. I liked the Ukrainian people but found their lives to be quite difficult. The judges told me they frequently did not receive their small monthly salaries and the Ukrainian government often failed to provide them and their families with promised individual family housing. Also, police corruption was in full view on the streets of Kiev and workers who were supposed to help repair such public assets as the fountain in “Freedom Square” did about as much work as I did at Oklahoma State. As the old Soviet saying went, “The government pretended to pay them and they pretended to work.” I left Ukraine with a greater appreciation of what our Founders sacrificed for us.

Then in 2003 the National Judicial College sent me to Russia for a week to teach Russian judges about jury trials. The old Soviet Union abolished jury trials after the 1917 Revolution and Russia was just reinstituting them into their legal system. Peg was able to be with me on that trip and we, once again, found the Russian judges to be friendly and gracious but the Russian culture caused us great chagrin. A good cup of coffee was truly a foreign concept, but the consumption of alcohol was quite prevalent. The idea of innocent unless proven guilty was belied by the defendants being housed in metal and plastic cages in the courtroom. And when a defendant on trial for murder was marched into the courtroom by four AK47 carrying uniformed guards right in front of the jury, my American sense of justice was assaulted. It was good to get back to my Indiana courtroom with its guarantees of equal justice. Russia was interesting, but the United States was good to come home to.

Most recently (June 2022-February 2023) Peg and I completed a six-month judicial teaching mission sponsored by the American Bar Association, the East-West Management Institute and the United States Agency for International Development. I was sent to the country of Georgia that until 1991 had been part of the old Soviet Union. My duties were to make friends, observe, work with and give suggestions to Georgian judges based upon my more than forty years of experience as an American judge.

We had a wonderful experience with the Georgian judges and our newly-made Georgian friends. They could not have treated us any better. Everyone we met was positive about our involvement and open to suggestions. We would gladly return to Georgia whenever invited. Of course, we did note substantial differences between the Georgian culture and America’s. Georgia is bordered on the north by Russia and on the south by Turkey. Twenty percent of Georgia is militarily occupied by Russia; that is a constant worry for the Georgian people. Peg and I thought how different our lives in America are. Our northern border is Canada which we visited in 2018 and is about as good a neighbor as any country could have. And our southern border is Mexico that appears to want to join us.

What this 2023 Fourth of July birthday party has helped us to reflect upon is, no matter how much CNN, MSNBC, FOX News and many in government service complain about America and malign it, many of the alternatives are pretty scary. After seeing how some of the rest of the world has to live, I find the ’ole USA absolutely marvelous. America has faults and foibles, but as Francis Scott Key wrote, it is really wonderful, “That our flag is still there.”

Photo by Peg Redwine

Welcome to Ukraine

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As I retrieved my luggage at Boryspil Airport outside Kyev, Ukraine the last week of December in 1999 I was surrounded by a jostling mob of drably dressed male cab drivers shouting for my attention in an amalgam of Ukrainian and Russian. I chose the aesthetically thin one who said “Best” in English. He loaded my large golfclub caddy, my suitcase and my backpack into his precarious looking tiny Trabant vehicle with a cracked front windshield. Once we left the airport for Kyev I understood why the passenger side window was down; the roller was broken.

It was dark. It was bitterly cold. It was snowing. The trip to the “four-star” Hotel Dnipro in downtown Kyev took about half an hour and the driver did not want Ukrainian hryvnia (pronounced grievna) but American dollars. I later learned he probably would have been ecstatic with $5.00, but I paid him $30.00. He insisted on pulling my heavy golfclub caddy into the lobby. The caddy was filled with lesson plans and Walmart trinkets for the Ukrainian judges that the National Judicial College had sent me there to teach. After I starting teaching classes, I found the Ukrainian judges were as thrilled to receive the plastic Harry Potter toys I had brought to give away as prizes as we Americans might have been to get expensive sports paraphernalia from our favorite team.

I checked in, gave up my passport with a twinge of indecision, and was directed to my room on the seventh floor. I was not given a key but was simply told I would be in room 702. When I got off the elevator, I found a woman wearing a large shawl sitting at a plain wooden desk in the cold hallway. I used my fingers to show her my room number and she opened an unlocked drawer containing the keys to all the rooms. She did not ask for I.D. She just handed me my key. I kept it in my possession for the whole two weeks I was there.

The door to my room reminded me of the pasteboard type construction used for cheap, portable closets in the 1950’s. The room had a single metal bed, a small metal table with two metal folding chairs and a window looking out onto an alley. There was a metal dowel rod, but no hangers, for hanging clothes and the restroom had a commode, a sink and a tiny shower that I soon found spurted out green water. I spent two weeks on bottled water and a lot of soap.

The room was about four paces long and three paces wide. Once I moved my luggage in, I could barely turn around. I had hardly got in my room when the telephone rang and a female voice said, “Anna”. I responded, “No, you have the wrong room.” The woman said again, “Anna” then she added in a Ukrainian accent, “You want?” I was a little slow but finally got it. I said thank you but, “No”. The cab ride and Anna were just the beginning of my introduction to the Ukrainian economy.

After I kind of unpacked I decided to seek out a sandwich and a beer at the snack bar on the second floor. The bar was near the doors to a small casino where two uniformed dealers, one male one female, were behind black-jack tables. I was the only potential customer. I had the uncomfortable feeling I was the only game in town so I slowly backed away from the casino and went to the bar.

The bar was about twice the size of my room with a semi-circular formica topped bar and five stools like those one might find at a small-town drugstore counter. There were four small metal tables with armless metal chairs. When I entered the bar there was a male bartender who indicated in Ukrainian and with gestures they had no food, only potato chips. There was a large man sitting on one of the stools and at one of the tables a thin woman, everyone was thin, sitting alone holding an unlit cigarette.

I ordered a bottle of beer and received one with an unreadable label. I took the bag of chips and the beer to an empty table and sat down. Almost immediately the woman moved to my table and sat near to me. She looked to be about thirty years old. She asked in English if I would buy her a beer. I was surprised at her excellent English and told her so. I did not respond to her request. She said she could tell I was American as she had once lived in New Jersey while going to college. After a few minutes of talking, she managed to convey to me what her second job was.

She said she was a medical doctor who was employed by the government but she had not received any pay for three months. After I explained I was not interested in her second job she just sort of smiled and pointed to the large man at the bar. She said, “That is my husband.” She said their only child, who was sixteen, was home alone. She said they could not afford more children, but wanted more. Then she began wiping at her eyes. I shook her husband’s hand and left.

The next day I went for a walk to the center of Kyev and found Maidan Nezalezhnosti (Independence Square). Two shabbily dressed men were staring at the non-operating fountain. In a rusty dented metal bucket, they had a few worn tools. It was very cold as they made a few half-hearted attempts to work on the fountain. Then one of them just threw down the bucket and they walked away. I assumed it was a real-life lesson in the old Russian/Ukrainian/socialist aphorism, “The government pretends to pay us and we pretend to work.”

As I walked the main streets, occasionally but not often, an automobile would be flagged over by a uniformed police officer. The exchange of demanded money was not even attempted to be hidden.

The next two weeks as I taught approximately two hundred Ukrainian judges about America’s judicial system, I was told the government was supposed to pay each judge the equivalent of $350 dollars per month and provide living quarters for each judge’s family. However, the judges told me they were paid sporadically and had to share an apartment with other judges.

I did learn that many, but not all, of the Ukrainian judges despised Russia and that it was wise on my part to call the capital Kyev (Kāev), not Kiev (Kēev) and when I said goodbye, I should use the Ukrainian “do pobachennya” not the Russian “do svidaniya”.

I do not know how much American judicial knowledge I imparted to the Ukrainian judges, but about the only “honest” economy I did find in Kyev were the black markets set up in the courtyards of the huge churches. I frequented them several times and bought about $1,500 worth of marvelous local items such as Ukraine’s delicately painted eggs. I filled my then emptied golfclub caddy with numerous wonderful mementos for the trip home.

As I was preparing to leave Ukraine for the U.S. via the airport, the uniformed customs officer asked me if I had anything to declare. I at first answered, “Yes”, and pointed to my golfclub caddy. The customs official looked me in the eye and she said again, “Do you have anything to declare?” I said, “No”, and brought the souvenirs home while leaving my American dollars in Ukraine.

I liked the Ukrainian people very much but the living there is hard. I hope Russia does not invade, but if it does, I hope the Russians bring food and jobs and not just more misery. The Ukrainians have it tough enough already.

Legal Slight of Hand

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After last week’s scintillating column on Constitutional Law I know you are eagerly awaiting promised round two on politics and the United States Supreme Court. Of course, America’s judiciary eschews any notion that court outcomes are sometimes a product of the political views of the judge or judges who decide the cases. At the National Judicial College where I have served as a part-time faculty member since 1995 one of the guiding principles is the effort to have completely impartial judging of all cases. That is a proper goal. However, is that goal always achieved? Let’s take a look behind the black robes of history starting with America’s most famous case, Marbury v. Madison, decided in 1803 a mere sixteen years after the end of the Constitutional Convention that occurred on September 17, 1787.

You may recall that last week we had sought guidance on understanding the U.S. Constitution from law professor Michael Klarman who spoke to the Indiana Graduate Judges Seminar in French Lick, Indiana in June 2019. In his book The Framers’ Coup, The Making of the United States Constitution, Professor Klarman gave an in-depth analysis of the political warfare that produced our Constitution. A similar phenomenon occurred when the fourth Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, John Marshall, blatantly grabbed for the U.S. Supreme Court the immense power to declare whether a particular law was constitutional. Marshall deftly, and unethically, used the virulent hatred between those early Americans who favored a strong central government, the Federalists, and the anti-Federalists who preferred a more citizen-centered national government. John Adams was our second president and he was one of the strongest proponents of a strong central government. Adams was defeated in an election by our third president Thomas Jefferson in a bitterly fought campaign. John Marshall served as Adams’ Secretary of State and Marshall and Jefferson despised one another. Just before Adams’ term as president ran out he appointed John Marshall to be Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court. Marshall was succeeded as Secretary of State by James Madison who, incidentally, later became our fourth president.

Just before John Adams left office he also appointed numerous judges and justices of the peace as a sharp stick in the eye of the incoming president Thomas Jefferson. William Marbury, a wealthy businessman and vocal opponent of Jefferson, was one of Adams’ justice of the peace appointees. While Secretary of State, John Marshall had the duty of signing Marbury’s certificate of appointment and delivering it to Congress. Marshall failed to get that done and the task was left to new Secretary of State James Madison. But President Jefferson, who was angry at John Adams for the last minute appointments, ordered Madison to not deliver Marbury’s certificate. Marbury then filed a law suit in the Supreme Court seeking to have the Court order Madison to give Marbury the certificate of appointment.

If all this intrigue seems rather petty and even perhaps reminiscent of our current political climate involving nasty actions on all sides, well, the pettiness turned out to have a momentous affect on every court case in America after 1803. The squabble may have resembled a tempest in a teapot but Chief Justice John Marshall’s highly political decision in the case resulted in a federal judiciary of immense power, a power not contemplated by many of our Founders and Framers of our Constitution.

Because of his earlier direct connection to Marbury’s appointment John Marshall should have recused himself from the case and should have had no part in it. However, Marshall seized upon Thomas Jefferson’s hatred of John Adams to trade what Jefferson wanted, that is to prevent Adams’ last minute appointments, for a huge leap toward a strong centralized government where the Judicial Branch would have power over decisions of both the Legislative and Executive Branches’ decisions.

What John Marshall and two more members of the then five member Supreme Court decided was that the legislative act that purported to give jurisdiction over cases such as the one brought by Marbury violated the Constitution therefore the Supreme Court had no authority to order Madison to give Marbury his certificate. It might appear to have been a win for Jefferson over Adams, but it was the ultimate Pyrrhic victory as Marshall and all future courts used it as a nuclear weapon in the war between the Federalists and anti-Federalists. Supreme power over what the Constitution meant has resided in the Supreme Court ever since 1803.

For example, in Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857) Chief Justice Roger Taney, a former slave owner, and the U.S. Supreme Court ruled Negro slaves had no rights that the Constitution was bound to protect. Then in George Bush v. Al Gore (2000) a bitterly divided court led by Chief Justice William Rehnquist who had been appointed by Republican President Richard Nixon to be an associate justice then by Republican President Ronald Reagan to be Chief Justice handed the presidential election to Republican George Bush.

So, as America’s judiciary proclaims it must remain independent from outside influences and look only to the law and the facts, it might appear to some cynics that the blindfold often slips. Anyway, I am certain you probably feel the same sense of relief in finishing this column that I did in finishing law school and Professor Klarman’s book. On the bright side however, the rest of your day is bound to get better.

Mayberry We Miss You

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In December 1991 my family and I ate at Luby’s Cafeteria in Killeen, Texas. There was no trace of the bodies, blood and shattered glass from the October 16, 1991 mass shooting. We still felt their presence. Although I remembered the city riots of the 1960’s and 70’s and had closely followed the violence of 1968, the utter randomness of the Luby’s murders stoked more personal concerns. To slaughter people one did not even know struck me as much more horrendous than the misguided criminal actions of zealots.

While America’s 20th century experience with deadly violence from 1900 up to the 1960’s was extensive and tragic, as Jasmine Henrique reported in her article Mass Shootings in America: A Historical Review (Global Research News, 2013), the victims were almost always members of the killer’s own family or were the unfortunate object of a felonious act such as a specific, intentional robbery that was committed in secret. However, in most of the last half of the 20th century and the first nineteen years of the 21st century America has endured public mass killings of persons who were strangers to their murderers.

Memories of Luby’s came back to me as I participated in an internet class on judge and courthouse security taught by my friend and fellow faculty member Judge D. Neil Harris from Mississippi. Judge Harris along with other faculty of the National Judicial College including me are teaching a six-week course to seventeen judges from across America. Of course, it is not just the judiciary that needs to be concerned about security.

If you recall, when this course on general judicial topics started three weeks ago I suggested in this column there was much we modern judges could learn by examining how courts and judges arose originally. That is when humans considered net-working to be making friends with the folks in neighboring huts. As for court security in those bygone days about all that was required was for the judge to treat people who came to court as the judge would want to be treated. This worked pretty well until the world began to fill up with people who were not comfortable living in a smaller area.

But now, as William Wordsworth (1770-1850) might say, “The world is too much with us”. Or as Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862) might have nostalgically wished if he were in charge of courthouse security, “That security system is best that restricts the least”. Unfortunately, we can no longer simply return to nature. The world has moved on.

Whereas in 1950 there were 151 million people in the United States and it seemed space was infinite, in 2019 we have 327 million and it has become difficult to stretch out. Mayberry, our TV town of 2,000, has metamorphosed into what feels like a megalopolis from sea to sea and from Mexico to Canada. Sheriff Taylor, who did not even carry a gun, ordered Deputy Barney Fife to carry only one bullet and keep it in his shirt pocket.

It may be that over population has impacted our behavior. Dr. John Calhoun (1917-1995) studied population density using lab rats as subjects. While many other scientists point out humans are not rats and are more able to adapt as conditions change, it may be our precipitous increase in mass shootings of random victims has come about as, at least, a partial result of population density. In their analysis of Calhoun’s theories, Doctors Edmund Ramsden and Jon Adams in their article Escaping the Laboratory: The Rodent Experiments of John B. Calhoun & Their Cultural Influence (Journal of Social History, Spring 2009) stated:

“As population density (of the rat city) increased it became evermore difficult for an individual to control the frequency of social contact. The result was unwanted interaction, leading to adverse reactions such as hostility and withdrawal, and ultimately, to the type of social and psychological breakdown seen during the latter stages in his (Calhoun’s) crowded pens.”

To solve a problem it helps to understand the cause of the problem It may be there are more valid causes for mass shootings than increasing population density. If so, they should be defined. However, if our teeming mass of humanity is contributing, we should address it and use our Homo sapiens adaptability to assuage the carnage. Regardless, whatever the etiology of increasing societal, including courthouse, violence there is no doubt is is occurring.

As reported by Timm Fautsko, Steve Berson and Steve Swensen of the National Center for State Courts and the Center for Judicial and Executive Security, there were 199 incidents of courthouse violence from 1970-2009 with an increase noted each decade. As they posited:

“We live in a time when threats against judges and acts of violence in courthouses and courtrooms are occurring with greater frequency than ever before.”

As much as I yearn to return to Mayberry and rely upon my mother’s stated advice, “Jimmy, just be nice”, the evidence overcomes the myth. Society, including the judicial system, must face the reality of a 21st century world. Security is necessary. That is why the Indiana Supreme Court in its Administrative Order AD19 requires each county court system to develop a security plan, seek approval for that plan, implement that plan and update the plan every two years.

I do not like it and my guess is neither does the Supreme Court. However, I, and I believe they, know it is necessary.

The Circumspect Caveman

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If you read last week’s column you probably noted the current general topic is judicial education. Specifically, the focus of last week’s session was the definition of what is a judge and how did the concept of judging arise? We went back about 130,000 years to the hypothetical, and questionable, theory that Homo sapiens may have existed in North America before it had a name. The reason we are delving into these arcane mysteries is because the National Judicial College in Reno, Nevada has tasked some of its faculty, including me, with teaching an annual on-line course to judges from across North America. By design the course concentrates on general and basic aspects of what judges do and how and why they do it. So let us return to last week’s pedagogical construct of a truly elemental judicial system, that is, caveman justice.

You may recall we visited three hypothetical aboriginal families inhabiting a tiny cluster of huts. A dispute between two of the families had arisen over possession and use of certain flowers. Those two families agreed that instead of fighting with clubs they would agree to submit the matter to a member of the third family for a decision; voila, the first judge and the first court. But why would the dueling litigants accept the judge’s decision? Why not just ignore the judge’s imposed resolution and go back to trial by combat. How could the ancient society have confidence the judge was right, or if not completely right, at least fair? Judicial ethics were born. And that was the subject matter of this week’s NJC class.

If we assume the judge wants his or her family to enjoy the benefits of a peaceful community and we assume cooperation on such things as mastodon hunts by everyone is a benefit to all while bashing skulls is a benefit to none, we can find a basis for accepting a decision by an impartial judge. The rub, of course, is how to ensure the contentious parties believe the judge is impartial. That is why a large part of America’s judicial system places restraints and requirements on the behavior of judges. Judges, just as our caveman judge, have no armies nor do they have the power to raise revenue. All judges have to enforce their decisions is public confidence in the judge, or, at least, the overall judicial system.

So with our nascent judicial system from 130,000 years ago our judge could not play favorites and the two contesting parties would have to have confidence he/she was, in fact, impartial. People can accept a less that ideal resolution of their legal problem if they are convinced it was arrived at without prejudice. Therefore, our caveman judge must not talk to one family about the dispute outside the presence of the other family. And the judge must not accept favors from either family. Also, the judge must not voice any out of “court” opinions about the merits of the case.

Well, Gentle Reader, you might surmise there are a few more legal system details for mankind to work out other than our caveman justice. However, it all comes down to our judges must not only be fair, we must believe they are fair.