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Column ping AND show ping for Friday

Hey, Judge, mind your own P’$ and Q’$
By Howie Carr | Friday, May 16, 2008 | http://www.bostonherald.com

Who the hell is Roxbury District Court Judge Ed Redd to be telling cops, or anyone else for that matter, how they ought to be spending their free time?

This is a judge nicknamed “In the Red” because of his 1996 bankruptcy filing, in which he listed assets of $680,985.12 and liabilities of $1,449,042.42.

It’s a terrible thing, having to file Chapter 7. At the time the judge and his physician wife went belly up, they were scraping by on $263,000 a year. But that doesn’t go that far when you have a summer cottage in Oak Bluffs on Martha’s Vineyard. So the Redds tried to raise some money. Three months before he officially filed, the judge unloaded his other vacation home, in St. Petersburg, Fla., to his daughter.

For $6,500, records state.

Now this judge has the audacity to suggest to a bunch of off-duty Boston cops in his courtroom that they don’t need to be attending a hearing involving a crazed cop-killer named Thomas Shay, who planted a bomb in 1991 that killed BPD officer Jeremiah Hurley and maimed a second cop.

Three of Hurley’s children are on the job now. Of course the cops would want to be in court supporting the family. And even by cop-killer standards, this Shay is a real piece of work. He writes me letters occasionally and I can say with some degree of certainty that he is a real nut, and not just because he’s a cross-dresser, which after all has never stopped anyone from becoming a bankruptcy judge in this state.

But back to Judge Ed “In the Red” Redd. In 1996, one of his creditors sent me a copy of the judge’s bankruptcy filing and I wrote a column about it. Tried back then to reach the judge to get his side of the story, but when the phone didn’t ring, I knew it was Ed “In the Red” Redd.

Yesterday, I called the flack for the judiciary and asked her to get a statement from the judge.

She sent me back an e-mail saying she had spoken with him and he said “he has been discharged from his bankruptcy.”

Which left unanswered the main question. Did the creditors get any money? I called the flack back and asked her.

“I don’t have that information,” she said, “and I’m not going to ask him.”

It’s a great thing, being a state judge in a corrupt state. You get an 80 percent pension when you get tired of working at your part-time $130,000-a-year-plus job.

As my correspondent, Judge Ed “In the Red” Redd’s creditor, wrote me at the time:

“You can probably guess I don’t have any of these wonderful retirement benefits waiting for me.”

Who does? The definition of “Massachusetts judge” is “lawyer who was starving to death until he made contributions to the right politicians.”

Guys like Ed “In the Red” Redd make it tough on the good judges in Massachusetts, but you know what they say. It’s that 98 percent of state judges who give a bad name to the other 2 percent.

But Judge Redd believes he can lecture cops - not on probable cause or the rules of evidence or some other legal issue on which he could at least claim to have some expertise, but on how to spend their time off.

And by the way, time off is a lot more meaningful to a cop than it is to Massachusetts judges, who work, or should I say “work,” 35 weeks a year, tops, after all the sick, vacation and educational time off, not to mention all the national, state and Suffolk-county-only holidays.

Look, Judge, nobody cares if you want to dress down the occasional perp, but where is your credibility in telling anyone else, cops or otherwise, how to run their lives?

Let me ask one final question: Who is more responsible for the crime in this state, cops or judges? Don’t everybody answer at once.
Article URL: http://www.bostonherald.com/news/opinion/columnists/view.bg?articleid=1094419