Judge criticized for stationery, comments

A Hayden Lake resident is alleging that 1st District Judge John Mitchell used court stationery to promote his campaign for re-election and made false statements at a March press conference.

Robert Siegwarth said Friday he took issue with Mitchell’s characterization that he was disqualified from cases as “a result of personality clashes primarily with one public defender and two deputy prosecutors.”

Siegwarth said he has numbers to prove otherwise.

“For him to come out and make remarks that primarily two or three people are DQ’ing him or recusing him is absurd,” Siegwarth said. “It’s not factual.”

But Mitchell said Friday he thinks Siegwarth’s statistics prove the point he was trying to make at his press conference – that primarily it was one public defender and two attorneys from the prosecutor’s office who were disqualifying him.

Siegwarth said he was filing a complaint with state elections officials alleging that Mitchell’s remarks were “false and offensive to the multitude of dedicated public officials.” He said his figures show that at least a quarter of Kootenai County’s licensed attorneys have disqualified the judge at least once.

Siegwarth said he’s a member of a political action committee – Citizens Promoting Judicial Accountability – that endorses Mitchell’s opponent, Coeur d’Alene attorney Rami Amaro.

Amaro is also Siegwarth’s attorney.

Siegwarth also was a plaintiff in a 2002 civil suit that came before Mitchell. After Mitchell awarded summary judgment to the defendants, Amaro appealed.

The Supreme Court reversed Mitchell’s order and remanded the case back to his court. When Amaro declared she was challenging Mitchell for the bench, she asked that he be disqualified from the case.

The judge then disqualified himself, according to court records.

Siegwarth said despite his relationship with Amaro – as a client and a friend – he filed the complaint on his own.

“I don’t know anything about the complaint,” Amaro said Friday. She declined to comment on Siegwarth’s allegations.

“Bob is my client,” she said. “In terms of my campaign, he has his own political action committee. I think it’s formed to oppose judges who are not accountable.”

Amaro said Siegwarth provided her with the breakdown of attorneys who have disqualified Mitchell as the judge in their cases. She counted about 70 attorneys, or about half of all trial attorneys in the county, she said.

“I think it indicates to me a question of why these recusals are happening,” she said.

In a recent interview, Mitchell said he felt the disqualifications were “clearly personality driven.”

He said one attorney in the public defender’s office always disqualifies him because Mitchell admonished the lawyer for not being prepared for court. It happened three times, Mitchell said, and then he went to Public Defender John Adams.

“I would let them know it’s not acceptable,” Mitchell said.

Mitchell said he also went to Adams about another one of his employees when jurors, following two separate trials, questioned the attorney’s competence.

“Is that guy really an attorney?” Mitchell said one juror asked. “For a few months that attorney disqualified me.”

The judge on Friday addressed Siegwarth’s complaint about use of court stationery. In January, Mitchell sent out a letter and copies of a petition to gather signatures required for candidacy. The letter, he said, went to 80 friends and professional acquaintances, including some county employees. Mitchell asked them each to collect 20 signatures and return the petitions in a pre-addressed envelope.

The letter was on Mitchell’s letterhead, but he said the letterhead was a computer document he printed at home, and that he paid for paper and postage himself.

The judge said Friday he also paid for the envelopes, which are addressed to him at the courthouse.

“We’ve been told by the Judicial Council and the Supreme Court to keep our identity as anonymous as we can,” Mitchell said. “I don’t have a listed phone number. I was using my work address for security reasons.”

He said the letters were placed unopened on his desk – except for two mistakenly opened by his clerk.

Siegwarth said he was told that a complaint about the use of stationery was lodged with County Prosecutor Bill Douglas. Douglas said he could neither “confirm nor deny the existence of such complaint.”

First District Judge Charles Hosack, administrative judge for the district, was out of his office Friday. Elections officials with the Secretary of State’s Office said they had not received any complaints.

Siegwarth said he feels his complaint against Mitchell is well-researched.

“It’s a lot of work,” he said. “That complaint is not a frivolous complaint. It’s a very serious breach of ethics.”