AY DIOS MIO

Now we’ve done it. We’ve been accused of being too hard on our Judges who are of Cuban American Heritage.

Here’s the comment :

Anonymous said...
Rump why are you being so hard on Cuban judges as being the ones who set there calendar for 9 and show up at 1030? that only describes one particular judge who used to be in on the second floor who is now in backup and likes to juggle a bean bag throughout trial. He also liked to wear a microphone a la Madonna.As a former ASA now in ciminal defense i can also state that this judge is equally angry and abusive towards the state and the defense. That said, why would you compare all of our fine and punctual cuban american judges with this one judge who does these things?

Here’s our response:

When we arrived in Miami from the (comment censored to protect the identity of Rumpole) in the 1980’s, we kept hearing about this term: “Cuban Time”. We mostly heard it from Cubans. It was a term of -what appeared to us to be- endearment used to laughingly describe a penchant of some people to be late.

Now many many Judges seem to have little regard for the time of the attorneys and clients sitting in their courtroom. We remember when Judge Lando was in the Justice Building, she wouldn’t take any lawyers out of turn. But when it came to some Judges being habitually late for court, we were NOT thinking of Judge Rodriguez. Indeed, we like the fact that Judge Rodriguez starts at 10:00 or 10:30 and tells everyone about it. I makes it easy for us to schedule our time. One word of warning: We remember the last Judge who scheduled his court late: Former Judge and Current Felon Roy T Gelber used to start his County Court DUI calendar at 1:30 PM! We kid you not. And we all know what happened to him: he ended up in an eight year handball game at your favorite Federal Correctional Institute. Not to even remotely compare Judge Rodriguez to Gelber. One’s a respected judge and one sold his robes.

Back to Cuban time. When we made that little comment, we actually were thinking of Judge Pando, who was a great judge in County Court, but had a penchant for starting very late. We think she would admit this.

Now, we are in a quandary and very close to putting out legal foot in our mouth. Do we make a pun on Judge Pando’s heritage, or Judge Pando’s gender? Hmm.. truly either way there lies ahead a rocky road.

Discretion being the better part of valor, lets move on and conclude with this: We took a cheap shot at all Hispanic Judges with that little quip about running late. Certainly, if you did a study, we are sure there are no genetic components to running late, although if we had to choose, we would chalk it up to gender. [See below].

Many Hispanic Judges run a tight ship, and some don’t. The ones that don’t just have to grin and bear the “Cuban time” quips, while the Judges who run late and are not Hispanic just get cursed at under the attorneys breath.

If you think about it, it’s better to have a friendly quip tossed your way, then a curse.

Go here to file your gender bias complaints: http://www.eeoc.gov/facts/howtofil.html.

See you in court.

PS: Judge Rodriguez has been compared to Madonna, although we do not even want the image of him wearing a gold plated bustier in our mind for one second.
The question is: What do you think his favorite Maddona song is?
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