Moore Claims She’s Not a Complainant in Latest Special Committee Order on Newman Investigation
“Regardless of whether [Moore] is a complainant or not, based on the allegations, she still needs to be a witness. You can’t be witness, investigator and judge under the American system.” – Gene Quinn
The Special Committee of the Judicial Council of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC) that is investigating Judge Pauline Newman over allegations she is unfit to serve on the court issued a redacted order yesterday specifying the behavior they say warrants the probe.
Amid calls from Newman’s attorneys and ethics experts to transfer the complaint to a different circuit, a footnote on page one of yesterday’s order somewhat confusingly notes that Chief Judge Moore “did not file a complaint nor is she a complainant. Instead, Chief Judge Moore identified a complaint pursuant to Rule 5, which allows a Chief Judge to initiate the complaint when others have presented allegations establishing probable cause to believe a disability exists.”
The order goes on to make numerous claims that indicate “overwhelming evidence raising concerns about whether Judge Newman currently suffers from a disability that makes her unable to efficiently perform the duties of her office.”
In addition to repeating allegations about significant delays in completing cases and insisting she submit to testing and provide medical records, which Newman refused in her recent response to Moore’s initial order, the order details a number of scathing complaints made by staff. These include that Newman is paranoid and convinced that people are hacking into her computer; that she her phones were being bugged; that she has mentally deteriorated to the point of not remembering how to log on to her computer; that she repeatedly failed a simple security awareness training test; that she often forgets to bring necessary materials to court; “seems lost and confused”; that she disclosed a confidential employee matter to 95 people on the court; that she forgot her law clerk ended their service with her chambers and demanded the clerk be returned to her chambers; that she was abusive to a former clerk and then threatened to have him arrested; and that she generally “seems confused and suspicious and to be struggling to comprehend what she is being told.”
In response to Newman’s refutation of the concerns about her reduced workload in the complaint she recently filed in district court, the order also claims that Newman only authored 10 majority opinions compared to an average of 58 for other active judges between October 1, 2021, and March 24, 2023. “Even accounting for dissents and concurrences, during this time period, the average active judge authored 61 opinions, whereas Judge Newman authored 28. At the same time, Judge Newman took more than three times as long to issue her opinions.” The order includes the following chart showing Newman’s time to issuance compared with her colleagues.
Many have weighed in to support transferring the investigation to a new circuit, since, despite the disclaimer in yesterday’s order, Moore’s involvement in the process arguably seems objectively biased. IPWatchdog CEO and Founder Gene Quinn, who broke the initial news about Moore’s identification of the complaint, said Moore’s contention that she isn’t a complainant is bizarre.
“I find it very convenient that suddenly Judge Moore claims to no longer be the complainant when the original complaint was authorized under her name and written in the first person,” Quinn said. “And regardless of whether she’s a complainant or not, based on the allegations, she still needs to be a witness. You can’t be witness, investigator and judge under the American system.”
In a separate order issued yesterday, the Special Committee responded to Newman’s allegations of First Amendment violations related to a “gag order” requiring Newman to keep the proceedings confidential. According to the order, “the suggestion in the first sentence of Judge Newman’s letter brief that the Confidentiality Order directed her and her counsel to ‘cease making public statements regarding the above-referenced matter,’ misstates the requirements of the order. To the extent Judge Newman and her counsel wish to publicly discuss aspects of this proceeding that have already been made public, the Confidentiality Order placed no restriction on them.”
Attendees of IPWatchdog’s Patent Litigation Masters 2023, which ends today, told IPWatchdog the entire matter is unfortunate and doing real damage to the image of the court.
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Author: iodrakon
Eileen McDermott
Eileen McDermott is the Editor-in-Chief of IPWatchdog.com. Eileen is a veteran IP and legal journalist, and no stranger to the intellectual property world, having held editorial and managerial positions at […see more]
