THE LEGAL LEADFOOT

I want to talk about Marcus Einfeld. You remember him?  The former Federal Court Judge who is now behind bars for perjury and perverting the courts of justice. He was publicly humiliated, stripped of all his honours and his legal standing and sent to prison for making false statements while trying to avoid demerit points on his licence and avoid a $77 speeding fine.

He told a court that he wasn’t the driver. He’d lent his car to a woman who actually had died three years earlier.

Einfeld’s crime was worse because he was a judge. He knew the law. He had sat on the bench and jailed other people for perjury. And now he’s in jail.

So why rehash old news?  Because I’m confused. Swap the name Marcus Einfeld for Carmen Randazzo and start again.

Carmen Randazzo is the Melbourne Magistrate who was caught speeding ten times in a month and on two occasions she nominated her father as the offending driver.  He wasn’t dead like Einfeld’s excuse. But he was in Rome. He’s a Senator in the Italian Parliament and lives in Rome for much of the year.

( Judge Einfeld got exposed by a newspaper, The Daily Telegraph  and Magistrate Randazzo got rolled by The Age).

But that’s when things get different. Here, the Chief Magistrate, Ian Gray, commissioned a report and former Supreme Court judge, Alex Chernoy, found that Randazzo nominated her father to ‘ avoid having to face the consequences of a possible disqualification from driving’.  He found the magistrate’s behaviour was ‘morally wrong and amounted to a serious departure from the standard of judicial behaviour’. Damn right it was.

And surely it was illegal. An officer of the court swore a false statement not once but twice.

Her lawyer, Peter Ward, claimed ‘Ms. Randazzo at no stage intentionally sought to mislead anyone in relation to this matter’. She didn’t?  Just slipped her mind that Papa was in Rome? The pending loss of her licence had nothing to do with it?

He also said that ‘during this period, Ms.Randazzo was under enormous amount of personal strain’. Yeah. Getting pinged for speeding ten times in a month can do that to ya. The ‘personal strain’ didn’t stop her from still sitting on the Bench and sentencing other people who had broken the law. Although she has now resigned.

But what still puzzles me most about this case is that Chief Magistrate Gray said he’d been advised by Police Commissioner Simon Overland that no charges would be laid against her.

Why not? Can we all expect that sort of treatment if we lie about who was
the leadfoot behind the wheel?  Can we all expect a personal clearance from the Police Chief.

Marcus Einfeld must be thinking he lives on the wrong side of the border.

© Copyright Derryn Hinch 2009