Unfettered corruption

Among the apparent victims of a Philadelphia judge's influence-peddling was a local security firm that goes by the colorful name Houdini Lock & Safe Co. The judge's guilty plea last week constitutes the latest proof that the corruption afflicting the city and its judiciary is, like the eponymous escape artist, very difficult to contain.

Consider that just a year after Philadelphia's benighted Traffic Court expired amid allegations of leniency traded for pornography and crustaceans, this latest case of bottom-feeding has surfaced from the depths of the city's Municipal Court - the venue that was supposed to absorb Traffic Court's duties and introduce a measure of professionalism to them.

Partisan judicial elections, and the campaigns and fund-raising that accompany them, were an important component of the corruption that finally felled Traffic Court. But as the latest case illustrates, the entire Pennsylvania judiciary is produced - and tainted - by the same poisonous political process.

Municipal Court Judge Joseph C. Waters Jr.'s crimes go to the heart of the system's dangers. Waters offered a campaign contributor "anything you need," a promise he kept more faithfully than those he made to the people who elected him. When the judge's backers called in favors, according to the plea, Waters enlisted two fellow jurists to rule the way his supporters wanted. And they did, prosecutors allege, bottling up a civil claim by Houdini and, in a separate case, reducing a felony gun charge.

Transcripts of federal wiretaps depict the judges as making these arrangements in a clipped, almost opaque patois: "Who's your guy?" "The defendant." "No problem." Like the Traffic Court scandal, the shorthand suggests that in certain corners of the judiciary, such conversations are not so unusual.

The other judges referred to in Waters' plea, Dawn Segal and Joseph O'Neill, have not been charged with any crime, but they are not hearing cases while the allegations are examined by judicial disciplinary officials. The Supreme Court deserves credit for acting quickly in that respect.

However, after scandals ranging from the high court to the low one at issue, it's difficult to divine a good reason for state lawmakers' failure to come close to replacing judicial elections with an appointment process - or to produce any other comprehensive reform of the commonwealth's tarnished court system. The inescapable consequence is that judicial corruption is still on the loose.