Robert A Lewis, Clark County, Washington Superior Court Judge Department Nine Dishonorable Robert A. Lewis 564.397.2226 Lewis won re-election in 2016. He was unopposed in the general election on November 8, 2016. A graduate of Western Washington State College and the University of Washington Law School, Judge Lewis practiced law in Camas before his appointment to the court in November 2004. On June 6, 2017, Clark County Superior Court Judge Robert A. Lewis refused to hear a bail reduction request submitted by Pro Se Defendant, John Garrett Smith. The refusal has upheld a $12 million-dollar bail amount, deemed by many to exceedingly excessive, that was set by Lewis nearly two and half years earlier for the attempted murder of his wife. On December 3, 2014, after a 3-day bench trial before Judge Robert Lewis, Garrett Smith was convicted of 2 crimes, Attempted Murder II and Assault II. Smith was later sentenced to 12 years in prison for a crime that did not occur. During the January 30, 2015 sentencing hearing, Lewis RAISED the $10 million-dollar bail amount requested by the Clark County Prosecutor’s Office to $12 million without so much as an objection from Smith’s defense counsel or an explanation from Lewis as to why the increased bail amount. On October 4, 2016 in a unanimous decision, the Washington Court of Appeals Division II REVERSED Smith’s Attempted Murder II conviction but reaffirmed the Assault II conviction, an offense which Smith had already served the maximum sentence range of 15 months. On November 3, 2016, the Clark County Prosecutor’s Office submitted a petition for discretion review to the Washington Supreme Court. On June 8, 2017, the WSC was set to review the petition briefs in chambers. A response from the State… Read More
A recent Wall Street Journal investigation found that over the last decade, 131 federal judges failed to recuse themselves in hundreds of cases that involved their own financial interests. Chief Justice of the Supreme Court John Roberts, in his year-end review of the federal judiciary, said the report’s findings indicate a “serious problem of inadequate ethics training,” especially for those judges who had numerous violations. The conflicts of interest primarily include judges hearing cases involving their or their families’ stock holdings, which ultimately tainted some 685 court cases. Given the rising concerns that the federal judiciary is becoming increasingly politicized, the newspaper’s findings are deeply troubling, says Martha Davis, university distinguished professor of law at Northeastern, adding that the violations only “compound the lack of trust that the federal judiciary seems to be breeding.” “What’s at stake here is a lot,” Davis says. “We have a judiciary for various reasons already losing the trust of the American people, and the evidence that federal judges are hearing cases that they have a direct financial interest in only makes things worse.” One of the primary mechanisms for alerting the courts about potential conflicts is through software that screens for them. The computerized system itself was implemented after a 2006 Washington Post investigation discovered a rash of ethics violations in the federal courts. But the more recent Wall Street Journal investigation found that the software isn’t foolproof, requiring more awareness from judges. “Judges are expected to know themselves, and not to rely on some kind of mechanism or computer system” to catch these conflicts, Davis says. “And they’re supposed to be aware of what their own assets are.” The Journal reports that some of the judges who hadn’t recused themselves in the cases… Read More
