How Central Is Catholic Church in New Orleans? Many Federal Judges Recuse Themselves from Abuse Cases

By Ramon Antonio Vargas
NOLA.com
May 14, 2020

https://www.nola.com/news/courts/article_3ec30804-955c-11ea-a075-8345401da914.html

One served as the Archdiocese of New Orleans’ in-house attorney. Another was on the board of the archdiocese’s seminary and earned an award for organizing monthly Masses for special-needs parishioners. A third is married to an attorney who is representing the archdiocese as it seeks bankruptcy protection. Yet another serves on an archdiocesan charity's board.

Respectively, U.S. District Judges Wendy Vitter, Jay Zainey, Sarah Vance and Ivan Lemelle are four members of the federal bench in New Orleans who have recused themselves from clergy abuse lawsuits that were transferred to their courthouse after the church filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy on May 1.

The recusals involve nearly a third of the 14 federal district judges in New Orleans. It's a stark illustration of how deeply the church is woven into the fabric of the metropolitan area, which counts a half-million Catholics among its roughly 1.3 million residents.

The life experience of one judge who’s now presiding over four of the transferred cases further underscores this reality. U.S. District Judge Martin Feldman has written about how he converted from Judaism to Catholicism in 2009 after studying for two years with then-Archbishop Alfred Hughes.

Loyola Law School ethics professor Dane Ciolino on Wednesday said the recusals so far are understandable, and show that judges tend to take seriously their duty to avoid “even an appearance” of impropriety or potential bias.

“It’s … a fairly indeterminate standard, but an important one, because of the need to have judges not only be — but also appear to be — impartial,” Ciolino said. “Some people don’t like that standard, … but it’s been around for a long time for those reasons.”

After the archdiocese filed for bankruptcy, citing the financial fallout of the abuse cases and the coronavirus pandemic, the church moved more than two dozen molestation lawsuits from Orleans Parish Civil District Court to the federal courthouse on Poydras Street.

The city’s legal community watched the cases’ random allotment process with keen interest, given the ties some of the judges in the Eastern District of Louisiana had with parties to the church bankruptcy proceedings.

Ultimately, records show, Vitter received at least three cases from which she recused herself. She spent six years as the archdiocese’s general counsel before her 2019 appointment to the bench. Her duties with the archdiocese included mediating settlements with people claiming to have been molested by clergymen.

For her part, Vance recused herself from at least two cases because her husband — R. Patrick Vance, a partner at Jones Walker — is among the attorneys representing the archdiocese in bankruptcy. Federal law makes clear that, without exception, judges must disqualify themselves from cases in which their spouses are involved.

In Ciolino’s view, Zainey’s recusal from one of two cases allotted to him exemplifies how judges adhere to a rule calling for them to disqualify themselves simply if there’s a chance their “impartiality might reasonably be questioned.”

Besides serving on Notre Dame Seminary’s board and being honored for his volunteer work with special-needs parishioners, the deeply pious Zainey has written articles for the archdiocese’s newspaper and has spoken openly about his friendship with Archbishop Gregory Aymond.

Zainey earlier this year also said he gave Aymond the idea of bringing in the New Orleans Saints’ top public relations executive to advise the archdiocese as it prepared to publish a list of allegedly abusive clergymen, a roster whose completeness and accuracy has been challenged by plaintiffs’ attorneys since its November 2018 release.