April 30 - Judicial Administration Petitions

Midas took care of my tire the first thing Monday morning and I got to Tampa only an hour later than usual. Pulling my travel case and wearing my red jacket, having gone through my entry routine, I headed for the plenary floor. One of the delegates from the Judicial Administration Legislative Committee came over to the edge of the bar of the conference and beckoned to me.

“Our committee dropped the Committee on Investigation for clergy but replaced it with one of your main concerns, verification of accusations,” she told me.

“CoIs never really did investigations,” I responded.

“Right,” she said. “Now conference chancellors who have at least beginning legal knowledge about the nature of evidence and validating complaints will be part of the initial response so that before there is any formal legal action against a pastor in the church, reasonably competent help will be given to be sure the complaint has merit.”

“And that means the chancellor can be called as a witness by the defense and cross-examined and probably can’t be assistant church counsel?” I asked. That had been a particular bone of contention in a recent trial I worked on.

“That’s what I understand,” she said. “When you see the legislation, some of your other ideas were included even though your specific petitions will appear in the DCA under non-concurrence.”

She said that conference chancellors meet every year for training and that working on evidence would be a topic of review as part of those meetings. “I think there will be better verification of accusations in the future. We kept the Committee on Investigation for bishops, deacons, and laity because those categories rarely are ever exercised. I thought you would want to know about all this,” she concluded

I thanked her sincerely. I wish all my petitions had been integrated into the new legislation that, she told me, would be on the consent calendar and probably pass before the end of the day. But I’ll take any victory I can get.

While I have seen a reconstruction of the work of the committee and was unable to find anything else I may have influenced, I await the final publication into the Discipline. None of it goes into effect until January 1, 2013.