That’s the question I kept asking myself as I watched former U.S. District Judge Sam Kent be sentenced to 33 months in federal prison yesterday (previous posts here).

I had an early-morning hearing in federal court yesterday and another one in the mid-afternoon. So, instead of returning to my office between hearings, I decided to attend the sentencing hearing for Judge Kent. It’s not every day that a federal judge is sentenced to prison.

The first hour or so of the hearing was stupefying as prosecutors and Kent defense attorney Dick DeGuerin argued over objections to the government’s pre-sentencing report. The main reason for the boredom was that, for the most part, no one except the lawyers in involved in the case and U.S. District Judge Roger Vinson knew what they were talking about. That vacuum of information was a direct result of Judge Vinson’s dubious decision to keep a substantial amount of the information about the charges against Kent under seal and away from public scrutiny.

Judge Vinson’s decision in that regard might have been somewhat defensible had the two victims of Kent’s sexual assaults requested secrecy to preserve what little privacy they could salvage from this ordeal. But neither of the victims requested such treatment, and my sense is that Kent didn’t want it, either.

So, Judge Vinson decided to conduct this case largely outside the public eye for his own reasons. In my 30 years of practicing law, I have never seen the volume of information in a case placed under seal as was done in this case.

In sentencing Kent, Judge Vinson claimed that he was upholding the justice system by showing that even a powerful judge is not above the law. Unfortunately, he undermined that same system by preventing the public from learning the details of the accusations against Kent and Kent’s responses to those allegations.

Although the first part of the hearing could have induced a snooze, the pace picked up dramatically when the two victims of Kent’s assaults made their way to the podium to make their victim statements to the court (one of the victim’s statements is here, courtesy of the Houston Chronicle). Both victims were extremely impressive in their presentations, describing the emotional and family carnage that Kent’s assaults and abuse of power caused. We also learned tidbits of information that likely would have been already been revealed had Judge Vinson not maintained such tight control over information:

The case manager reported Kent’s assaults to her supervisor, who did not take appropriate steps to report it to higher authorities out of fear for her job;

A "culture of fear" existed among employees at the Galveston federal courthouse as a result of Kent’s manipulative behavior and frequent drunkenness; and

Kent is estranged from much of his family.

There was a good bit of discussion from the victims and the lawyers regarding Kent’s alcoholism and his "serious" psychological issues, for which Judge Vinson ordered him to continue treatment. Also, Kent has been rendered virtually insolvent from his funding of the cost of defense of the case.

For his part, Kent did a good job in his statement to the court, apologizing to his accusers, his staff, his family, other judges and "the system." He promised Judge Vinson that he would continue to rehabilitate himself regardless of the sentence. My sense was that Kent was sincere.

I do not know Kent personally. I handled several hearings in his court over the years and never had a problem with him.

However, I know plenty of lawyers who found Kent insufferable and rude (see also here), and I heard the rumors about his alleged favoritism of certain Galveston lawyers, particularly in admiralty cases. In 2001, the Chief Judge of the Southern District of Texas took the unprecedented step of reassigning 85 cases away from Kent that were being handled by one of Kent’s best friends.

And now it appears that Kent was drinking heavily for much of the past decade and that he was frequently intoxicated while at the courthouse. You have to wonder whether concerns about Kent’s behavior impacted out-of-town parties’ decisions in cases such as this one?

So, I circle back to the question I asked at the beginning of this post — how did the judicial career of Sam Kent come to this sordid and sad ending?

Where were Kent’s "friends" who knew about his excessive drinking and other personal problems, and were in a position to intervene and help him before it was too late?

What are we to make of the federal government’s human resources apparatus that an entire federal courthouse could have been placed under a culture of fear by the abusive behavior of one man?

And doesn’t the Fifth Circuit Judicial Council have some explaining to do on why it issued its agreed order of public reprimand of Kent without interviewing either of the victims during the council’s investigation?

Finally what are we to conclude about our justice system that the Houston Chronicle — which, along with its coverage of Hurricane Ike, should have been won a Pulitzer Prize for its reporting on the Kent case — provides much more information to the public about the crimes of an abusive judge than the prosecution of that judge?