By DAVID IGNELL
My last column referenced two bills seeking to reform Alaska’s judiciary, currently pending in the Senate State Affairs and House Judiciary Committees.
In support of their bills, sponsors Sen. Mike Shower and Rep. George Rauscher invited testimony this past spring from former Lt. Governor Loren Leman.
Leman testified that back in the early 1990s a leader in the Alaska House boasted to him that the Democrat Party would always control the judiciary because of the way Alaska selects its judges.
Leman’s testimony should send chills through the spine of any Alaska lawyer or judge who cares about democracy. One of their preeminent organizations, the American College of Trial Lawyers, leaves no doubt that we must change this reality with the following statement:
“The concept of judicial independence — that judges should decide cases, faithful to the law, without ‘fear or favor’ and free from political or external pressures — remains one of the fundamental cornerstones of our political and legal systems, both federal and state.”
I quoted this statement in a November column, but it’s worth repeating. A few months later, Sens. Matt Claman and Bill Wielechowski, and Rep. Cliff Groh, sat in their committee seats and listened to Leman’s testimony. Each of these elected officials are members of the Democrat Party and the Alaska Bar Association.
None of them challenged Leman. They challenged other individuals testifying in support of the judicial reform bills, but not Leman. Perhaps these lawyers knew his testimony was unimpeachable, and they didn’t want to draw additional attention to it.
After all, Leman is a Republican and they’re Democrats. In the burgeoning field of partisanship politics, the truth is becoming increasingly ignored if it is spoken from across the aisle.
Claman, Wielechowski, and Groh can’t ignore Edgar Paul Boyko, however. He was one of them.
Boyko was a prominent leader in the Alaska Democrat Party when our Constitution was formed. He was a delegate to the territorial conventions of 1954 and 1956, and chairman of the platform committee in 1956.
Born in Austria, Boyko was educated at the universities of Vienna and St. Andrews and became a research chemist. He and his Jewish wife immigrated to America in 1940 to escape Nazism. They had $100 to their names. He then entered the legal profession, licensed to practice in Maryland, D.C., Alaska, and California. From 1967-1968 he served as the Attorney General in Alaska.
Towards the end of his career Boyko became a very outspoken critic of Alaska’s judicial system. In 1990 he took advantage of a rare, unbiased public platform to voice these concerns, a forum unfiltered by judges and what he termed our “establishment media.”
From August through November 1990, the Senate Family Law Task Force, chaired by Senator Jack Coghill, held six days of public testimony. More than 250 Alaskans testified about the nightmares harming their families caused by judicial decisions on divorce, child custody, child support, and foster care issues.
Boyko, a father of six children, testified twice and didn’t mince his words.
Boyko began by saying he had quit practicing family law about 10 years earlier because it was “too tough on my heart muscle. There is just too much misery and too much injustice and too much failure on the system day in and day out and I couldn’t handle it.” He later added that family law matters were just “the tip of the iceberg as far as our judicial system is concerned.”
Boyko was known as the “Snow Tiger.” Former Gov. Wally Hickel said, “You could never intimidate Ed.” If Alaska’s family law practice could frustrate such a legendary lawyer to quit, no wonder AK Mom’s family can’t obtain justice.
Boyko also heaped considerable criticism on the predecessor to the Office of Children Services, saying a lot of its functions should be taken away: “They are overloaded. They are basically unqualified. They tend to be dictatorial being … unaccountable appointed bureaucrats.”
Boyko cited Lord Acton’s axiom — that power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
He said, “We have given too much power to various functionaries of our government, particularly the judiciary, but also other parts of the government. We have given too much power to our government. We have given too much power to the judges. We have diluted accountability, by having only one statewide, two statewide officials elected and everyone else appointed.”
Boyko testified, “There’s a number of reforms that are crying out to be made in the judicial system in this state.” He said many constitutional delegates didn’t know much about running a state and we had “some ultra-liberals in there who had ideas that have now been disproven across the world … They created some really horrible things.”
The curriculum vitae Boyko submitted to the Senate Task Force concluded with his motto:
“To try to live each day in such a way that I may look myself in the eye in the mirror the next morning; without shame or embarrassment; to hold integrity above material gain; truthfulness and principle above popularity; to stand fast against oppression and injustice; to avoid confrontation – but never to run from it; to prefer love of God and man to religious self-righteousness; love of country to chauvinism or jingoism; to disdain, reject and fight against cruelty, hypocrisy, greed and bigotry, as the most despicable of human failings; to walk proudly among men and humbly before God and his universe.”
Bokyo suffered a series of strokes in 1998 and died Jan. 1, 2002. Well said and done, Snow Tiger. May you rest in peace.
Senators Claman, Wielechowski, and Representative Groh, do you look in the mirror every morning and ask yourselves if you’re following that same motto?
I imagine you’ve earned and continue to earn a very comfortable living appearing before this flawed judicial system, which Boyko said “works wonderful for the people on top.”
But the system you’re defending doesn’t work well for most Alaskans – people like AK Mom’s family, whose lives have been torn apart the past two years; people like Thomas Jack, Jr., who are denied by your judges a jury of their peers and a fair trial, families struggling financially who are denied their full Permanent Fund dividends, or Alaska Natives who fill our prisons at twice the rate they populate our state.
You ignored Loren Leman. Will you ignore Edgar Paul Boyko too?
David Ignell was born and raised in Juneau, where he currently resides. He holds a law degree from University of San Diego and formerly practiced as a licensed attorney in California. He has experience as a volunteer analyst for the California Innocence Project, and is currently a forensic journalist and author of a recent book on the Alaska Grand Jury.
