An Alabama newspaper exposed a scandal May 16 that deserves national prominence. The headline was “Federal judge’s lengthy affair with court worker is exposed.”
This is a scandal not simply for the judge, Mark Everett Fuller, shown at right in a photo by my research colleague Phil Fleming. It is a lifetime shame for those in the Justice Department, federal court system and the United States Senate who have coddled and protected him for an entire decade during his obvious previous disgraces.
It was fully a decade ago that Fuller was first accused by Alabama’s pension officials at their highest level of trying to bilk the system out of $330,000. Yet Alabama’s two senators pushed Fuller forward for a lifetime appointment, which Fuller received from voice vote by the United States Senate with no serious discussion of his past. Fuller and his court staff were even able to hide from public view a 180-page impeachment filing against him in 2003 with no apparent attempt at investigation.
A corrupt federal judge is in position to create vast harm in both civil and criminal cases, especially when he controls the court administrative system, as Fuller did during a seven-year term from 2004 to 2011 as chief judge for Alabama’s most important federal district. This is the middle district surrounding the capital city of Montgomery.
Let’s start with today’s disclosures and then get to the implications. Montgomery Independent Publisher and Editor Bob Martin published a front-page news story quoting divorce papers filed April 10 by Lisa Boyd Fuller, the judge’s estranged wife of three decades. Her papers strongly suggested adultery. Interrogatories asked about drug use. Martin’s news story, distributed May 16 to a syndicate of 25 regional papers, reported:
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