Audio By Carbonatix
It’s a battle between good and evil.
At least that’s the way former Phoenix justice of the peace Roger Rudman describes the duel for the JP slot in the East Phoenix No. 1 District, where candidates are battling for a little-known judgeship with the fervor and vitriol usually reserved for far more visible and powerful posts.
The race between the three candidates–Democrats Randy Mackey, Rebecca Macbeth and incumbent Judge Dave Braun–has centered around a bitter feud between Braun and Macbeth. They’ve spent the summer hurling insults and charges of moral turpitude at each other with reckless abandon. Rudman, who resigned his position on the bench in 1986 while reportedly under investigation for misconduct by the state, is a campaign adviser to his erstwhile girlfriend, Macbeth, who he says represents the angelic half of this minibattle between the forces of light and darkness.
For his part, Braun thinks Rudman and Macbeth are the devil and his lady, bent on corrupting the sanctity of the judiciary.
Although most citizens would be hard-pressed to name the JP in their district, the justices direct a substantial amount of the county’s legal traffic. JPs possess jurisdiction over preliminary hearings for many felonies, DUI jury trials, landlord-tenant complaints, civil suits involving amounts up to $2,500 and a smorgasbord of misdemeanor offenses. For many people, a JP court appearance is their only encounter with the judicial system, and, oftentimes, their only recourse to settle disputes. The virtually unregulated power and authority held by a JP–as well as the $56,000 annual salary–is an appealing target for aspiring jurists. No legal experience is required.
This year the race for East No. 1 JP is a higher stakes contest than usual, because whoever wins the JP seat in the September 11 primary (there are no Republicans running in East No. 1) could be looking at a lucrative permanent career, rather than just a four-year term. The Arizona Commission on the Courts, a body sponsored by the state Supreme Court, will make recommendations later this year on proposals to reform the state’s court system. One of the proposals would create a unified Maricopa County district trial court, incorporating current JPs as judges. These judges would, in effect, receive lifetime appointments.
“Look,” Rudman says, “this is an important job, and the fact is that there is a good guy and a very, very bad guy in the campaign. It’s easy to see.”
But in a race that has featured charges of carpetbagging, district gerrymandering, fraud, sexual misconduct and “judicial abuse” of battered women, as well as a vicious barrage of insults–ranging from “queer” to “slut”–passing between the two main candidates and Rudman, voters might find it hard to detect the difference.
FOR THOSE WHO LIVE or work in east-central Phoenix, the campaign-sign warfare between Macbeth and Braun has become a fixture of daily life–and a prominent part of the city landscape.
In a low-interest race where name recognition is a vital factor, Macbeth’s strategy has been to inundate neighborhoods with campaign signs. But a few weeks ago, she says she noticed that a large number of the ubiquitous signs had been knocked down, many with holes punched through her picture. She accused Braun of the destruction by adopting his campaign slogan, “You be the judge!” on a new batch of signs reading, “Who’s bashing Rebecca’s signs? YOU be the judge.”
Braun hotly denies the charge. “Neither myself nor my campaign workers are knocking down her little signs. Take a look at them. They’re made of thin, cheap material and they fall down easily during the monsoons we’ve been having.
“Plus, everybody knows putting your face on a sign makes it a target.”
Braun suggests that kids may be damaging Macbeth’s signs, and says he, too, has suffered the loss of campaign materials. “My signs, like all candidates, have fallen. I’ve just replaced mine, while she hasn’t.”
“Look, I’ve got eight years on the bench as a JP and I’m not going to risk my reputation tearing up signs like a juvenile delinquent.”
While the campaign-sign controversy has been the most visible of their disagreements, the conflict between Braun and Macbeth runs much deeper than a few torn pieces of poster board. Both admit to harboring long-standing ill will toward the other, and the roots of their apparent mutual distaste seem to lie in their connection with Rudman, who Braun served with on the bench and once banned from his courtroom after accusing the then-JP of threatening court staff members.
A member of the JP staff in East Phoenix says there has been bad blood between Rudman and Braun for years. “They have never gotten along,” the staffer says. “With those two guys, being petty to each other is a way of life.”
Rudman has been a controversial figure in Phoenix since 1982, when he helped his then-wife Carol fight her ex-husband in a highly publicized child-custody case. Elected in 1984 to the JP spot in East Phoenix No. 2 District, Rudman was under fire from practically his first day on the bench, defending himself against charges that he and Macbeth, who was elected as his constable, had made up endorsements from local members of the legal community to print on campaign literature.
In 1985, Rudman and Braun were both ordered to stop issuing marriage licenses after it was revealed that they were not authorized to do so. Rudman had run advertisements in the Arizona Republic urging people to visit him for a license. Recently, Rudman, who owns AAA Instant Bail Bonds, became involved in another debate when he accused fellow bondsman Robert “Bobby” Buckner of accepting sexual favors in return for posting a bond. The complaint is pending with the state Department of Insurance.
Rudman resigned his JP post in 1986 after a state judicial commission reportedly launched an investigation into his business dealings with a company called AAA Legal Processing Services, which did extensive work for Rudman and Macbeth, and an incident where he allegedly berated an attorney from the bench, saying that “attorneys will charge you money while sitting in the rest room thinking about your case.”
Rudman refuses to comment on his resignation, or the charge that he quit in exchange for a promise by the commission not to make public the findings of its probe. But Braun says that because Rudman was forced to give up his judgeship, he wants to win it back by helping to elect a surrogate–Macbeth. “It’s obvious that he’s frustrated with having to leave the bench,” Braun says, “and if he can’t be a judge, he wants to own one.”
Rudman portrays the East No. 1 District, which is bounded by Buckeye and Thomas Roads and stretches from Central Avenue to 56th Street, as a “desperate area in need of a JP who can make a difference.
“This is a community area of the poor, who need help with unscrupulous landlords and car dealers. They need someone who won’t bludgeon them with the law, but will help the little guy. Rebecca is the little guy. She’s a sensitive, sweet person who will help. But Braun is just a lazy hack.”
THE STAGE WAS SET for conflict between Braun and Macbeth early this year when Maricopa County was ordered to change its voting precincts to conform to mandated federal guidelines. As part of the restructuring, completed in March, a precinct in East No. 1 was moved into East No. 2 by the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors at the urging of Braun, who says the switch “made good sense” in terms of distributing population and caseloads between the two districts.
Macbeth, who was living in the relocated precinct with the intention of running for JP, agrees that the move was logical for Braun, but for different reasons.
“Quite simply, he wanted the precinct moved out of East No. 1 so I wouldn’t be able to run against him,” she says. “I just find it strange that the only precinct moved was the one I was living in. Braun was scared of me.”
Even though the board of supervisors eventually decided to postpone the restructuring plans because there wasn’t enough time to educate voters on the boundaries of their new precincts before the September 11 primary, the board voted to switch the East Phoenix No. 1 District immediately. Macbeth sued the board in Superior Court claiming the move was calculated to gerrymander the district to exclude her from the ballot. But the court, and later the Supreme Court, upheld the board’s decision. Frustrated by her defeat but determined to run for JP, Macbeth moved into another precinct in East No. 1 only three days before the June 25 candidate filing date and announced plans to challenge Braun.
Braun says the decision to move the precinct had been planned for months and points out that the final decision was made not by him but by the county supervisors. “If she wants to point the finger for gerrymandering, she should point at the supervisors, not me,” he says.
Braun had his day in court, too, trying to get Macbeth knocked off the ballot by filing suit against her for allegedly committing fraud when she listed a post office box in East No. 1 as her home address on a voter registration form. Macbeth, who claimed the post office box was merely the address of her campaign committee and was accidentally listed under home address by a deputy registrar, convinced Superior Court Judge Stanley Goodfarb to dismiss the suit. Braun, however, remains convinced Macbeth falsified the form.
“You know, just because we weren’t able to convince the judge of something doesn’t necessarily make it untrue,” he says. “Macbeth’s candidacy has been a fraud from the get-go, and this was just another example of her walking that fine line between truth and outright dishonesty. She only moved into this district because she wants the job; she doesn’t have ties to the community or care about it.”
Macbeth has been accused of carpetbagging before, most notably during her race for constable in 1984, when opponent Barney Blaine accused her of moving into the district from her posh home at the Arizona Biltmore only days before the filing deadline. This year, she transferred ownership of her Biltmore home to Rudman before moving into an East Phoenix apartment.
More troubling than Macbeth’s frequent address changes, Braun says, is her record as constable.
The position of constable might sound like an antiquated job out of the Old West, when the law wore a tin star, packed six-shooters and sat tall in the saddle. Nowadays, constables are more likely to wear skirts, carry eviction papers and drive Hondas. But they still possess law enforcement powers, which mean they can arrest lawbreakers and hold a great deal of power and influence in the day-to-day conduct of the law in a community. Braun charges that Macbeth neglected these responsibilities.
A constable executes the decisions of the JP and one of the primary duties of the constabulary is to act as process servers. Yet while serving as a constable from 1984-88, Macbeth was enrolled as a full-time student at Arizona State University, spending up to six hours a day on campus and pursuing several majors while drawing a $31,000 constable salary.
A study issued in 1986 shows that Macbeth served the fewest papers of any constable in Maricopa County. Most of the work was done by process servers hired by the county from AAA Legal Processing Services–the firm linked to Roger Rudman.
Although the study points out that constables have different individual styles in managing their workload, Braun says Macbeth was able to dodge her duties because she was romantically involved with Rudman.
“She didn’t do a damn thing as constable,” he says. “She and Rudman were two operators; two peas in a pod . . . and as a result, her job consisted more of being somewhat of a slut or a girlfriend to the judge rather than a constable.”
In reference to her relationship with Rudman, Macbeth will say only that she is “proud to be his friend.” But she angrily denies that she neglected her work, saying she worked long hours helping those who had been evicted from their homes “before it was fashionable to do so,” working with elderly crime victims and helping to establish night court proceedings. “It is ridiculous for a man of Braun’s reputation to attack my record,” she says.
Macbeth and Rudman don’t hesitate to assault that reputation at any opportunity. They charge Braun, who they say is homosexual, with gross negligence in handling cases involving battered women. “Women literally come in bleeding and battered to Braun’s courtroom seeking orders of protection from their husbands,” Rudman says, “and that arrogant bastard tells them to come back next week if they are still being beaten.
“He’s got a reputation as a queer male and a woman-hater.”
Macbeth points to statistics showing that Braun issues the fewest number of orders of protection (which prohibit contact between two people) among all county JPs, and touts the story of Susan Lincks, a Phoenix woman who approached Braun for protection in 1985, as proof of her claim.
Lincks says she received a three-month order of protection against her husband, who had allegedly beaten and bruised her several times. But when she asked Braun to renew the order for another three months, he refused. “He told me that if I didn’t want to get beaten up I should just divorce my husband,” Lincks says. “He told me I didn’t need another order.”
Braun, who insists his sexual preference, whatever it is, should “not be part of the political dialogue,” says he issues few protection orders because he doesn’t have the time.
“An order of protection is a very serious thing, and it can often be used later in child-custody battles,” he says. “I like to consider such things very carefully, and don’t always have the long hours necessary to talk to the victim and figure out what’s going on. So I send a lot of them down to city court to get one.”
Between slinging jabs at each other, both candidates say they wonder how the campaign got so heated. “This old saw about how good people not wanting to run for office because they don’t want to get beat up . . . I used to think that was hyperbole,” Braun says. “But no more. I’m just frustrated.”
He’s not the only one. Randy Mackey, the “other” JP candidate, a Valley air conditioning installer whose voice has been largely drowned out by the clamor between his two opponents, has his own doubts about the electoral process.
“It’s just not right,” he says. “I’m just a guy running for justice of the peace, walking the district, meeting people and doing the best I can because I think I can be a good judge.
“And (Macbeth and Braun), who just spend their time slamming each other, are getting all the publicity. Do you have to be a jerk in this town to get noticed?”
note to production cj: first two pullquotes must BOTH be used or don’t use either. I’d like all four pullquotes if possible. jana
Thanks, cj
August 10
noon
“Her job consisted more of being somewhat of a slut or a girlfriend to the judge rather than a constable.”
“He’s got a reputation
as a queer male and a woman-hater.”
“Rebecca is a sensitive, sweet person who will help. But Braun is just a lazy hack.”
“Macbeth’s candidacy has been a fraud from the get-go.
