Note to federal judges: Don’t save those bawdy, possibly obscene and most likely sexist e-mail attachments e-mailed to you by your college roommate, second cousin George or anyone else.
And, if you doubt this advice, consider the case of Chief Judge Alex Kozinski of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.
Kozinski was admonished last week for causing embarrassment to the judiciary by unintentionally providing public access to material on his computer, some of which was sexually explicit.
Alex Kozinski
The judge had cooperated with the panel’s investigation – indeed, he asked for an investigation - he had quickly apologized for the problems he caused.
Admonished, Kozinski, 58, can remain on the court, and the panel has concluded its investigation.
The episode stands as an exception to a brilliant legal career.
A graduate of UCLA Law School, Kozinski clerked first for now Supreme Court Justice Anthony M. Kennedy when Kennedy was on a lower court. He then clerked for Chief Justice Warren Burger of the Supreme Court.
President Ronald Reagan appointed Kozinski to the Ninth Circuit appeals court in 1985, making him the youngest federal appellate judge in the nation. Kozinski has served on the court, becoming chief justice in November 2007.
Not long after that, on June 11, 2008, the Los Angeles Times published a story on its website reporting that Kozinski had “posted sexually explicit matter on his website.”
The material included a photo of naked women painted to look like cows. There was also a staged photo of a man dressed in clerical garb in a sexual situation.
The timing of the revelation was especially awkward, as Kozinski was presiding over a criminal obscenity trial.
When the Times story appearred, Kozinski suspended the trial. A few days later he declared a mistrial and recused himself from the case. He also called for an ethics panel to review his conduct.
Anthony J. Scirica, chief judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, headed the five-judge panel.
Its admonishment of Kozinski is included in its memorandum of finding filed on June 5. The memorandum traces the complicated chain of circumstances that led to the revelation of the website and the pictures.
Essentially, Kozinski had stored a wide variety of material — most of it not sexually explicit — in a directory on his home computer labeled “stuff.”
In 2002, his son, Yale Kozinski, helped him set up a website that would allow family members, friends and colleagues to share material.
The website wasn’t meant to be public, but Kozinski unintentionally made public viewing possible by linking to it in his light-hearted e-mail posted on the blog Underneath Their Robes in 2004.
Anyone digging around on Kozinski’s website could have come upon the photos with sexual content, as did the Kozinski critic who tipped off the Times in December 2007.
The site has now been taken down.
“Had I known how easily the files could be accessed by strangers, or that the files on my server had been indexed by Yahoo! and perhaps other search engines, I would have been much more diligent,” Kozinski told the panel in apologizing.
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