Yes is was a bad judge.
You want to talk about the dangers that exist even with a law as clearly written as the 1949 PA Code 14 Section 318 is written?
This is the case to start with.
This code is clear about the process.
Petition is submitted for removal.
Judge will make a ruling as to whether the respondents are required to respond to the petition. He is to give the respondents five days’ notice a ruling is coming.
Judge makes the ruling and THEN the “no less than 10 days, no more than 20 days” clock on the response being due begins.
The petition was filed and delivered to the school board Feb 22. Judge Mahon did not issue his ruling until March 15…but then tried to claim the 20 days started from Feb 22.
There is no “plain text reading” of the law that would support Judge Mahon’s position.
To be fair, he walked his initial ruling back, but not before he chastised the school board’s lawyers for getting it wrong (even though they hadn’t).
NOW…let’s talk about the plainly spelled out criteria for such a petition to succeed. The law clearly states that the petition is ONLY valid for the following:
- At least ten taxpaying residents sign it
- The reasons for removal are ONLY for the following: a) failure to organize/reorganize the board at the beginning of a board year b) failure to fulfill the duties of a school board member that are spelled out in other sections of Code 14…failure to fulfill ONLY those spelled out duties and/or c) conspiracy amongst several board members to fail to organize or fail to carry out those spelled out duties.
In other words, you just can’t throw together ten taxpayers who don’t like what the school board members are doing and have a petition granted for just those reasons…which is what Ms. Rosica (who is well-funded by dark money from h right wing, BTW, and her group has done the exact same thing in at least three other districts in Chester County) did. NONE of the reasons on the petition for removal correspond to the duties spelled out in the law.
So…even WITH a clearly spelled out law, well-organized groups on the right are costing school districts time and money, and rapidly starting us down the path towards making schools ungovernable (which is likely part of the whole plan all along).
PS Judge Mahon is a judge who had an 88-year old woman named in a civil suit arrested for failing to appear in his courtroom on the scheduled hearing date…even though her lawyer submitted a request for excused absence because…wait for it…she was suffering from COVID at the time.
Speaking of “activist judges”…
