National Affairs: Norris Ousted

Jean Hortense Norris, New York city’s first woman magistrate, blanched, tried to rise, then sat stone still for 20 minutes last week when she heard five justices of the Appellate Division of the Supreme Court unanimously find her guilty of judicial malfeasance and order her re-moved from office (TIME, Feb. 23 et seq.). When she was able to get up, she left the courthouse amid boos and jeers, went to visit her good friends Major & Mrs. Lloyd

A. Kefauver at the Army barracks on Governors Island. Remarked Major Kefauver: “She’s the godmother of my children and everything a godmother ought to be.”

Mrs. Norris, long publicized as “woman’s judge of women,” was the first magistrate to be ousted as a result of Samuel Seabury’s investigation of Manhattan’s inferior courts.* She was convicted on five counts: 1) altering the stenographic record of a case appealed from her court; 2) jailing as a wayward minor on hearsay evidence a girl artist found living with a married man by a Methodist deaconess; 3) ordering special probation reports to support her convictions of prostitutes who had appealed; 4) buying stock in a bail bond concern that did business in her court; 5) exploiting her office for $1,000 from Fleischmann’s yeast. Though not corrupt she was found “judicially unfit” to occupy the bench on which she had so proudly sat for twelve happy years.

Within 48 hours there were six aspirants for the 54-year-old ousted jurist’s $12,000 job. They were a female assistant district attorney who gets $7,500; two female deputy assistants who get $4,000 and $3,240; the sister of a male magistrate; a female attorney; a female member of the State insurance department. Tammany indicated that it would appoint a female to “vindicate” the city’s women.

As soon as the court had passed on Mrs. Norris’s case it went out to lunch. When it came back from lunch it began to hear the case against Magistrate Jesse Silbermann, also impugned by the Seabury in-vestigation, also on the Women’s Court bench. Mr. Seabury contended that Magistrate Silbermann was in cahoots with shysters, had been guilty of “bias, prejudice and conspiracy to defeat justice.”

* Magistrate Albert H. Vitale before the Seabury inquiry began was removed by the Supreme Court because of financial dealings with an underworldling. Three other magistrates have resigned under Seabury fire.