When Michael Jackson's wife wanted out of their marriage, the pop star hand-picked and paid the retired judge who signed off on a prearranged deal giving Jackson sole custody of their two children.
Jackson did not have to set foot inside a courthouse to finalize his 1999 divorce from Deborah Rowe, avoiding the kind of glaring public scrutiny he encountered last year when he was tried on and acquitted of child molestation charges.
Like Jackson, many of California's rich and famous are paying retired jurists up to $550 an hour to quietly end their marriages, divvy up their property and decide who will care for their children -- an arrangement that some critics fear is creating a separate and secret justice system for those who can afford it.
The decades-old debate over privately paid justice was reignited in recent months when the media was denied access to the Jackson case in addition to divorce files and proceedings involving billionaire supermarket magnate Ronald Burkle, who paid a retired judge $73,000 to preside over a 10-day trial.
In response, Los Angeles court officials are trying to create safeguards to prevent elite litigants from buying secrecy in public court proceedings.
Under California law, if both parties agree, a sitting judge officially transfers the case out of the courthouse. The parties may then hire a jurist to resolve their civil disputes, even though the cases technically remain in the public court system, governed by the same rules as other lawsuits. Retired judges set their own pay rates.
"It's relatively easy for a temporary judge to be lax at the behest of the parties," said Los Angeles County Superior Court Presiding Judge William A. MacLaughlin, who is overseeing the reform effort.
Attorney Susan E. Seager, who represents media outlets including The Times, said the lack of public access in these two cases "may be part of a larger trend toward secret divorce-court proceedings for celebrities and the wealthy," violating state court rules and the constitutional right of access to court records and proceedings. It is also unconstitutional for a sitting judge -- including, in Seager's opinion, one temporarily assigned to a case -- to be privately paid by the parties.
But retired Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge Stephen Lachs, who was paid to decide the Jackson and Burkle matters, defended the system, saying celebrities don't hire private judges "to hide things." Private judges are popular, he said, because they can devote more time to promptly resolving their cases.
