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Pedro Segarra has his eye on a new job: Superior Court judge.
Segarra, 57, a lawyer, has been quietly pursuing a judicial nomination by the governor since early this year — under a secret process that already has included a closed-door vote in his favor by the state Judicial Selection Commission in February.
That key screening commission determined he’s suitable for a judgeship, despite a disciplinary panel’s 2012 order that he take an ethics class because of a mistake he made representing a Hartford woman in a 2007 slip-and-fall lawsuit.
Normally, a lawyer’s efforts to become a judge are kept secret (and, in fact, the law says that the Judicial Selection Commission’s “deliberations, files and records … shall be confidential and not open to the public or subject to disclosure”) until the governor nominates him for approval by the General Assembly, but that has not happened here.
Segarra hadn’t been willing to discuss his judicial ambitions when The Courant unsuccessfully tried to reach him concerning sources’ reports of his efforts in the past few months to wear judge’s robes and to collect a salary of $167,634.
But he opened the window on the process by his decision in early March to seek the political support of the state’s Latino and Puerto Rican Affairs Commission. When that panel wrote him an endorsement letter on March 17 and sent a copy to the office of Gov. Dannel P. Malloy, his fellow Democrat, it created a paper trail.
That trail of documents was obtained by Government Watch this past week. It provides an unusual glimpse into a generally private, nervous time of phone calls and quiet conversations with professional colleagues or political godfathers who can help….
To read full article: http://www.courant.com/politics/hc-lender-segarra-seeks-judgeship-0501-20160430-column.html
