Are imaginary friends a prima facie disqualification for a judge?

Via Ed Cone I found one of those stories that makes me love the Wall Street Journal: "In the Philippines, Ex-Judge Consults Three Wee Friends":

As a trial-court judge, Florentino V. Floro Jr. acknowledged that he regularly sought the counsel of three elves only he could see. The Supreme Court deemed him unfit to serve and fired him last year. ...

Helping him, he says, are his three invisible companions. "Angel" is the neutral force, he says. "Armand" is a benign influence. "Luis," whom Mr. Floro describes as the "king of kings," is an avenger.

Oh my.

While it's not common in these parts for adults to claim that they're in regular contact with invisible elves, apparently, in the Philippines, an elf (or "duwende") is as plausible a critter as a vampire -- which is to say, lots of folks believe in them. Still, it would seem that it was an unusual enough thing for a trial-court judge to claim that it made judicial officials uncomfortable. That their medical clinic determined Mr. Floro suffers from psychosis can't have helped, either.

In 1999, Mr. Floro invited officials from the Supreme Court's administration unit to inspect his small courtroom. What they found unnerved them, and the Supreme Court convened a hearing to determine whether Mr. Floro should be removed from the bench.

According to Supreme Court papers, the court investigators presenting evidence at the hearing said they found Mr. Floro wearing blue robes instead of the normal black. Mr. Floro's own witnesses testified that he wore black on Fridays to "recharge his psychic powers."

The court investigators also reported that Mr. Floro began court proceedings with readings from the Book of Revelation and conducted hands-on psychic healing sessions for members of the public in his chambers during recesses. The investigators said Mr. Floro would sometimes enter a trance to write his rulings.

During the hearing, Mr. Floro revealed his contact with his elves.

As I read it, this seems to be saying that there were worries about Mr. Floro's performance prior to the revelation that Angel, Armand, and Luis were in the picture. (Who knew that blue robes would be an issue?) But it doesn't sound like this additional information about the elves counted as a positive for his competence on the bench.

Should they be counted against his competence? If Mr. Floro hadn't been performing psychic surgery on the job, reading from the Book of Revelations in the courtroom, and wearing those non-regulation blue judicial robes, would his belief in the elves be reason enough to remove him from the bench? Mr. Floro argues that it would not:

Mr. Floro says he never consulted the invisible elves over judicial decisions and the fact that he puts faith in them should make no difference to his career. "It shouldn't matter what I believe in, whether it's Jesus, Muhammad, or Luis, Armand and Angel," he says in an interview.

In other words, Mr. Floro is arguing that his faith in the elves is a personal matter, and something quite distinct from his job performance as a trial judge. In the case that he really was making his rulings on the basis of sound principles of jurisprudence, would it be possible to count his elfin inclinations as idiosyncratic but irrelevant?

Or is the belief in elves necessarily a sign of a state of mind incompatible with sound judicial reasoning in the real world we all share?*

In March 2006, after lengthy delays, the Supreme Court finally dismissed Mr. Floro from the court service, largely because of his belief in the supernatural. Even though Mr. Floro says the elves played no part in his judicial decisions, the Supreme Court justices said his broad faith in mysticism and supernatural phenomena had affected his work. "Lest we be misconstrued, we do not denigrate such a belief system," Associate Justice Minita Chico-Nazario wrote in the Supreme Court's verdict. "However, such beliefs, especially since Judge Floro acted on them, are at odds with the critical and impartial thinking required of a judge under our judicial system."

If I'm reading this right, the Supreme Court's verdict seems to indicate that Mr. Floro was acting on his belief in the three invisible elves in the course of his duties as a trial judge. Does this mean that they weren't influencing his rulings but, say, he acknowledged their presence in the courtroom? (I'm guessing that might wig out defendants.) Surely, there are more components of the job performance of a trial judge than the authorities he consults when writing his decisions.

But if Mr. Floro had better compartmentalized his work life and his personal life, would we (or the Supreme Court of the Philippines) be OK with his continued service as a trial judge?

It strikes me that there's a tension here not unlike that in the Marcus Ross case. On the one hand, our confidence in a particular methodology for decision making (whether scientific or judicial) makes us inclined to say that deploying that methodology will get us reasonably objective and impartial results that have relatively little to do with the details of which particular people are using that method. On the other hand, there are some beliefs that strike us as pretty likely to compromise objectivity and impartiality.

It would be nice to have some empirical data on how compatible elf-belief is with competent exercise of jurisprudence, or of the scientific method. As well, getting some independent confirmation of Mr. Floro's psychosis (to make sure there were other indicators besides elf-belief) would be useful. Otherwise, our inclination to take elf-belief as a disqualification from being a judge (or a scientist) looks like an attractive hypothesis without a whole lot of support.

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*I suspect some folks would want to make an appeal to community standards here (where Mr. Floro lives in a community in which his belief in the elves is not so outrageous), and others will respond that judges and others with significant authority in society must rise above community standards and try to latch onto something more truth-like. I see the intuitive appeal of each of these positions.