SAIPAN — A former CNMI Public Defender who went on to serve with the United Nations has submitted a letter to the Senate EAGI Committee urging confirmation of Associate Judge Joseph N. Camacho as Presiding Judge of the CNMI Superior Court, calling the Attorney General’s opposition letter a “hypocritical hatchet job” driven by overzealous prosecutors in his office.
Masood Karimipour, who served as CNMI Public Defender from 1999 to 2005 before leading the U.S. State Department’s justice program in Afghanistan and later serving as chief of the Terrorism Prevention Branch in the UN Office on Drugs and Crime, submitted the letter March 28 to all nine members of the 24th CNMI Senate.
Karimipour said he was compelled to write after reading, with what he described as great disappointment, how the Office of the Attorney General was unfairly maligning Judge Camacho. He emphasized that he writes as a private citizen with no interest in any CNMI case and does not speak for the Public Defender’s Office.
“Judge Camacho possesses exceptional legal intellect, integrity, judicial temperament and unimpeachable moral character,” Karimipour wrote. “He is well qualified to serve as Presiding Judge.”
Karimipour said he knew Camacho during his time as Public Defender, when Camacho was in private practice and married to a then-assistant public defender in his office. He described Camacho as deeply committed to the welfare of the CNMI community, highly knowledgeable about CNMI cultural and legal principles, and passionate about equal justice under law.
On the attorney general’s opposition, Karimipour argued it was unfair to cherry-pick a handful of cases from among thousands handled by a long-serving judge. He said judges are not evaluated like baseball players by batting average but are more like umpires making close calls that will inevitably be disputed.
“Selectively picking five or so cases out of hundreds of rulings and characterizing it as a pattern of errors, while ignoring hundreds of rulings that even the AGO deemed either favorable or fair, only points out the bias and weakness inherent in the AGO criticism,” he wrote.
Karimipour also pushed back on the use of appellate reversals as a measure of judicial quality, noting that every trial judge who issues hundreds of rulings is likely to have some reversed on appeal. He noted that Attorney General Edward Manibusan himself was once a trial judge whose rulings were reversed by the Supreme Court.
On sentencing, Karimipour said he had heard from litigants that Judge Camacho’s sentences in serious criminal cases were at times harsher than those imposed by other judges, sometimes exceeding even the prosecution’s recommendations. He said the same AGO that now criticizes Camacho for being too lenient previously saw him as too tough on defendants.
“If you are making both sides mad, you must be doing something right,” Karimipour wrote.
He urged the Senate to reject what he called the AGO’s biased and logically indefensible attack and confirm Camacho on the merits of his professional record and character. The letter was copied to Governor David M. Apatang and Chief Justice Alexandro C. Castro of the CNMI Supreme Court.
The letter is the third support submission received by the EAGI Committee in recent days, following letters from attorney Robert T. Torres on March 25 and the law firm Torres Brothers LLC on the same date.
