California Superior Court Judge James Rogan will be on campus in the fall to teach “The Criminal Justice System.” In the one-credit course, offered by the politics department, Rogan will teach students about the period between arrest and sentencing to give them a better understanding of how the U.S. justice system works.
“I am hopeful that by the end, they will have a more truthful understanding of the criminal justice system,” Rogan said. “I want to share my enthusiasm for this profoundly constitutional process.”
Rogan has been a long-time friend of the college, having visited most recently in February to give a speech.
“He is a very interesting man and really experienced in this area,” Assistant to the President Kyle Murnen said. “He has a relationship with Dr. Arnn and the college, and when the opportunity to bring him back to teach a one-credit class in the fall was presented, he said he was willing to do it.”
Born in San Francisco, Rogan attended University of California, Los Angeles law school and served as the Los Angeles deputy district attorney before moving into politics. In 1996, California voters elected him to his first of two terms in the House of Representatives. While serving on the House Judiciary Committee in 2000, he was one of the 13 congressmen to manage President Bill Clinton’s impeachment trial.
“It was an absolutely fascinating process to go through. It was a trial that nobody on the face of the planet had lived to see before,” Rogan said. “It taught me that the Constitution worked.”
Rogan said the Constitution worked because each house did the job it was supposed to do. The House can consider impeachment, and the Senate’s job is to determine whether the president committed a high crime and, if so, whether it merits his removal from office.
Rogan said it was not the Senate’s verdict that disappointed him about the trial, rather the procedures by which they proceeded through the trial.
“I said the trial was a sham then, and I’ll say it again now,” Rogan said. “The senators passed rules that changed and modified their rules of impeachment, which prevented us from being able to call any of our witnesses in that whole trial. In that sense, the Senate created rules that turned the procedure into a sham.”
“This is a black eye on the Senate, and nobody knows about all this but me and the other people behind the scenes,” Rogan said. “The Senate doesn’t view it as a black eye because it is not observable, but it is there.”
Rogan said his experience in Congress has not changed his opinion or made him more skeptical of the U.S. political system. He said he believes Congress gives congressmen an opportunity to become statesmen but that some people did not “rise to the challenge.”
“The most important thing for me when I left Washington, D.C., was that I remain true to the oath I took to protect the Constitution in the way it was intended to be preserved,” Rogan said. “I still try to remain true to this oath today.”
