Benched

Just seven months after John McClellan's Senate labor-management investigating committee tied him up with Teamster union racketeers (TIME, Dec. 30), Hamilton County Criminal Court Judge Raulston ("Turkey Neck") Schoolfield, 52, was kicked off his bench last week by the Tennessee senate acting as an impeachment court. The three-count conviction: 1) accepting a "gift" Pontiac from local racketeers, 2) using the bench for political purposes, 3) indulging in obscene language in court.

The 32 state senators failed to raise the two-thirds majority necessary to convict Schoolfield on 21 other charges, among them one for illegally protecting Teamster arsonists, set forth in the lower house's indictment. Nor could they muster the votes needed to bar him from ever again holding public office. But the voters of Hamilton County, in a primary held while the impeachment debate raged in Nashville, had rejected Schoolfield's bid for a new term, and after the impeachment verdict he announced voluntarily that he would never run again.

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