RALEIGH – Wake County Superior Court Judge Donald Stephens lost his cool last week. It remains to be seen what else has been lost in this latest sorry episode of the Jim Black saga.

The occasion of Judge Stephens’ tantrum was the final sentencing of the former speaker of the NC House, whose corrupt tenure in office eventually led to his felony conviction on federal and state charges. Having jurisdiction over the state case because the capital is in Wake County, Stephens had delayed sentencing on a bribery charge until Black paid a $1 million fine the judge had previously ordered.

While serving time in federal prison, Black sought repeated extensions of the deadline to pay his state fine. He finally paid half the fine last summer in cash. Then, still claiming financial difficulties, Black offered to transfer ownership of some Mecklenburg County land to the Wake County school system, the legally required recipient of the fine.

As Carolina Journal’s David Bass and Jeff Taylor have reported, the Wake school system and the prosecutor in question, Wake County District Attorney Colon Willoughby, decided to accept the land transfer as satisfying the other half of Black’s $1 million fine. They did so on the basis of an appraisal commissioned by Black that the land was worth $613,000 – even though they never saw the full appraisal and the 2003 tax value of the undeveloped 9.5 acres was only $149,000.

The Raleigh News & Observer referenced the Carolina Journal findings in a Wednesday article that also quoted one of Wake County’s school board members, Ron Margiotta, who complained that the board had not been consulted about the deal. “We’ve got an appraisal done for a criminal,” Margiotta said. “Give me a break.”

In court Thursday to announce his final sentencing decision – to give Black the minimum sentence, served concurrently with his federal time – Stephens reacted angrily to the criticism of the Black land deal. He called Margiotta’s comments “idiotic.” And Stephens summoned the Wake school system’s attorney before him for a tongue-lashing.

“Criticism from those receiving the gift really kind of puts a chilling effect on judges and the courts system that are working really hard for their benefit,” Stephens also said. “It is not appreciated. I don’t even understand it, quite frankly. In my 25 years on the bench, I have never seen anything quite like that.”

Well, the judge has a few years on me, but in my 20 years writing about the intersection of North Carolina politics and the judiciary, I have never seen anything quite like Stephens’ intemperate rant. Among other things, the performance has now made the conduct of Stephens himself part of the story in a way that it previously was not, and provides skeptics even more reason to suspect how Black’s state fine has been handled.

As Stephens rightly pointed out, he was under no obligation to order Black to pay the $1 million fine in the first place. (At the time, however, the judge certainly seemed to think it was warranted.) Furthermore, I suppose that it was always Stephens’ prerogative to change his mind and show Black greater leniency now, if for some reason he was so persuaded.

But if a felon is ordered to pay a fine and then does not pay it, no amount of overheated rhetoric from the bench can change the facts. Either Black has paid a $1 million fine or he hasn’t. Clearly, he hasn’t.

Because neither Black’s attorney nor the state has seen fit to release the $617,000 appraisal, it’s impossible to know exactly how two undeveloped tracts of land could be said to have posted a 314 percent increase in value in just five years, a time period concluding with one of the worst crashes in the history of the Charlotte-area real-estate market. But set the appraisal aside for the moment.

If someone was willing to pay at least $500,000 for the land right now, Black could have sold it and paid his fine. If no one was willing to pay that amount, which seems evident, then it’s not worth at least $500,000 to the Wake school system right now – so the fine has not been paid. Why should a faraway school system have to go the expense of marketing the property, hoping that at some point months or years in the future it will finally receive the funds legally due it?

Margiotta was right to ask tough questions, as were my CJ reporters. I think Stephens knows how bad this looks and reacted emotionally. He seems not to have considered the fact, which would surely have been obvious to him during a moment of calm reflection, that his unseemly behavior would invite more rather than less scrutiny. It took years of crooked dealings for Black to earn the deep public skepticism now surrounding his every financial move. It only took a few minutes for Stephens to embarrass himself.

What’s worse, Stephens went on to intimate that he might think twice in the future about ordering a criminal defendant to pay a fine to the Wake schools. Really? I wonder what the voters of Wake County will think about that statement.

Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation