BURKE

PROVIDENCE — Without any official notice, the Senate yesterday voted unanimously to confirm House Speaker William J. Murphy’s deputy assistant, Patrick T. Burke, as a special magistrate in the Superior Court.

Burke, 45, will be moving into an opening created by Joseph A. Keough’s retirement in December, though in actuality he will take over the position Magistrate and former Rep. William McAtee has held for more than 15 years, overseeing the pre-arraignment calendar, while McAtee steps into Keough’s position.

Unlike judges, magistrates are not vetted by the state’s Judicial Nominating Commission in an open and competitive arena. They are recommended by the top judges of each court, in this case Superior Court Presiding Justice Joseph F. Rodgers Jr., who urged speedy action on the Feb. 26 nomination.

In his nominating letter, Rodgers said illness and retirements have left his court “four judicial officers short.” But Senate President M. Teresa Paiva Weed said Rodgers’ letter was not the reason the Senate did not post notice of yesterday’s vote on its calendar, as it usually does two days in advance. She said the “desk was closed” when the Senate Judiciary Committee approved Burke’s nomination on Tuesday. She provided no further explanation for taking it up on “immediate consideration.”

Burke, a graduate of the Creighton University School of Law, is a former public defender and onetime director of administration for the Town of West Warwick.

He was at the center of a controversial court case that worked its way to the state Supreme Court in the 1990s that evolved from his arrest by the Warwick police in 1993 after they observed his car weaving on Route 2 around 2:30 a.m. The police charged him with refusing to submit to a portion of the breath test, and the traffic court suspended his license and scheduled a hearing that never took place after being continued seven times, the last time at the prosecutor’s request because she knew Burke through the courts and questioned whether she could be impartial.

Burke’s lawyer, then House Speaker John B. Harwood, in 1996 filed for dismissal, saying the state’s action deprived Burke of his right to a speedy trial. Judge John F. Lallo dismissed the charge, but fined Burke for a roadway violation. The attorney general’s office appealed to a three-judge traffic appeals court panel, which upheld the dismissal. The attorney general appealed to the state Supreme Court, which refused to hear the case.

In the moments before yesterday’s vote, Sen. Charles J. Levesque, D-Portsmouth, cited the ability “to recognize that there are bad people and you have to prosecute them for the good of all, but there are also very good people who have had bad days and you have to recognize the difference. Pat Burke is somebody who recognizes the difference. ”

kgregg@projo.com