The move comes on the eve of a Supreme Court hearing on whether Traffic Tribunal Magistrate Aurendina "Dina" G. Veiga should lose her post and whether details regarding her history of writing bad checks should be released.

01:00 AM EDT on Wednesday, June 29, 2005

BY TRACY BRETON
Journal Staff Writer

PROVIDENCE -- Traffic Tribunal Magistrate Aurendina "Dina" G. Veiga has resigned from the bench, averting a private hearing that had been scheduled for this morning to show cause why she should not lose her $91,093-a-year job.

It is unclear exactly when Veiga made her decision not to fight a recommendation by the Commission on Judicial Tenure & Discipline that she be removed from the bench for ethics violations that span several years.

Her lawyer, J. Renn Olenn, in papers submitted to the state Supreme Court late yesterday, cited her resignation and the fact that Veiga "awaits the court's response to that submission." Olenn submitted the papers to the court in an effort to block the release of the names of parties Veiga has written bad checks to in recent years. He said he was doing so to protect Veiga from "identity or financial theft."

The Providence Journal has been trying to get access to the commission's records containing Veiga's bad checks. At a public hearing June 14, special prosecutor Marc DeSisto disclosed that Veiga had bounced 173 checks over a 27-month period between January 2003 and March of this year and that he could find no record that she had ever made good on 65 of them. Veiga insisted she had made timely restitution on all but one of the bad checks, sometimes with cash and money orders.

The checks were entered as public exhibits at the hearing, subject to redactions by DeSisto and Olenn. DeSisto and the commission are taking the position that the only information that should be redacted from the checks are Veiga's Social Security and bank account numbers, according to court spokeswoman Dyana Koelsch.

Olenn, as part of his motion to make additional redactions, argues that if her resignation is accepted, "then it would appear that inquiry into the personal financial matters of the respondent have no further public or punitive purpose to be achieved."

"There has never been an allegation or evidence that [Veiga's] violations of the Code of Judicial Conduct had any taint of misuse or her judicial office," Olenn argues in the court papers. "There has been no allegation or evidence that [Veiga] solicited, paid or received funds by or from other employees of the state or members of the Bar."

The Supreme Court is expected to decide today what information from the checks should be released.

VEIGA HAS BEEN suspended from the bench without pay since May 6.

On June 17, the commission recommended that she be removed from the traffic court for ethics violations. The violations include misleading clients while in private practice, misleading the commission when it was investigating one of the client complaints, defying an order from the Supreme Court that she take 20 hours of ethics courses within a one-year period, and bouncing dozens of checks.

The most recent complaint to be brought against Veiga, a divorced mother of four, came from an East Providence jewelry store that claimed she had written a bad check for $567.10 and then failed to make good on it for almost a year and a half, despite repeated demands for payment from the business owner.

The commission also faulted Veiga, a former bail commissioner and assistant public defender, for using her courtroom sheriff and an East Providence police captain as "personal bankers."

The commission, in forwarding its recommendation for removal to the Supreme Court, said Veiga has "a practice of submitting checks without sufficient funds to meet these financial obligations." It zeroed in on her own testimony that she fails to keep a check register, never balances her checkbook and doesn't "even check on the status" of the checks she writes.

Veiga testified that she can't balance a checkbook. DeSisto elicited testimony from her in a deposition taken in May that some of the checks she wrote bounced multiple times.

Even though Veiga testified at the public hearing that she had not knowingly written bad checks, the commission pointed out that it is a crime to write a check knowing you don't have enough money to cover it. It said Veiga's "practiced ignorance of the state of her finances . . . raises serious concerns about future actions which could bring disrepute to her judicial office and amount to further violations of the judicial code."

Veiga's financial problems date back to before her 1999 appointment to the traffic court by District Court Chief Judge Albert E. DeRobbio. The appointment was for eight years, ending in 2007.

In her May deposition, Veiga told DeSisto that she pays $1,400 a month rent for a house in East Providence, receives no regular child support, and sometimes has to depend on family members for money. She buys some of her groceries at the Dollar Store, she testified, and has always had to live paycheck to paycheck.

"I don't know how I'm going to do it now," she testified.