The claim against Hedges was not made to authorities until 40 years after the event, at which point he had been on the bench for 27 years. His now-adult niece, who struggled for decades with the traumatic consequences of the abuse, summoned the courage to come forward in 2012. The investigation, which eventually led to the removal of Hedges from his position, tore fissures into her family. But it resulted in exactly what we should hope for in terms of holding alleged perpetrators of sexual misconduct accountable: a fair and thorough ethics investigation.

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In an ideal world, this is how the allegations against Kavanaugh, which he vehemently denies, would be handled. The only problem? The federal court system has no equivalent to the independent state commissions that conduct disciplinary hearings and impose sanctions on offending judges. This needs to change.

My office investigated the claim against Hedges. While the statute of limitations had long lapsed, precluding a criminal prosecution, there is no time constraint in New York on examining unethical behavior that might render a judge morally unfit to remain in office. All 50 states have some form of independent ethics enforcement entity such as the New York State Commission on Judicial Conduct that investigates claims of wrongdoing against judges and may impose sanctions for misconduct committed on or off the bench.

Though there were only two people in the bedroom when Hedges abused his niece, the lawyers and investigators on my staff examined schematics of the premises and interviewed numerous people who were in a position have pertinent information, including relatives to whom the victimized girl recounted the event years before she made it public. The process took less than a month. Hedges himself gave ambiguous accounts of the episode during the investigation, eventually admitting that at least some indefensible sexual contact had occurred that, he claimed, the 5-year-old had initiated.

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That partial confession was the result of confronting him with his own words to a third party. Our determination that he should be removed from judicial office was upheld by New York’s highest court, which said that even though the disciplinary petition was based solely on conduct that occurred 40 years earlier and before the judge had assumed office, the demonstrated misconduct was “grave,” undermined public confidence in his integrity and “rendered [him] unfit for judicial office.”

There is a code of conduct for federal judges that would similarly render Kavanaugh unfit for office should the sexual misconduct allegations against him be proved in an ethics proceeding. But at the moment, ethics complaints against federal judges are handled in-house and closely guarded by the judges themselves. In 2016, there were more than 1,300 such complaints throughout the country, but only four were investigated. An average of fewer than one judge per year is criticized by his or her colleagues for misbehavior.

Ironically, Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa), the chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, has repeatedly proposed legislation to create a judicial inspector general, which would have authority to investigate and report on allegations such as those recently levied against Kavanaugh. As my office did in the Hedges case, such a federal inspector general would collect extrinsic evidence and take sworn testimony in a professional deposition setting from many more witnesses than the two principals whom the Senate Judiciary Committee will limit itself to interrogating in a political setting.

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Short of a stunning mea culpa by Kavanaugh or an equally unlikely confession by Ford that she made up her story, Senate questioning of only these two will result in stalemate, leaving both advocates and opponents of Kavanaugh’s confirmation with their predetermined views. The same goes for the accusations made against Kavanaugh by his Yale University classmate Deborah Ramirez. At the very least, taking testimony from any eyewitnesses to these incidents — such as Kavanaugh’s high school friend Mark Judge, who Ford said was present in the room during her alleged attack, as well as others to whom Kavanaugh’s accusers may have confided — would give the Senate and the public more information with which to evaluate the credibility of both accuser and accused.

The only path to truth in the Kavanaugh matter is a thorough inquiry, just as it was in the Hedges case. Putting Kavanaugh on the Supreme Court without a full vetting of allegations against him will not stop a free press or even a Maryland prosecutor from developing new leads in the allegations. That could put Congress and the country in the grotesque position of having to deal with this matter after a rush to confirmation by the only means available should the claims appear substantiated: impeachment. Nobody should want that.