Florida judge assists emerging democracies: 'I come to help rebuild judiciaries'.

Collected skulls were left on tables in mass monuments to remember the genocide in Rwanda three years earlier.

Even during his time as a former police officer in Los Angeles, Judge James Martz had never seen "that level of violence, and that level of disregard for human rights and for life.

"The streets literally ran red with blood. They had killed so many people with machetes. Where you would normally see rain in a rainstorm, you saw blood. It was gruesome," Judge Martz stated of the tragic events.

A fulltime circuit court judge in West Palm Beach, Martz's passion for the law leads him to volunteer overseas with a team of talented U.S. lawyers and judges, most recently in affiliation with the U.S. Agency for International Development, to fight corruption in foreign countries with emerging democracies.

Although he has been doing this for the last quarter of a century, collecting many eye-opening experiences around the world, Rwanda was one of the most interesting, but sad, places he'd ever been.

"Death was just accepted," he said of the African nation, adding one of the members of the war tribunal was killed while they were there and all the locals had to say was, "Well, they went out after dark. What do you expect?"

"Really? That's all you have to say about it?" He thought, "Sorry I asked."

Fixing Broken Systems

The judge's "corruption fighting" volunteer work allows him to discuss serious issues pertaining to broken legal systems with foreign law professionals in order to help them repair their systems from within.

"A lot of us have full-time jobs, but for a lot of us--for lack of a better word--it's a hobby," he said.

"My part is always the judiciary. I come to help rebuild judiciaries. I'm there to try and create rules of professional conduct, ethics, selection, working conditions, numbers of judges for workload. Clean up the process.

"I'm not a world traveler. I'm not fascinated with going to a bunch of places," he confessed. "I've got to be going on a mission. The mission is paramount. It's the good we do. It's to go there and meet really good people that really appreciate having us push things they know are right and should be, but can't speak for themselves because it's not a climate for them. They can't speak up against the government. We can. We can make change."

Like Eating an Apple

Corruption can be deeply embedded into a struggling nation's legal system, Martz said, but change is possible with time.

"It's like eating an apple,"...