Assessing American Judicial Misconduct: What System is Protecting Bad Judges?
Do the judges really want to see the people mistrust the process so much that they abandon their faith in the rule of law and choose to use duels to resolve conflicts?
(Warning: explicit language)
Recently, in Lafayette, Louisiana, a burglar broke in next to the home of City Court Judge Michelle Odinet and stole from two parked cars. A neighbor saw the scene and shooed the burglar away.
The scene was captured clearly on the Odinet family’s security camera. In addition to calling the police, Odinet and her husband commented on the image of the burglar stealing, being scolded and fleeing.
Although no faces can be seen in the footage, Odinet’s husband can clearly be heard saying to his wife, “And Mom’s yelling n-er! n-er!”
Odinet laughs while echoing the words, “We have a n-er, it’s a n-er, like a roach.”
Odinet, who is white, and along with her husband continually uses a historically dehumanizing term for the Black community, comparing them to cockroaches and, worse, elevating the actions of one Black man to a collective insult to the entire race, is not a common racist. In addition to judging burglars at night, during the day, she is one of the presiding judges of the city court in Lafayette, a city of more than 120,000 people, 30 percent of whom are Black, with the power to make major decisions.
The video later found its way into the hands of local activist Gary Chambers and was reposted on platforms such as Twitter and TikTok, predictably sparking public outrage. At first, Odinet wouldn’t admit her mistake outright, claiming that the use of racist words in the video was due to sedation. This feeble explanation failed to quell the public’s anger, and Odinet was eventually forced to accept an indefinite suspension without pay, and her position was replaced by a Black female judge.
In Alabama, not far from Louisiana, Talladega County Probate Judge Randy Jinks had repeatedly racially and sexually shamed his subordinates since his election in 2018. When he discovered that one of his Black clerks had purchased a new car, instead of congratulating the employee, he sneered, “I can’t even afford a car like that, and I’m the judge here. What are you doing? Selling drugs?”
That’s not all of Jinks’ inappropriate statements. According to the report of the complaint that eventually led to his review by the the Alabama Court of the Judiciary and loss of his seat on the bench, he once told a clerk that “you know he’s just a n-er” when discussing a case regarding a Black man; claimed that George Floyd, a Black man who was murdered by a police officer, “saw it coming” and was “just another thug”; accused Bubba Wallace, a Black race car driver who was racially discriminated in NASCAR, of “playing the black card.”; forcing a female employee to smell his cologne and then telling her it was called “Sex” in the hope that she would soon feel it; and even forcing his own employees to watch striptease videos with him in the office.
Odinet and Jinks’ inappropriate comments eventually cost them their jobs. But because the power they were able to exercise as judges was consequential in the U.S. judicial system, the presence of these individuals also cast doubt on the level of trust the American public has in the judicial system. In the face of repeated revelations of such incidents, the public can’t help but ask the question: How many judges like these have gone undetected?
Clout of Secrecy
Unfortunately, the fact that Odinet and Jinks were punished for their actions does not mean that all judges will be punished for their misconduct. An NBC News investigation found that in many states, thousands of judicial complaints are filed against judges each year, but the rate at which they are punished is extremely low, at less than 1 percent. On top of that, the public is often not informed of the progress of judicial complaints due to a non-public feedback system, further putting their confidence in the judicial system on ice.
With more than 100 million cases filed in local and state courts each year and judges exercising near-absolute power in deciding who wins custody of children, who can get married and whether people go to jail, the public’s ability to scrutinize judicial behavior is critical to transparency, and it should be taken as seriously as the recent calls for sweeping reforms to policing and prosecution.
Typically, every state has some form of judicial conduct commission to which the public can bring allegations of misconduct against judges. Generally, this body, which can consist of other judges, government attorneys and other non-professionals, determines whether a complaint establishes that a judge has violated the code of judicial conduct of independence, integrity and impartiality. A judge’s conduct in and out of the courtroom, including on social media, can be part of the review of allegations.
According to NBC News, the level of transparency around misconduct cases varies from state to state. In about two-thirds of states, the public can learn the specifics of a charge when a judge is first accused of misconduct by the Judicial Conduct Commission or when a judge responds to the charge. In some states, however, the allegations are not made public until the court deciding the discipline formally intervenes. What’s more, in three states — Delaware, Hawaii and North Carolina — misconduct cases are only made public in the final stages of an investigation, when the judge is subject to punishment.
Why would different states choose to protect judges in this way? Those states that choose to go this way believe that because the truth of the complaint cannot be determined at the beginning of the investigation, this is the only way to protect the judge’s due process rights. However, when the opaqueness of the process has led to an increasingly low level of trust in the law, it is time for these states to rethink their choice. Do the judges really want to see the people mistrust the process so much that they abandon their faith in the rule of law and choose to use duels to resolve conflicts?
Plethora of Misconducts
In a lengthy investigation in September 2021, the Wall Street Journal found that miscarriages of justice were not limited to inappropriate statements made in and out of the courtroom, but also included failing to disclose the existence of financial ties between themselves and those connected to the case at hand. This survey found that 131 judges across the country oversaw conflicts involving financial interests in 685 court cases and refused to remove themselves from trial. Overall, about two-thirds of federal district judges disclosed personal stock holdings, and one in five who did so tried at least one case involving those stocks. In 173 of these cases, the judge’s stock holdings exceeded $15,000, and in 21 cases exceeded $50,000. However, U.S. federal law stops judges from hearing cases in which they, their spouses or their minor children have an interest.
These judges, because they hold the stock of a party involved in the case, often make decisions that favor that party in their decisions, violating their principles. When they are caught in the act, they give themselves a variety of defenses: some accuse the clerks of not telling them the full story; some argue that their family members’ stock holdings are not a violation; others argue that the money managers operate accounts that are not under their management; and still others argue that negligence and laziness led them to become involved in a conflict of interest.
For Judge R. Brooke Jackson of Colorado, the conflicts of interest he faced were too many: according to his own disclosed financial disclosure forms, his portfolio was designed to include Apple, Chevron, Facebook, JPMorgan Chase, Johnson & Johnson, Wells Fargo, Honeywell, General Electric, and many other companies that were involved in his interests in the 36 cases he decided. In an interview, Jackson simply stated that he had a fund manager handling these investments and that he himself was not aware of the specific projects in which these investments were made. When told that he needed to know under the law, he claimed, “That’s still news to me.”
The system of accountability against this system is so weak that it amounts to approximately nonexistent, as judges rarely make public the names of companies in cases in which they should not be involved. When judges recuse themselves from a case, they usually do not disclose the details. In the modern era, no judge has been removed from the federal bench simply because he or she has a financial interest in the plaintiff or defendant who appears in their courtroom. In theory, the federal judiciary should conduct conflict screening and ethics training to prevent violations, but this Wall Street Journal investigation clearly shows that they fall short.
It is important to understand that a judge will have tremendous control over all elements of the courtroom, from pretrial proceedings and trials to criminal defense, verdict and sentencing. Judges have a great deal of latitude in their factual findings and evidentiary rulings, most of which can only be overturned if an abuse of discretion is alleged and sat on.
Disciplined Judges Can Still Get Resurrected
If it is outrageous enough that obvious violations are not duly punished, it is arguably the greatest humiliation to those affected victims to see that the few judges who do violate the rules and are punished are still able to weigh in on the court. Yet this is the reality of the U.S. judicial system: according to a Reuters investigation, 90 percent of all judges they found punished over a period of decades retained their jobs, and the cases they heard involved thousands of individuals and spanned the entire United States. Because of the opaque punishment system, there are many judges whose circumstances after being punished are not made public, which results in victims losing the opportunity to complain.
The ways in which these judges have violated the law are truly eye-opening and unforgiving: some have drunkenly pulled guns on each other in fast food restaurants; some have appointed their own sons to handle cases in which they have a conflict of interest; some have been sentenced by judges to long prison terms for simply defaulting on a traffic ticket that they did not comply with; some have forcibly imprisoned prisoners without legal representation. In Texas, while the jury was debating whether a woman accused of sex trafficking should be found guilty or not, the judge in charge of the case burst into the room where the jury was debating and told them that God had just told him the woman was innocent.
For judges accused of such misconduct to return to their offices, it is not only an insult to the victims, but also a great disrespect to those judges who are scrupulous in their duties. Pennsylvania Supreme Court Justice Arthur Grim heard a case accusing two former judges of accepting kickbacks for improperly increasing criminal records and sentences in order to fill the number of people in juvenile detention centers controlled by private capital. The two former judges were later sentenced to prison terms, and the criminal records of more than 2,000 minors they took over were reviewed and erased, but the damage done in those cases can never be undone. In the interview with Reuters, Grim couldn’t help but lament, “If we have a system that holds a wrongdoer accountable but we fail to address the victims, then we are really losing sight of what a justice system should be all about.”
The painful yet deep historical debt of racism in the United States means that these miscarriages of justice often have a more immediate, and more serious, toll on minority groups. Take the case of Montgomery, Alabama, judge Les Hayes, who previously held prisoners for long periods of time for overdue traffic tickets. Despite the offender, a single Black mother who lost her minimum-wage job was raising three children on her own pleading to him that she had no financial means to pay back her dues, Hayes was unconvinced by the request and judged by “gut feeling” that she was lying. In Hayes’ cases, Black people are generally punished more severely, and many of them are for minor infractions like delinquent tickets.
Under such a system, with minorities who are generally at the bottom of the social ladder for historical reasons, especially the Black community, they often face the tragedy of being behind bars or even having their families destroyed, not because they failed to comply, but because they don’t have the money. Although Hayes received a complaint and was suspended for the case, the Judicial Council reinstated him a few months later until he officially retired at the end of his term.
In Alabama, the Judicial Inquiry Commission, which reviews judges and is appointed by other judges, requires that the complaint process be impartial and must be in writing, and anyone who makes a false statement about a judge can be prosecuted for perjury. This means that the person filing the complaint must face a significant risk of being accused of perjury and retaliation by the judge for filing the complaint, as well as being prepared for a less than 1 percent success rate. Even with these preparations, they may see judges like Hayes, who left the bench only for a few months after a complaint, or even Marvin Wiggins, who was complained upon four times in a decade, who was also once suspended for 90 days, but still sitting on the bench. According to one allegation, Wiggins once asked defendants who could not afford to pay fines to donate blood to avoid jail time.
The public and judges alike know exactly what it means to indulge in these scandalous practices. David Sachar, executive director of the Arkansas Commission on Judicial Corrections and Disabilities and speaking at the 2019 General Assembly of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, said that “Judicial misconduct breaks down the very fiber of what is necessary for a functional judiciary — citizens who believe their judges are fair and impartial.”
Unlike the military and the legislature, the judiciary, as a system built entirely on public trust, loses its fundamental purpose of existence once it loses the confidence of the population. In order to protect the population from judicial misconduct, it is incumbent upon the judiciary to support measures that hold it accountable, to adopt more transparent mechanisms for handling complaints and providing feedback, and to use the powers already available to the Judicial Council to warn or reprimand for unethical behavior and to take steps to remedy it. Only then will the public have enough trust in the 1,770 judges in 209 courts across the United States to keep them from overstepping the boundaries of the law and using their own methods to solve problems that would put the United States in a dangerous position of being unable to follow the law.
