Let me share an interesting set of circumstances with you.
About a year ago I represented a man who was falsely accused of a number of sex crimes including rape and sodomy. The alleged victim was a woman who was at the same bar he was at that night. When he went to his truck at closing time she was standing at the driver side of the truck waiting for him. She asked him to “get her out of there.”
She climbed in the truck over the driver’s seat into the passenger seat. She would not tell hm where she lived so he took her to his place. His adult son and the son’s girlfriend lived there too.
My client and the woman eventually had sex, lots of it.
No question she had been drinking. At one point during the night, she got out of bed and ran to a neighbor’s house claiming she had been raped. The police came and my client was arrested and charged with rape and several counts of sodomy.
One of the issues in the trial was how intoxicated she was and whether she had been abusing any other drugs that night. One of the people she was out with that night was a sitting judge in the very county that this occurred. That judge was interviewed by the police as a witness. In the interview, which was on video, the Judge is asked of the woman was doing any drugs. The Judge, before answering, asked the police officer not to put the answer in his report. The answer was that the woman had been using Adderall that night. That was in addition to drinking.
Now that alone makes me scratch my head. The Judge must have known the interview was being taped.
When the Judge testified in Court, I was pretty harsh with my cross examination. The Judge, under oath, kept dodging the question as to whether the woman in question was using Adderall. I finally threatened to play the video showing the request to keep the answer out of the report.
In closing argument I called the Judge and the rest of the woman’s friends that night enablers. They knew she was drunk. They knew she was using drugs. They didn’t do anything to protect her or stop her from drinking more.
The Judge was so mad at me that the Judge texted a person I happened to know that the Judge was going to sue me. (That alone made me question the Judge’s knowledge of the law. There were no legal grounds to sue me).
Recently I was representing a man on a felony case and that case got assigned to that Judge. I filed a Motion asking the Judge to voluntarily get off the case as I felt it was more likely than not that the Judge was not going to be unbiased since I was on the case.
The Judge refused. I could not believe it. The very fact that the Judge refused a simple request to send the case to another Judge seemed like clear evidence of the Judge’s bias. In fact the Judge actually scratched out what I had written in my memo and added language that claimed I used my automatic option for disqualification.
The rules say I only get one automatic disqualification of a Judge in any given case. I did not want to use that. But rather than admit bias, the Judge made me use my automatic disqualification.
In the long run that won’t have any real bearing on the case. I only wanted this Judge off because of bias. I do believe the Judge’s actions proved me right.
By the way, the jury didn’t buy any of the State’s case. Not Guilty.