Judges are as diverse as the people they serve. Some are brilliant, committed jurists who deeply care about law and doing right. Some have elevators that don’t quite reach the top floor. And some are very, very bad people.
For example: Mark Fuller, an Alabama Federal judge who beat his wife. That’s a bad judge. Closer to home is Atlanta Federal Judge Jack Camp who bought drugs for his stripper-mistress. And then there’s Carlia Brady, a New Jersey judge who was arrested for harboring a fugitive wanted for armed robbery who just happened to be her boyfriend. Then there’s the Pennsylvania judge who was stealing cocaine from cases pending before him? Or the Denver judge arrested for planning a tryst with a 14 year old boy?
You see, judges can be bad people.
A little while back we tried a divorce case against a woman who knew she was going to win. She told us so. Absolutely nothing she did was ever going to be held against her. She seemed to enjoy proving this point by conducting herself in the most egregious manner possible. She treated her children horribly. She mocked the concept of co-parenting with her soon-to-be ex-husband. She blew off the teachers. She scorned the children’s activities. She concocted the most absurd lies, perjuring herself time and time again and was always impeached with the evidence against her. Emails, recordings, photographs did not move this judge in the least.
Like she said, nothing made any difference. She was going to win.
I often think of law as a form of math. If you have the right numbers, the right equation, the right formula, you get the right answer, you win. Of course, law is more complex than that but it is still, at its core, supposed to be evidence based, not ouija board based, not bias based, not corruption based.
But there was no data, no testimony, no evidence that was going to sway this judge off of the pre-determined result. The woman was going to win. And she did. No balance. No tempered consideration of the evidence. Just a slam dunk.
Since evidence did not impact this judge in the slightest, I don’t know what did. Something undisclosed. Something unseen. Therefore, something corrupt.
This judge is relatively new. This judge is becoming known for these extreme outcomes. He reminds me of a judge from the last decade who conducted himself the same way. That judge met a very unpleasant end at the hands of the Judicial Qualifications Commission.
Now there is justice.
Michael Manely serves all of our clients from Marietta to Atlanta to Lawrenceville to Canton to Gainesville to Savannah.