Good.
A former district judge who served on the Harris County bench for 36 years has received a formal reprimand from a state watchdog commission for comments he made to a Houston Chronicle reporter stating black defendants were getting poor guidance from their parents about how to behave when they’re suspected of crimes.
The commission’s rebuke also cited the former judge’s comments in an editorial he penned for the Chronicle expounding on black defendants’ attitudes toward the justice system.
The State Commission on Judicial Conduct issued a warning on Nov. 12 to Michael McSpadden, a Republican who served on the 209th Criminal Court from 1982 through the 2018 election, for “casting public discredit on the judiciary and the administration of justice,” based on a series of comments he made about defendants’ attitudes toward judges and police officers. The commission announced its decision on Monday.
The Austin-based panel found that McSpadden violated a portion of the Texas Code of Judicial Conduct that instructs judges not to do anything outside of court that casts reasonable doubt on the judge’s ability to act impartially. The panel also found McSpadden violated the Texas Constitution’s prohibition against “willful and persistent conduct that is clearly inconsistent with the proper performance of his duties or casts public discredit upon the judiciary or administration of justice.”
The warning does not prevent McSpadden from sitting by assignment as a visiting judge, according to Eric Vinson, former executive director of the commission.
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Ashton Woods, president of Black Lives Matter Houston, who called for McSpadden to come under scrutiny for the comments, said the former judge’s statement in chambers and in his editorial called into question his ideology, indicating he could not be fair to black defendants and people of color who came before him due to his preconceived notions of how they may think.
“There’s already an imbalance … and when people put their thumb on the scale like McSpadden did, it increases the disparity,” Woods said. “There may have well been innocent people going through his court and he may have thrown the book at them because he had a bias toward them.”
Woods said he hoped all of McSpadden’s rulings would be reviewed for impartiality.
James Douglas, president of the Houston branch of the NAACP, said he did not think the commission went far enough.
“I think he should be banned from sitting on the bench,” Douglas said. “I don’t think he has the mental temperament or understanding of racial issues…Those views are not the views of a person who is totally impartial on the issue. He indicates he is not impartial when it relates to charges against African American males.”
See here and here for some background. The original comments from McSpadden, who was thankfully removed from the bench last year by the voters, came in a story about how he and others had “directed magistrates to deny no-cash bail to all newly arrested defendants”, over a period of nearly ten years. I agree that McSpadden’s previous rulings should be reviewed, and I definitely agree that he should never be allowed near a bench again. The visiting judge system needs an overhaul as it is, and it should be updated to exclude specifically problematic jurists like McSpadden. This is a no-brainer.