Minority Issues, Racism, State Judges

Black Judge Ordered To Pay Up For Having Opinions

While judges get away with bias and abuse all over the country, this guy's the one left paying the price.

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Judge Olu Stevens

Judge Olu Stevens

Yesterday, Judge Olu Stevens was suspended without pay for 90 days for the transgression of making fairly obvious observations. That shouldn’t land someone in professional hot water, but those observations involved a black guy talking about racism, so we had to shut that down right quick and public shaming seemed like an easy means to an end. It’s hogwash, but about as surprising as an old Vaudeville routine.

Which is to say Vaudeville routines had simplistic plots… and were racist.

The Jefferson County, Kentucky judge came to national attention when he exercised his authority to dismiss all-white juries as unrepresentative of the over 20 percent minority jurisdiction. This is an observation that involves complex, subjective, and racially charged skills like “basic counting,” but that was enough to make prosecutors cry foul about Judge Stevens’s wild judicial temperament.

Not to knock Judge Stevens here, but this would be a bold indictment of the Jefferson County judicial system if it weren’t for the fact that Jefferson County, Kentucky is literally where Batson started (the full story of that case is recounted excellently here). Given that history, it’s frankly more damning that it took this long for anyone to step up and question why all-white juries are still cropping up in Louisville. It’s like there was this whole Supreme Court thing to put folks on notice that maybe the Ville wasn’t a shining beacon when it comes to criminal justice.

Aw, but the prosecutors were pretty adamant that they never used “race” in constructing these juries to regularly exclude 20 percent of the population. Honestly, crafting the most clever race-neutral excuses to garner maximum racial disparity is the “Look ma! No hands!” of the prosecutorial bar — they just love showing off how cleverly non-racial they are. So to suggest that there might be actual, conscious or unconscious racism involved in making sure one race is excluded from juries? Well, the Commonwealth of Kentucky has carpel tunnel from all the pearl clutching that inspired!

Take Judge Stevens’s unwillingness to be an idle bystander to systemic concerns over jury composition and add in two other high-profile incidents involving race — one, chastising a family of robbery victims for nurturing their child’s blanket fear of black people when they casually excused the kid’s fear of Judge Stevens himself based on his melaninsimilitude to the perpetrator, and two, holding a defendant in contempt for 60 days for using the “n-word” to refer to the judge (Judge Stevens later reduced this to 24 hours, wisely, because contempt is a dangerous and largely unchecked power and slapping punishments measured in days was worrisome) — and the Kentucky Judicial Conduct Commission had to turn it all into a judicial misconduct story. And Judge Stevens gave in rather than keep fighting what was unfortunately a likely futile battle — discretion being the better part of valor and all that.

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Inevitably some flacks will applaud this decision and call Judge Stevens out of line for conducting himself in a manner unbecoming of the judiciary. But let’s take stock of what really happened here: he questioned the construction of juries in a jurisdiction that had already earned decades-old constitutional rebuke, and he objected to personal insults in his own courtroom. That’s what gets 90-day suspensions in this country?

Joking about black people and fried chicken gets the published-opinion equivalent of a frowny sticker from the Fifth Circuit. Supreme Court justices can imply that black people are slow from the bench to media jeers and little else. And the wildly inappropriate contempt sentences this guy hands out for comments that lack any racial animus are applauded by the mainstream.[1] If only Judge Stevens had any of the luck these guys had.

For those keeping score, calling a white judge a c**k is a breach of decorum worthy of four months in jail and calling a black judge the n-word is not only unworthy of 24-hours behind bars, but the judge needs to take three months off over it.

And that’s exactly the sort of simple, comparative observation that would earn an unpaid vacation from the Kentucky bench.

State officials suspend Louisville Judge Olu Stevens for 90 days without pay [WDRB]

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Earlier: Is This Judge Doing A Better Job Of Being The Defense Attorney Than The Defense Attorney?
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[1] Maybe you’re the sort that thinks all judges are abusing their power, but that’s really missing the point. The disparate treatment of these cases is real and even if you think all these judges should be punished like Judge Stevens, perhaps you should channel your outrage into why the powers-that-be are only willing to agree with your enlightened worldview when it’s the black guy in trouble.

Joe Patrice is an editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news.

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