Judge booted for flipping coin to decide

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Source: Associated Press

RICHMOND, Va. - A judge who ordered a woman to drop her pants and decided a custody dispute by flipping a coin was removed from the bench by the Virginia Supreme Court on Friday. The decision against Juvenile and Domestic Relations Court Judge James Michael Shull of Gate City was unanimous.
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According to the court, Shull admitted tossing a coin to determine which parent would have visitation with a child on Christmas. Shull said he was trying to encourage the parents to decide the issue themselves but later acknowledged that he was wrong.

The pants-dropping incidents, the court said, "were even more egregious."

The court said they occurred when a woman was seeking a protective order against a partner who she said had stabbed her in the leg. Shull knew the woman had a history of mental problems and insisted on seeing the wound, the court said.

The woman dropped her pants once to display the wound, then dropped them a second time after Shull left the bench for a closer look to determine whether the woman had received stitches.

A court bailiff testified before the commission that after the hearing, he asked Shull, "Did you see what that lady had on?" According to the bailiff, Shull replied: "Yeah, a black lacy thing ... it looked good, didn't it?"
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The justices could have merely censured Shull, but they noted that he had appeared before the Judicial Inquiry and Review Commission in 2004 for allegedly calling a teenager a "mama's boy" and a "wuss" and advising a woman to marry her abusive boyfriend. That complaint was dismissed with an admonition to Shull to chalk it up as a learning experience.

Read more: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20071102/ap_on_re_us/judge_removed

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Sheesh

[Beerboy]

1. Wow.

Unfucking real. Good on the Virginia Supreme Court.
This is the third 'Peter Principle' story regarding government agencies/officials I've seen in LBN in less than an hour.
The deductions Bush*co is with-holding from my checks really seem to helping, not.

[WindRavenX]

2. wow

:(

[Lone_Star_Dem]

3. He made a woman drop her pants in the courtroom?

All because she was seeking a protective order. There were so many other, better, ways to deal with that situation.

I shudder to imagine how I would have felt if a judge would have requested something such as that from me.

[TheMadMonk]

4. He asked to see the wound. She APPARENTLY chose to show it in an open court.

Yes there were still better ways to handle that, but it doesn't exactly look like he ORDERED her to drop her strides. Some sort of spanking was due him, but not outright removal from the bench.

The comments were definitely over the top, but it looks a little like the bailiff set him up for a fall. He asked a leading question and then dobbed in the judge. I hope he got HIS comeuppance for that little effort.


As for the flipping of the coin, over one day (Christmas) of visitation is it really that big a deal?

It would appear the kid refused to chose for themselves, (possibly out of fear of upsetting the other parent) since to the best of my knowledge that is the usual way a judge decides such things.

The parents were not going to resolve the dispute, and any decision his part would in all likelihood have been seen by one of the parents as validation. The other would just have been pissed.

A coin toss avoids any appearance of favouritism. Real or imagined.

Perhaps he should have proposed dividing the kid in half and giving part to each parent. That's the proper biblical way to resolve these things.

[EST]

5. Even if it really does amount to a coin toss,

you don't perform that coin toss in front of witnesses--on all sides of the question. It's a sure way to get all the participants to unite on one point, that the judge is a jerk, and diminishes the office.
Protocol requires the examining of normally unexposed parts of the body to be done in private, by an appropriate observer.

It really wasn't the disrespect for his supplicants that got him in trouble; it was the damage done to the office and that of his fellow judicial associates that necessitated his removal.