‘Shocks the conscience.’ Panel orders Kentucky judge removed over ethics violations
A Kentucky judge committed a long list of violations that included mismanaging his courtroom, pressuring people for campaign contributions, violating people’s rights and rigging bids for a home-detention monitoring service, a state ethics panel ruled Friday.
The Judicial Conduct Commission issued an order removing Circuit Judge James T. Jameson from office.
Jameson is up for reelection, but the panel went further to say that he is unfit for office in a new term as well.
There is a good basis to conclude that Jameson “should be permanently removed from judicial office” because of the severity of his violations, the committee said in its order.
“His violations of the Code of Judicial Conduct were extensive and frequent,” the commission said in its order.
Jameson’s attorney, Richard L. Walter, said he would appeal the order.
Jameson has been circuit judge for Marshall and Calloway counties, in Western Kentucky, since 2015.
Jameson strongly disputed the charges in his written responses, saying they were based on “biased, misrepresented, and, in some cases, purely manufactured information” from people who wanted to take him down politically.
However, commission members voted against him unanimously on each of seven charges.
The commission said there had been prior ethics complaints against Jameson, which it handled in two cases with private admonitions.
Abusing his power
Those cases involved some of the same allegations against Jameson as the current case, which was relevant because he’d been cautioned about similar matters before, the panel said.
Several of the charges against Jameson involved an effort to set up a home-incarceration program — with electronic ankle monitors — in order to finance a drug-treatment facility, which had been a longtime dream of Jameson’s, according to the commission’s order.
Jameson improperly took part in preparing specifications for the program and submitting a bid to run it from a non-profit board he headed, which was a conflict of interest, the commission said.
The commission said that good intentions didn’t overcome Jameson’s obligation to follow ethics rules.
Other charges the commission ruled against Jameson on included:
▪ Abusing his power to hold people in contempt of court, which the commission said “shocks the conscience.”
In one case, Jameson got upset when a bailiff told him that because of COVID-19 restrictions, a deputy jailer wouldn’t accept someone Jameson had ordered jailed.
The judge recessed court and ordered a deputy sheriff to take the deputy jailer into custody, the order said.
Jameson held a hearing for the handcuffed deputy jailer without his attorney present, then admonished him and let him go, the order said.
Retaliation
In another case in which Jameson revoked a woman’s probation, her grandfather, who was in the courtroom, asked what he should do with her baby.
Jameson said if the man couldn’t take care of the baby, he should “turn it over to the state.”
As the man left the courtroom, he commented out loud that he wouldn’t vote for Jameson. The judge immediately held him in contempt, had him put in a holding cell and conducted a hearing for him a couple of hours later without an attorney.
Jameson conditionally discharged the man’s 360-day contempt sentence for two years, meaning he didn’t have to serve if he stayed out of trouble, but that left him with a criminal record, the Judicial Conduct Commission noted.
Jameson testified the man resisted arrest, but the video showed that was not the case, the commission said.
▪ Pressuring an attorney to file a complaint against another lawyer and to give a sworn statement backing Jameson in a complaint against him.
▪ Retaliating against an employee of the sheriff’s office by seeking to have him fired or reassigned.
Jameson believed the employee had leaked video of him in the judicial center to the media, though there was no evidence of that, the commission said.
Information in the charges indicated the footage was of Jameson in the judicial center in his underwear.
Jameson said in his response that he sometimes worked very late and slept in his office. On one occasion, his wife called him from outside the back door of the judicial center to come down and see his children, and, having gotten little sleep, he “stumbled down” to see them.
Jameson later asked the manager at the Murray State University radio station to confirm he wouldn’t run a story “about the camera footage of you walking around in the courthouse in your underwear,” according to the charge.
That demonstrated Jameson tried to use the power of his office for personal gain, the commission said.
▪ Attempting to block the commission’s authority to investigate the allegations against him.
In its ruling, the commission cited the standards judges are supposed to follow, including maintaining the dignity of the office; avoiding impropriety; and aspiring to conduct themselves in ways that ensure public confidence in their independence, impartiality, integrity, and competence.
Jameson, the panel said, “failed in essentially every respect of this fundamental rule applicable to all judges.”
This story was originally published November 4, 2022 at 5:14 PM.
