In Tennessee, a judge is legally required to be “patient, dignified and courteous” with people in court. He is also required, not unreasonably, “to respect and comply with the law”. But not all judges do.

The Supreme Court of Tennessee recently disciplined Judge Durwood Moore for unlawful judicial conduct. Presiding in court one day, the judge happened to glance at Benjamin Marchant, a friend of someone who had court business. Marchant was not a witness, just a spectator. Yet after observing him, the judge ordered court officers to seize the man, get a urine sample from him and have it tested for drugs. The sample came back negative. The judge was found guilty of acting unlawfully and undermining public confidence in the administration of justice.

Judge Moore was given public censure, the harshest form discipline short of being recommended for removal from office, so it was clearly his last chance. Remarkably, on the same day the Court of the Judiciary ruled against him in another case: he had wrongly and irascibly refused a lawyer’s request to allow someone else to present a document and had then “used profanity” to the lawyer on the phone and threatened him with a contempt finding if he did not return to court to present the document himself.

Bizarre instances of unlawful judicial cussedness in British trials (later overturned on appeal) include an English judge who fined a man for accidentally walking into court in Surrey wearing his hat; and a Scottish judge who fined a man for simply shaking his head while the prosecutor was summing up.

The award for Most Unjudicial Petulance, however, goes to a judge in a 1968 criminal trial in London. During defence counsel’s final address to the jury, the judge sighed in despair and loudly exclaimed, “Oh God”. Finally, he laid his head across his arms and made groaning noises. Just as bizarrely, the appeal court upheld the conviction of the defendant in that case saying the trial judge’s conduct would not have prejudiced the jury.

Professor Gary Slapper is Director of the Centre for Law at the Open University. His book How the Law Works is published by HarperCollins

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