Judicial Misconduct

Angered by the soaring cost of defending Georgia's most notorious murder suspect, state lawmakers said Thursday they would explore the possibility of impeaching the judge presiding over the case of Brian Nichols, the rape suspect who escaped from a courthouse in 2005 and allegedly killed a judge and three others. Critics say DeKalb County Senior Judge Hilton Fuller has mismanaged the high-profile death penalty case.

Inside a wire cage in the back of an Orange County courtroom, a middle-aged woman barely a smidgen taller than 4 feet stands up to answer charges of petty theft. "She's a little thing," says Superior Court Judge James M. Brooks. "Is she on her knees?" Without warning, he rises from the bench and puts his hands on his hips as he addresses her, pretending he doesn't believe she can really be so small. "Are you trying to fool me?" he says, unable to keep a straight face. She smiles back at him.

Judge Robert Spitzer, whose courtroom quirks and messy ways were well known in Riverside County's legal community, was removed from the bench Tuesday by the state judicial oversight panel for serious misconduct and "gross neglect" of his duties. The state Commission on Judicial Performance had been investigating the Riverside County Superior Court judge since 2003 when his supervisor reported that he was falling months behind on issuing court orders.

In the highest profile case of his career, Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge Larry Paul Fidler this week did something judges seldom do: He admitted he had made a mistake and said he wasn't sure what to do about it. The mistake was an erroneous jury instruction that some jurors cited as confusing after they announced Tuesday that they were deadlocked on a second-degree murder charge against Phil Spector.

SAN FRANCISCO -- In a rare move, the California Supreme Court on Thursday tossed out the death sentence of a Long Beach man convicted of killing two people during a drunken shooting spree that injured two others. The Supreme Court ruled that trial judges improperly denied Arthur Hans Halvorsen's right to represent himself. But the 6-1 decision left intact his two murder convictions and his sentence of life in prison without parole for one of the killings.

SAN FRANCISCO -- Judge Robert Spitzer, the hopelessly messy jurist who faces possible removal from the bench over allegations that he let cases languish and improperly contacted witnesses, told a skeptical state judicial panel Wednesday that he should be censured but allowed to keep his job. In a hearing before the state's Commission on Judicial Performance, the Riverside County Superior Court judge was accused of repeatedly lying and undermining public trust in the judiciary.

The state judicial commission announced Wednesday that it is investigating allegations that Orange County Superior Court Judge Kelly W. MacEachern filed false and misleading expense claims for a legal conference in San Diego. MacEachern, a former prosecutor elected to serve on the bench in 2003, could be removed from her seat, censured or admonished if the Commission on Judicial Performance determines she lied about her participation in courses during last year's conference.

Orange County Superior Court Judge James M. Brooks has again been reprimanded for misbehaving, this time by a state appeals court that found he acted more like a circus ringleader than an officer of the court during a job discrimination trial that he let devolve into one sideshow after another.

A special prosecutor in Indiana could not have had worse timing for telling a judge that he had cleared him of theft for taking a college student's ringing cellphone during a class the judge was teaching. The prosecutor had just delivered his report in the judge's courtroom, which has a sign ordering that cellphones be turned off, when his cellphone rang.

Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Ronald M. Sohigian was publicly admonished Thursday for mistreating an attorney and abusing his judicial authority. Sohigian, 69, was disciplined for treating an attorney in a "belittling, rude and sarcastic manner" in 2006, when he ordered the attorney -- who did not have a document with him -- to go across the street to the law library, research an issue and return in 20 minutes.