Judges Policing Judges: True Disciplinary Actions Are Rare (1)

A vanishingly small number of judicial misconduct complaints are found to potentially involve actual misconduct—and most of those end in retirements, often with the judge taking home a full pension.

Nearly 11,000 complaints about judges, filed by litigants, attorneys, and sometimes public officials, were terminated by the judiciary between 2010 and 2018. Of those, just 33 resulted in any disciplinary action of a judge such as a censure, or reprimand, or suspension of case assignments.

More often—121 times—judges were allowed to retire, or some other “intervening event” prevented the judiciary from investigating the complaint about one of their own, a ...