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The independent judiciary, which is a pillar of the rule of law, is under attack.
President Donald Trump has called for the impeachment of judges when he disagrees with their decisions. Last month, the DOJ asked federal prosecutors for the “most egregious examples” of federal judges impeding the president’s agenda for potential referral to Congress. It is the kind of partisan screed against the independent judiciary that has infected Trump’s presidency, undermining the public’s faith in judges and the rule of law.
Unfortunately, in Kentucky, lawmakers are taking it a step further by impeaching a judge simply because they do not like her rulings. That assault on judicial independence is a direct threat to the rule of law. The judiciary is supposed to provide a constitutional check on lawmakers. Democracy suffers when legislatures use impeachment not to oust judges who are corrupt or derelict but whose opinions they dislike.
Kentucky law allows “any person” to initiate an impeachment proceeding against a state judge. In January, a former state legislator who lost reelection two years ago and is seeking to regain their old office filed an impeachment petition against Julie Goodman, a state trial judge. The petition alleges that Goodman “abused her office” based on her rulings in six cases in which she allegedly violated statutory law and refused to follow precedent.
As an example, the petition notes that Goodman dismissed an indictment against the prosecutor’s wishes and that the “dismissal was based on her belief that the prosecutor—an African American woman—singled out [the defendant] for prosecution because he is an African-American.” The petition explains that the Kentucky Court of Appeals “unanimously reversed Judge Goodman’s dismissal of the indictment, writing that her ‘order is fraught with legal errors and abuses of both its discretion and its authority.’ It noted that ‘the fallacies the trial court embraces are legion’ and issued a 108-page opinion detailing Judge Goodman’s ruling’s fallacies, legal errors, and abuses of authority.” Yet the petition says little about what makes this reversal so egregious and different from other times that an appeals court reverses a lower court’s ruling. The appeals court’s decision corrected any errors the judge made; the state judiciary has an internal process to handle judges who violate their ethical responsibilities in a proceeding.
Last week, the Kentucky House of Representatives voted to impeach Judge Goodman, largely on partisan lines. The only allegation of impropriety involved her rulings in these cases. The report of the House Impeachment Committee says that “Across the six cases reviewed, the Committee found a judge who repeatedly abused her authority,
disregarded the constitutionally mandated roles of other actors in the justice system, and, in at least two instances, acknowledged that what she was doing was improper and proceeded anyway.” The state Senate will put Goodman on trial to determine whether to remove her from office, which requires a two-thirds vote of the senators.
This is the first judicial impeachment of a Kentucky judge in over 100 years...
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