Baltimore Sun, May 14, 2008:

The state's highest court suspended a Baltimore County judge ... for making profane and uncivil comments from the bench, issuing the harshest punishment for a Maryland judge in more than two decades and, observers said, sending a message to judges to watch their behavior.

The Court of Appeals found that District Judge Bruce S. Lamdin violated the state's judicial code of conduct. It accepted a judicial commission's recommendation that the judge be suspended for 30 days without pay.

Lamdin, 60, tossed profanities at defendants from the bench, joked that Circuit Court judges spend afternoons drinking rather than working and chastised a woman accused of prostitution by telling her, "Business must be good. ... If I released you, you'd be scratching that itch tonight."

To a man accused of speeding on Interstate 83, he asked, "What's the big rush to get back to Pennsylvania? It's an ugly state." When a woman left his courtroom with a crying baby he pointed out that confiscated cell phones are placed in plastic bags to be sent to Annapolis and added: "Maybe we ought to do the same thing with children except poke holes in the bag."

I don't know how I feel about this one.

Please pardon the explicit nature of the commentary below, per the sex/vulgarity tags above.

On the one hand, it's good for judges to see that they are not only enforcers of judicial power but are subject to it. There is something to be said for keeping profanity off the bench, though Judge Lamdin's remark that one defendant couldn't seem to keep from stepping in "a pile of [expletive]" probably spoke the language that that defendant may have needed. And Pennsylvania is often an ugly state; take I-81 past Harrisburg and Scranton and watch how pretty it suddenly gets at the New York State line.

But the "scratch that itch" comment to the prostitution defendant was unacceptable. Prostitution is not about "scratching that itch" but about women (and sometimes men) trying to survive in a pretty dangerous environment, where thieves and thugs can rob and rape you with near impunity (since a sex worker won't generally approach police) and where you stand a severe risk of communicable diseases from white-bread bronchitis to HIV. I am not saying that women don't get itches and don't scratch them, as it were, only that prostitution is not a means for women to meet their sexual needs but rather those of their clients while meeting their own desperate need for cash. It's illegal, of course, but one rarely sees a john in court.

Vulgarity probably should not issue from the mouth of a judge except as strictly necessary to enforce rule and law (e.g. quoting a significant witness's words, etc.) But the world did not come to an end when I heard Catholic priests use vulgarity in class on infrequent occasions in high school.

I could have seen a reprimand getting the job done here. It's not clear that the judge exhibited actual prejudice, bias or a severe misapplication of any rule, statute or precedent. His language was rude, rough and blunt, if unwise. Perhaps he should have had some mandatory continuing education about sex workers' actual lives, but losing a judge for 30 days over these comments seems, well, questionable in its positive effect on the administration of justice. I don't believe I have appeared recently before Judge Lamdin and do not recall specifically doing so on any occasion.