(CBS DETROIT) – A cancer patient has had a difficult time maintaining his lawn since being diagnosed, but a Hamtramck judge showed no sympathy.
In a Zoom court hearing, Burhan Chowdhury, the 72-year-old defendant, explained that he has been too weak to maintain his lawn.
Judge Alexis G. Krot told the defendant that he should be ashamed of himself and said, “if I could give you jail time, I would.”
During the court hearing, Shibbir Chowdhury, the defendant’s son, explained that his dad is sick, and after receiving the citation, they cleaned his property.
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As someone in the Reddit thread I found this in (though, I won't link to it because the abuse directed at the judge in it is honestly horrific) observed "I thought that video was part of a sketch satirising justice in this country". Presumably, they were thinking of this Illinois judge who's been booted off criminal trials due to reversing the sentence in a rape trial.
It's actually interesting (in addition to being horrific) because I finally got around to watching 99 Homes yesterday and one of the defining moments of that movie is right at the start where the judge basically goes "shut the fuck up, I've got another three thousand cases so I'm skimping on all of them, you're getting evicted tomorrow and you have thirty days to file an appeal, bailiff!". And this is then repeated later on in the movie where Michael Shannon's character is able to get forged documents into evidence since he knows no-one's going to check the index numbers in the record logs.
I think also of Rake, where the main character, a coked up lawyer who literally goes to prison for conspiracy to commit murder (a charge he's guilty of), finally gets disbarred only when he accidentally insults a judge on camera. Or Boston Legal which, like Rake, had several recurring judges, most of whom were dingbats. And who can forget the trial in Blackadder Goes Forth?
Oh, and then there's The Wire where you can only find justice when the judge isn't up for re-election... and also if you fake a serial killer in order to defraud the city so that you can fund an investigation into literally dozens of connected murders from a year earlier...
These are fictional examples but they cut to a deeper truth... if you've got judges, the quality of justice is dependent largely on the quality of the justices. However, a fairly standard operating practice is to treat justices, much like referees, as a class that may be protected... I believe the theory is/was that if you let people be mean to judges, the whole house of cards is liable to collapse on itself. The logic is something like a dissed judge lacks the credibility to make stuff work.
So... what say, yes, NSG? To judge or be judged?
