Jefferson County Judge Nakita Blocton of Alabama’s 10th Judicial Circuit has been removed from the bench after being found in violation of numerous ethics violations.
Included within the ethics infractions was a derogatory reference Blocton made concerning another judge who she called an “Uncle Tom,” a disparaging racial term suggesting a black person to be subservient to white people.
The Alabama Court of the Judiciary, which was charged with reviewing the complaint filed by the Judicial Inquiry Commission, found that Blocton “engaged in a pattern and practice of making inappropriate comments – for example, calling one judge ‘Uncle Tom’ and another judge a ‘fat b****’ and calling an employee a ‘heifer.’”
The court also agreed with the commission’s assessment that Blocton had partaken in a “pattern of abuse of staff, attorneys, and litigants.”
According to the judgment, Blocton had ordered employees to allow her access to their cellphones and private logins so that any communication related to the commission’s investigation could be deleted. She had also forced her staff to “work unreasonable hours, including excessive, unproductive, and unnecessary late nights and weekends.”
Additionally, the court found that Blocton “made repeated threats to fire employees in an attempt to intimidate them.”
The commission successfully argued that Blocton had utilized numerous aliases on social media to communicate with litigants in an effort to influence the outcome of domestic-relations cases.
In the initial complaint filed against Blocton earlier this year, she was accused of having used or directed another individual to use an alias on Facebook to intimidate a litigant involved in divorce case. One of the messages read, “[L]EAVE THOSE BLACK WOMEN DEMOCRATS ALONE OR THE DEVIL IS GOING TO GET U.”
The judgment also found that she held an “appalling” amount of pending domestic-relations cases that had yet to be resolved.
In conclusion, the nine-panel court ruled that Blocton had committed a total of eight ethics violations and ordered that she be immediately removed from the bench.
Dylan Smith is a staff writer for Yellowhammer News. You can follow him on Twitter @DylanSmithAL
