Holding someone’s property against their will has got to be against the law.
Maybe misuse of public funds. He ordered a public employee who was on the clock to enforce his hissy fit while she should have been doing her normal duties.
Note it is completely unethical for a judge to be involved in a case in which he/she is personally involved. An ethical judge would have let other people take care of it. The guy needs to be sent packing.
[Steve Martin]
Well, recuuuuse me!
[/Steve Martin]
Violating laws and abusing one’s authority need not necessarily be the same thing.
How do I get a job like that?
It would be great if she had access to a car she didn’t care about…
I’d love to park there every day and get a ride to work from there. Every
evening I’d move it so it couldn’t be considered abandoned.
First of all, was there a law broken? Could you get a ticket for parking there? Can she really get towed if she’s not parked illegally or stopping some type of service i.e. trash service or fire truck access?
The judge is an ass hat.
Watch a lot of porn.
Hey, if that’s all it took, I’d be on the fucking Supreme Court!
Sounds like a judge with an ego problem. No shortage of them.
Another example of the power of our robed masters. Reserved spots are a courtesy, not (generally) legally enforceable.
It is a courtesy extended to people who are unable to get to the office early, in my experience.
Add me to the list of disapprovers.
If it was a legally protected parking space, he should have called law enforcement and had the car dealt with legally - ticketed and towed. I can’t imagine that any defendant in his court would be allowed to get away with taking the law into his own hands like that.
If it was merely a courtesy space, he should get over himself.
But if his car was repeatedly moved by the assistant so that other judges could get out, why didn’t the woman leave then? Was the assistant physically blocking her car during maneuvers?
It seems like we’re edging close to property or auto theft here. It wasn’t exactly kidnapping or wrongful imprisonment - she wasn’t kept there bodily - she eventually left her car and came back for it after the court closed, but they were holding her property without a warrant, and not at an impound yard. Can they do that, legally?
::: Waves hand:::
I know, I know!
Well teacher since he made her sit in the courtroom all day, I will go with admendments V and VI of the Constitution.
There was no trial, he detained her. No due process, no impartial jury.
Yeah I admit it is a bit of a streach, but no more overboard than the judge himself. I would love to see the ACLU jump in his shit over this. 
Yeah I get a little pissed if somebody takes my parking space, but this guy is a dick.
Have people always been like this about parking spots? I don’t have a parking spot at work; shit, our parking lot isn’t even paved and a lot of us park in the street - but why would you go to this extreme behavior over a parking spot? I’ve seen people in car accidents who weren’t that mad!
I’m inclined to side with the judge. Parking is almost impossible to find around my local courthouse, and it can take fifteen minutes to find a spot and get to the front door. He could have found her in contempt for holding up the court while he found a parking space, but that would have wasted resources since a deputy or bailiff would have had to track her down. Instead he found a more expedient way to hold her.
Was he an asshole to do it? You betcha; he’s a judge.
It would have made things a lot easier if the sign had said “Reserved for Judge Mills”, but it doesn’t take much to see why a judge wouldn’t want a sign telling the every passerby which car is his and where he will be at the end of the day.
He’s also no more valuable a human being than the woman who made a mistake while parking. Yet, since he is a judge, he can flex his muscles and ruin a person’s day who had the temerity to inconvenience him.
I don’t like the idea that we grant people power to enforce the law, and they use that power to lord over the little people who accidentally get in their way.
I agree with those who think the judge was wrong. He could have had the woman ticketed and/or towed, but when he is making it his business to send his assistant out to move his car around to let others out while still blocking her in, he was way out of line. His authority does not include detaining the woman’s car for a day “to teach her a lesson.” His authority is to impose punishment and, in some cases, to “teach a lesson to” those who appear before him with cases and controversies. She wasn’t before his court; she’s just some stupid chick who parked in his space.
If I was her, I would have called the police and demanded that his car be moved. I also would demand to know under what authority he repeatedly blocked my car in (using his assistant, no less) and deprived me of the use of my property. I’d file a complaint against him with the judicial ethics board of the local bar association for abusing his authority.
But the truth is it was probably cheaper for this girl to just cool her heels at the courthouse than demand that her car be released when the judge might then direct that it be towed.
I don’t have a problem with him blocking her in for as long as it took her to appear in his court and receive her slap on the wrist/tongue lashing, after which she should have been allowed to leave. I don’t even have a problem with telling the courthouse marshals or the local parking authorities that anyone parked in his spot should be immediately towed away. I have a problem with him taking it upon himself to take her car away from her for a whole day, when any other citizen would not be allowed to do that. He was only allowed to do it because he’s a judge, but he’s not a judge to pull petty little vindictive shit like this.
And I have a problem with him sending court staff out to move his car around for him repeatedly, too. That’s not their job, and not what they were hired to do.
Well, this judge may be an asshat but since I don’t know him, I wonder if he is like the judge that caught a kid doing something really stupid and dangerous and instead of calling the cops, ruining the kids life, destroying a family and all that, he handled the kid totally cool and so the ‘one off’ mistake the kid made did not follow him the rest of his life. That bastard judge did something illegal, heck, I know small town cops who do that kind of stuff a lot. I guess we should get better at zero tolerance and absolutely no room for common sense as that has worked out so well now hasn’t it?
I agree, the kids with three joints in their pocket should get 30 years in prison because we knee jerked the state legislators into passing mandatory sentencing for all drug offenses. That is working so well too.
Maybe this judge is an asshat. I don’t know about him other than this one thing but I do agree, all judges should be changed ever year because they are lawyers and you know what that means.
As a parent, I also think that I should not be able to have house rules that are not coded in law for my over 18 year old kids. If it is not against a law, then I have no right to enforce any rules on my property, right.
I also am now going to use my big ugly truck to intimidate young mothers in little cars with kids inside because it is not against the law. Not my fault if they panic and run off the road. Yeah, I like a zero tolerance society that lives exactly with laws only.
Make my day !
The World is Round,
It is Not Fair,
It is Just Damn Round !!!
If it were me, I’d inform the assistant moving the car that I was going to reverse out of the spot, and that if the vehicle were in the way, his problem.
Judge = the bad guy in this story.
Add me as another who thinks the judge was a total dickwipe. Suddenly stupidity is illegal? Towing the car is what he should have done.
Nope.
Zero tolerance laws are bullshit. I agree.
But it’s up to people to realize that and legislatures to change the laws to reflect that. The only way that will happen is by enforcing the laws as written, until people get sick of them and force change through the legislature. If a judge is simply allowed to ignore a bad law, there’s no reason to change the law. People in another judge’s jurisdiction will then suffer under the bad law.
It’s is not the judge’s job to make laws, or even make exceptions to laws. It is the judge’s job to JUDGE whether a law was broken and apply the penalties called for by law, or to supervise a jury in doing the same.
To allow judicial activism when I agree with it is to condone judicial activism when I don’t. Our legal system was carefully set up with a systems of checks and balances - three different departments so that one asshat with a bad attitude can’t ruin someone’s life (or day.) It should take many asshats working in accord.
Perhaps both of them have a sense of entitlement and we’re just arguing semantics? Surely, at 26 years of age, the woman understands the concept of reserved parking. Surely, as a judge, he knows better than to use his position to lord over someone else in such a questionable way. Regardless, he gets highlighted in the press for behaving like a small child and then trying to justify it. She just wastes some time while saving (possibly big to her) money on towing fees, while learning a small lesson on using one’s head.
But from the sidelines, can’t you all understand the desire to do either of the above? At least in theory, to take the asshole down a peg or two by using his ‘special’ spot and making him go elsewhere. And him by forcing another to face the consequences of not following social constructs. Now I’d never do either one, but I empathize with the urge if not the execution.