'Flagrant disregard for the law': Judge kicked out of office mere days after messy arrest at club and freak-out in custody

A Georgia judge who was no stranger to controversy even before her messy arrest at a club in the early morning hours last week has been removed from office by the Peach State’s top court, which found her “pattern of misconduct” in office was proven “by clear and convincing evidence.”

Christina Peterson, 38, is a Douglas County probate judge no longer, effective as of Tuesday, the Georgia Supreme court’s removal order said , meaning she can’t be appointed to a judgeship or run for one for at least seven years.

Though Law&Crime readers might recognize Peterson solely from the bizarre video footage of her encounter with the Atlanta Police Department and Fulton County jailers after 3 a.m. on June 20, the removal order has nothing to do with that alleged nightclub-adjacent simple battery against a police officer and obstruction of a law enforcement officer case, a case the accused’s lawyer says is riddled with “inconsistencies” and trumped up.

Peterson had already faced a recommendation that she be removed from office for numerous violations of the Georgia Code of Judicial Conduct, 12 of which the Georgia Supreme Court determined were “proven by clear and convincing evidence” warranting the punishment of losing her job.

Christina Peterson body cam video from June 20, 2024 (Law&Crime Network)

These incidents for which Peterson was disciplined go back to 2021 and 2022, and the “most troubling” one was her jailing of a woman who was trying to “amend her marriage-license application.”

The woman, a U.S. citizen born in Thailand, was wrongly held in criminal contempt and hit with the maximum 20-day stint behind bars in 2021 after Peterson, in a snap decision without any real notice, determined that the petitioner had tried to defraud the court with a “fictitious” and “forged” document.

“The petitioner sought to correct the name she had listed as her father’s name on the marriage-license application. In support of her petition, the petitioner attached a copy of her birth certificate, which had been translated from Thai into English. The copy said that the document was ‘not recommended as a legal document,'” Georgia’s top court recounted. “The petitioner explained to Judge Peterson that she previously had listed her uncle’s name, rather than her father’s name, on her marriage-license application in 2016 because her father was not involved in her life and her uncle had raised her.”

But Peterson responded by going nuclear, setting a hearing where she sprang the contempt charges on the woman without adequate warning or advice “that she was entitled to have counsel present,” the removal order said.

When grilled about her actions before a disciplinary body, Peterson offered up “untruthful testimony” about her reasoning that “underscores her conscious wrongdoing,” the high court said.

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“Because Judge Peterson’s actions were not merely negligent, but painted a picture of conscious wrongdoing motivated by ill will, we agree that her actions were taken in bad faith. Thus, Judge Peterson’s conduct constitutes willful misconduct,” the order continued.

From here, the Georgia Supreme Court walked through three other issues, two having to do with Peterson’s courthouse behavior.

“By requesting sheriff’s deputies to work throughout the night so that she could have after-hours access to the courthouse (without any showing that she actually planned to be in the building, let alone work, during those wide-ranging timeframes) and using the panic button to summon a deputy to escort her to court, Judge Peterson did not demonstrate the decorum and temperament required of a judge,” the order said.

Yes, the top court in the state said Peterson pressed a “panic button” in her office, caused a deputy to panic, and then claimed that she had no idea that button was for emergencies only.

Then there was Peterson’s lawsuit against her local homeowner’s association (HOA), in which she represented herself as a plaintiff.

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The Georgia Supreme Court said that Peterson showed up to an HOA meeting in 2022 and tried to use that lawsuit — or really the prospect of dropping the lawsuit — as leverage for calling a special election, even as she acted as her own lawyer in the pending case and berated those present.

“The meeting was video-recorded, and the recording showed that during the meeting, Judge Peterson asked the two members of the Board of Directors questions about her ‘lawsuit,’ urged them to ‘call a special election,’ and offered to ‘dismiss the lawsuit’ if they did so,” the removal order said. “When other meeting attendees spoke out against Judge Peterson, she engaged in hostile exchanges and made sarcastic remarks toward them, such as, ‘You are in a low place.’ After the meeting, Judge Peterson told the members of the Board of Directors that their counsel was giving them bad legal advice.”

While remarking that the disciplinary panel recommending Peterson’s removal found she “lied during her testimony,” even about the panic button fiasco, the Georgia Supreme Court said that, taken together, the “extremely concerning nature” of the Peterson’s misconduct and “flagrant disregard for the law” only showed that she should no longer be a judge.

Read the removal order here .

The post ‘Flagrant disregard for the law’: Judge kicked out of office mere days after messy arrest at club and freak-out in custody first appeared on Law & Crime .