A Baton Rouge state judge appears so incompetent in her office and has committed bias or legal errors in numerous criminal cases that she cannot be trusted to remain in office during an official investigation into her alleged misconduct, the Louisiana State Judiciary Commission recently said.
The Louisiana Supreme Court agreed this week and temporarily suspended Rose from her elected office while retaining her salary, saying she “poses a significant threat to the public.”
According to the commission, the misconduct she is accused of includes the allegation that District Attorney Hillar Moore “systematically targeted black men” when she advocated for the dismissal of a case in the spring.
“The young man committed no damn crimes. And I know the prosecutor probably wants to see every young black man in prison, but I don’t want that,” Rose said in an April 29 comment.
“And this case is four fucking years old now. And that’s the best you can come up with? You just want to do what, put every n***** in jail?”
Rose, who is black, won the seat in 2020 and is now running for a spot on the First Circuit Court of Appeals.
This was one of several cases in which the commission is investigating Rose based on complaints and media reports, according to the newly released filings. In asking the Louisiana Supreme Court to suspend Rose, the commission acknowledged that this was a drastic request.
The court has previously disqualified judges pending investigations, but the commission said there “appears to be no direct precedent for provisional disqualification in circumstances similar to those at issue here.”
Nevertheless, the Commission was “deeply concerned that Judge Rose’s continued clear errors of law in criminal cases, as well as her wholly inappropriate use of a despicable racist slur in court … mean that she could pose a significant risk of serious harm to the public or to the administration of justice if she remained in office.”
The records show that Rose took an apologetic stance toward the commission while arguing that her actions were not serious enough to require her to be held in contempt of the commission.
Her lawyers described Rose as “extremely remorseful” regarding the comment in the sidebar and “the impact those statements had on the agencies and individuals involved, the public and the judiciary as a whole.” Rose “accepts full responsibility for her lapse of judgment in this regard, which resulted in an extreme departure from her character.”
District Attorney Moore declined to comment on Rose’s suspension or the implications of her alleged offense.
Rose attributed this to the intense stress caused by the negative media coverage, saying that at the time she suffered from “hair loss, anxiety and stomach upset as a result of the sustained intense media scrutiny combined with the normal stressors” of her job.
However, she denied the commission’s accusation that she had tried to force prosecutors to drop charges in the case.
Rose’s disqualification was not the result of a single incident, the commission said, but was based on evidence of her misconduct in four different criminal cases.
“In another case, it was alleged and reported that after a jury found a defendant not guilty, Judge Rose met with the jury and then changed the verdict to guilty, resulting in a mistrial and causing this honorable court to vacate the mistrial and restore the acquittal,” the commission wrote.
In a third case, Rose is said to have imposed an unlawful conviction on a defendant charged with aggravated arson and then overturned the conviction along with the guilty plea.
“Finally, a media article reported that in a fourth criminal case, Judge Rose initially convicted a defendant of a non-existent offense and, after being made aware of the invalidity of the verdict, pronounced an acquittal,” the commission wrote.
Rose admitted to poor performance in some of these cases, according to the records, but she claimed to the commission that she meant well.
Her conduct was “by and large the unfortunate result of unintentional errors, negligence and inadvertent lack of preparation,” her lawyers wrote recently. “It was by no means the result of willful indifference to her responsibilities to justice, poor practices or lack of faith.”
However, Rose’s apologies were not enough to keep her in office, as the Commission expressed “serious concerns” about her competence.
The Supreme Court’s decision was made by a vote of 5-2, with Justices Jeff Hughes and Piper Griffin dissenting.
Provisional disqualifications of judges are rare and are usually reserved for serious allegations of misconduct such as sexual harassment or tax evasion. Yet since 2018, at least four other district and municipal judges in southern Louisiana have been provisionally disqualified pending the results of investigations.
In several cases, judges resigned before the Supreme Court imposed final disciplinary action against them.
James Clary Jr., Rose’s attorney, insisted that Rose would continue to cooperate with the investigation into misconduct.
“We have absolute respect for the Supreme Court’s procedures and rules,” Clary said. “At the end of the day, we want to be better.”
