Time for a retirement


This morning we have an appalling story of a Clark County, Washington judge who sat in his courtroom on Tuesday pumping out highly inappropriate comments about the fatal police shooting of Kevin Peterson Jr. last October. The judge was chatting up a court staff member and didn't realize he was on a live video and audio feed.

A Clark County judge apparently didn’t realize his courtroom conversation was live on YouTube as he referred to a young man killed last fall by sheriff’s deputies as “the Black guy they are trying to make an angel out of” and called him “dumb” for supposedly thinking he would go to prison for a relatively small drug bust.

District Court Judge Darvin Zimmerman, 70, also said Kevin Peterson Jr. “had a death wish” as well as disparaging Peterson’s father and defending his own son, a deputy who was on the drug task force trying to arrest Peterson....

Zimmerman can be heard on a recording obtained by The Oregonian/OregonLive saying he spoke with a chaplain who responded to the shooting that night and then relaying that Peterson’s father acknowledged to the chaplain that his son had a gun. Kevin Peterson Sr. also had gone to the scene.

Referring to the elder Peterson, Zimmerman said: “The next day he wakes up with dollar signs in his eyes and George Floyd’s attorneys.”...

The judge said his son had been promoted to sergeant and wasn’t one of the three deputies who fired on Peterson.

“He could have been a shooter and then they would be marching out at his house with signs saying, ‘You’re a murderer’ and all that bullshit,” the judge said.  

This one is not complicated. Darvin Zimmerman probably never should have been a judge. But he certainly should no longer be one as of today.

Comments

  1. The Chair of the Clark County Council said last June, “I do not think systemic racism exists in this county. Period."

    ReplyDelete

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