He sounds like the warden in the Shawshank Redemption….
Law & Crime reports…
The Pennsylvania Judicial Conduct Board on Wednesday filed formal accusations that an Allegheny County judge violated the state constitution and Code of Judicial Conduct by repeatedly making racist and offensive statements from the bench.
Judge Mark V. Tranquilli, who was placed on administrative leave earlier this year after referring to a Black juror as “Aunt Jemima,” is now facing six counts of judicial misconduct. The conduct board recommended that Tranquilli be suspended until the investigation into his conduct is completed.
The allegations against Tranquilli almost exclusively pertain to his demeaning treatment of Black defendants and jurors.
The first charge stems from the judge presiding over a 2015 custody case in which both of the parties were Black. Tranquilli allegedly said he did not care about the parties or their children, referred to himself as a “butcher,” and told the parents he would “split [their] baby in half like Solomon and sleep like a baby at night.”
Discussing the issue of communication with the couple, Tranquilli “affected an accent and dialect described as ‘Ebonics,’” saying, “And when I say communication, I don’t mean ‘and den da bitch done dis, and den da bitch done dat.’”
In March 2019, the judge told a defendant that if he didn’t comply with terms of probation, he [the judge] would “cast [him] down amongst the Sodomites” in prison.
After a jury returned a “not guilty” verdict which Tranquilli clearly overtly disagreed with in January, he called the prosecutor into his chambers and expressed “bewilderment” about the persons chosen to sit on the jury.
