Amy L. Zanelli, an elected Magisterial District Judge in Lehigh County in Pennsylvania, is in a peck of trouble due to some unjudicial conduct that can only be responded to with “What was she thinking?”
For example, when a court employee tried to whisper to her that she had made an erroneous statement in court about a defendant’s sentence, the judge first ignored the staffer, then when the woman tried to get her attention again, exploded with “I am the judge, and you are just a fucking secretary! I will decide and make the determination about what happens in this courtroom!”
Judge Zanelli has habitually used vulgar rhetoric, apparently being especially fond of the word “cuntrageous.”
Classy! The judge also brought into her office a desk calendar that contained explicit sexual messages”evidently intended to be humorous” in the words of the ethics complaint, such as “Bedroom Plants He’ll Have to Slice Through With a Machete If He Wants That Pussy.” This was displayed in the general work area until Judge Zanelli removed it after complaints from her staff.
But here’s my favorite: Zanelli possessed what she termed a “Book of Grudges” in her office, which had the appearance of an ancient leather-bound tome with papyrus pages. The “Book of Grudges” bore an inscription written by the judge which stated, “Upon this day, we shall begin to record within our Book of Grudges.” Zanelli entered notes in her book, like describing a local attorney as “Just a Dick.” The judge encouraged her staff to make additions to the notes in the “Book of Grudges” about other individuals doing business in Zanelli’s court. They declined, though Zanelli placed the “Book of Grudges” in a general work area accessible to all staff for them to add notations to it to it, if they wished.
Eventually she was persuaded to remove it, but judges are not supposed to advertise their “grudges.” Canon 1, Rule 1.2 of the Code of Judicial Ethics states:
“A magisterial district judge shall act at all times in a manner that promotes public confidence in the independence, integrity, and impartiality of the judiciary, and shall avoid impropriety and the appearance of impropriety.”
Judge Zanelli also was routinely late for court, skipped work, often choosing not to preside on Fridays. The whole eye-popping complaint is here.
A question: Has our judiciary always contained so many unethical, corrupt, biased, incompetent and just plain lousy judges, or is it just because of the internet that this is now so obvious?
Ethics Alarms 
I was expecting one big Costanza to finish out this post.
-Jut
You know me too well: George was the planned intro, then I was beguiled by how lovely an unethical judge she is. Probably helped her get elected.
She’s a lazy slug and an abusive b—h who thinks the rules don’t apply to her and that a judgeship is a cushy gig. This isn’t that uncommon, there are plenty of judges who stop just short of being abusive and don’t exactly rush to get the court’s business done. However, most of them aren’t flagrant, most know where the line is, and most don’t cross it. In NJ, where judges are appointed, not elected, most know to tread VERY carefully for the first seven years, after which time they come up for tenure and then can only be fired for good cause. A few don’t, like one who stupidly ordered her secretary to do personal business and tried to record a conversation with the chief judge on the sly and another who went to a party for probation officers, got drunk, and started playing grab-ass with the women there. Both were not granted tenure and are considered to have “blown it.”
Then there are those who just become useless, like one who was a drunk and was given nothing but settlement conferences and very light motions, or obviously biased, like another who made no bones about the fact that he hated one particular insurance company to the point where plaintiff’s attorneys asked specifically for cases with that company to be scheduled with him if at all possible. He also routinely denied even minor motions about things like correcting clerical errors over being a day late or other no-harm, no-foul issues, self-praising as a “stickler for the rules.” Then there are the sexual harassers who squeeze the good-looking intern’s behind and other stupid stuff.
The one that takes the cake, though, which story I may have told, is an infamous lawyer who was neither well-liked nor particularly outstanding who was appointed to be the presiding civil judge in one county with a severe backlog. Well, she cleared the backlog, at the expense of acting like a tyrant, denying any and all requests, and screaming and insulting attorneys from the bench. Finally, the attorneys sent one very politically powerful attorney up against her, she was abusive to him, he made a call, and she lost the chief judgeship.
It gets better. This same judge was dealing with a pro se litigant, which no judge likes to do, and he claimed not to have gotten a court notice. She sneered at him that she was sure his welfare check had no problem finding its way to him. He called his assemblyman, the assemblyman called the Director of the Administrative Office of the Courts, essentially the chief judge for all of NJ, and the director called this judge and told her she had until close of business that day to retire, or he’d personally enter an order at 9 a.m. the following morning kicking her off the bench and stripping her pension.
So yeah, what this woman did is common, even bush league compared to some of what I’ve seen.
Given her vocabulary, I’m going to guess she’s a Democrat.
Old Bill, I was unable to determine for sure whether she’s a registered Democrat or Republican (the judge position itself is nonpartisan, it seems) but when she was on the Lehigh County Board she sponsored a bill to give a $5K grant to the Bradbury-Sullivan LGBT Community Center. Unlike you, I don’t consider foul language a reliable indicator of political leanings — for example, you are more prone to this than I am, and I am confident you are NOT a Democrat! — but support of LGBT definitely is more aligned with the Democrat stereotype! So like you, I would bet that if she has a party affiliation, it is most likely Democratic.