It's been a rough few months in the legal system of East Baton Rouge Parish.
One 19th Judicial District Court judge has been accused of lying about her military record when she ran for office in 2020, another found a man guilty of a nonexistent crime and a third earned a rebuke from the state Supreme Court, which accused her of abusing her discretion when she overturned a 50-year-old rape conviction.
The most recent revelations center on Tiffany Foxworth-Roberts, who was elected in 2020 after a bruising campaign in which she claimed to have served in three different wars and achieved the rank of captain in the U.S. Army.
But the Louisiana Judiciary Commission, which investigates judicial misconduct and makes recommendations to the Supreme Court, obtained Foxworth-Roberts' military records in April and concluded none of those claims were true. Foxworth-Roberts has a hearing before the Commission scheduled for October.
One of her colleagues, state District Judge Eboni Johnson Rose, has also earned opprobrium for her particular brand of judicial gymnastics. In the most notable example, Johnson Rose, who was presiding over a bench trial in March, found a former Baton Rouge police officer guilty of a "misdemeanor grade" of malfeasance in office.
One problem: There is no misdemeanor malfeasance charge in Louisiana law.
More than three weeks later, Johnson Rose admitted her mistake and changed her verdict to not guilty, leaving prosecutors stunned.
State District Judge Gail Horne Ray
That's not Johnson Rose's only questionable recent decision. In May, she was forced to rescind a sentence she handed down in an aggravated arson case because her sentence was lighter than Louisiana law allows. And in April, Johnson Rose called parties back to a courtroom after a jury found a man not guilty. She met with jurors after the verdict, she said, and realized they meant to find him guilty of a lesser charge. The Supreme Court reinstated the original not guilty verdict, with one justice questioning Rose's "professional competency."
Finally, 19th JDC Judge Gail Horne Ray was accused by the Supreme Court of committing a "patent abuse of discretion" when she summarily overturned the 50-year-old conviction of a man who raped women at knifepoint. The man, who was in court seeking a commutation of sentence, had not asked Ray to review his conviction. But that's what she did, deciding the trial judge had given wrong instructions to the jury and therefore he should be set free. The state's highest court stayed that order.
There are few arenas of government where integrity and competence are more important than in the courtroom, especially now, when legal institutions are under attack around the country. Those who appear in the 19th JDC's courtrooms expect to have their cases heard by honest jurists whose decisions are grounded in black letter law. Those litigants, as well as the people of East Baton Rouge Parish, deserve better.