Judge Who Threatened to Shoot Black Teens Should Be Removed, Panel Says

A New York disciplinary panel said on Monday that a state judge should be removed from office for engaging in a “racially offensive, profane” diatribe during which she invoked her judicial position, threatened to shoot Black teenagers and expressed a bias in favor of the police.

The judge, Justice Erin P. Gall of State Supreme Court in Oneida County, made the remarks to law enforcement officers after a high school graduation party she was at in July 2022 descended into verbal arguments and physical fights amid the arrival of a large number of uninvited guests, the state’s Commission on Judicial Conduct said.

The officers’ body-worn and dashboard cameras recorded Justice Gall’s comments, and she acknowledged having made them. The commission found that impropriety had “permeated” her behavior on the night in question and that her “wide array of misconduct severely undermined public confidence” in “her ability to serve as a fair and impartial judge.”

“The judge’s behavior in this case is as shocking as anything I have seen in my 40 years of judicial ethics enforcement,” Robert H. Tembeckjian, the commission’s administrator and counsel, said in a statement.

Justice Gall, a Republican, was elected to the Supreme Court in 2011. Her 14-year-term is set to expire next year. She earns $232,600 a year and, the commission said, will be suspended with pay while the state’s Court of Appeals decides her fate. She has 30 days to appeal the commission’s determination to the court. Her lawyer, Robert Julian, said she planned to do so.

“We respectfully disagree with the determination,” Mr. Julian said. While he did not dispute the comments at issue, he wrote in a filing with the commission that his client had been in a “state of fear, dismay, frustration and exhaustion” when she made them.