Federal Judge Suspended After Committee Finds She Has Mental Health Condition
Judge Ada Brown was ordered to undergo a psychiatric examination.
A federal judge has been suspended because fellow judges concluded she has mental health problems.
Elrod and other judges on the Judicial Council for the Fifth Circuit said in a Sept. 29 order they were reassigning all of Brown’s cases and, for at least three months, banning her from new case assignments.
Brown, 51, became a federal judge in 2019. She has not issued a comment on the suspension.
A complaint prompted Elrod to appoint a special committee composed of herself and two other judges to explore whether Brown has mental health problems that interfere with her ability to carry out the duties of a judge, according to the documents.
The documents redacted the identity of the person who filed the complaint.
The committee, formed in August, found that Brown had recused herself from more than 40 cases since June 1, either without explanation or “for unusual reasons.”
It also found that Brown had been making inappropriate comments, including racial insults; claiming without proof that orders were being entered in cases she oversaw without her permission; making racial insults to judges and court staffers; and “sending copious and bizarre emails to court staff and judges, including emails in the middle of the night, and copying and/or blind copying others who have no reason to be copied on such emails.”
Brown also stopped working for a period of time to protest a clerk’s failure to enter a recusal letter on the docket of a case to which she is no longer assigned, and disseminated confidential materials, including to reporters, regarding the proceedings against her, the council said on Monday.
Brown told Elrod twice that she intended to resign, then later reversed her position, according to the documents.
She did not appear as ordered before the committee and did not show up to a scheduled meeting with Elrod and U.S. District Judge Reed O'Connor, the chief of the district in which Brown works.
Brown said that she did not appear before the committee because she was “advised by counsel to only give testimony under oath due to the parallel investigation into these matters,” according to the documents. Brown did not detail the investigation to which she referred.
Brown also provided examples of what she said were judges moving cases to and from her docket without her knowledge, but declined to answer other questions, including about turnover among her staff, citing other investigations and her “inability to force” O’Connor to produce evidence related to her docket.
The committee in September ordered Brown to undergo a psychiatric examination within 30 days. It was not clear from the documents whether she had complied with that order.
Elrod, on Oct. 16, reappointed herself and the same judges to a special committee to further investigate Brown. The committee ordered Brown to appear in person before it on Oct. 30 for no more than three hours.
