State Sen. Ernie Chambers has filed a formal complaint against the Sarpy County judge who decided to leave a man with mental problems handcuffed in the lobby of a state psychiatric hospital.
NANCY HICKS / Lincoln Journal Star | Posted: Sunday, May 11, 2008 7:00 pm
Omaha Sen. Ernie Chambers filed an official complaint against a Sarpy County judge for sending a man to the Lincoln Regional Center in handcuffs.
Chambers referred to the situation as “a tawdry tale of a mentally ill person being reduced to a helpless pawn in a shoddy political squabble by a grandstanding numskull judge whose reprehensible conduct is unspeakably barbaric.”
The 19-year-old man had been found unable to stand trial because of mental illness and was committed to the regional center, but there was no space at the Lincoln center.
Rather than wait the two to four weeks it takes with the current waiting list, Judge Robert Wester ordered deputies to leave the man at the psychiatric hospital — even if the hospital refused to admit him.
He threatened to hold the deputies in contempt if they failed to comply with his order.
Wester, on vacation this week, could not be reached for comment on Chambers’ complaint.
Chambers said Wester violated the Nebraska code of judicial conduct that prohibits willful misconduct and conduct prejudicial to the administration of justice that brings the judicial office into disrepute.
Wester ignored the standard protocol — a waiting list that judges have traditionally accepted, Chambers said.
Instead, he stepped in and disrupted the system itself, Chambers said.
Wester leapfrogged over prior court orders of other judges, Chambers wrote in the complaint.
This is not an emergency situation, Chambers said in an interview Monday. And there were no circumstances that would justify Wester’s order to leave the man at the hospital.
A judge cannot do anything and everything he or she chooses without being called to account, Chambers said.
Trying to make a point about local officials’ frustrations is not the function of an unlawful court order, he wrote.
“A judicial office is a position of trust, and not a fiefdom,” Chambers wrote. And the court order, he wrote, “manifested gross insensitivity toward a mentally ill person and contempt for judicial orderliness and integrity.”
Chambers used a variety of adjectives to describe the judge’s conduct in his complaint to the Judicial Qualifications Commission.
“So brazen, contemptuous, reprehensible, inhumane, unprofessional, unjudicial and inexcusable was the atrocity fomented by the numskull judge in this case….”
Chambers said he wrote and sent the complaint quickly to Chief Justice Michael Heavican because he was so “irate, disgusted and furious” with the judge’s handling of the situation.
Chambers even had a few comments on the judge’s vacation.
“The fact that the numskull judge scurried into hiding, like a terrified gopher … bespeaks moral cowardice impelling a judicial scoundrel to flee from ‘facing the music’ which his own hands composed.”
It would have probably taken two to three weeks for a bed to become available at the regional center , said Scot Adams, director of the Behavioral Health Division with the Department of Health and Human Services.
There are four people on that waiting list, he said.
The Judicial Qualifications Commission could decide to conduct an investigation. Based on its conclusions, it could choose from a number of potential punishments, ranging from a reprimand to removal from the bench.
Reach Nancy Hicks at 473-7250 or nhicks@journalstar.com.