A defendant who was captured in courtroom video leaping over a judge’s bench and attacking her, touching off a bloody brawl, is scheduled to appear before her again Monday morning.
In his Jan. 3 appearance before Clark County District Court Judge Mary Kay Holthus, Deobra Redden, who was facing prison time for a felony battery charge stemming from a baseball bat attack last year, tried to convince the judge that he was turning around his violent past.
Redden asked for leniency while describing himself as “a person who never stops trying to do the right thing no matter how hard it is.”
But when it became clear Holthus was going to sentence him to prison time, and as the court marshal moved to handcuff and take him into custody, Redden yelled expletives and charged forward. People in the courtroom audience, including his foster mother, began to scream.
Because that’s not what impartial means. Impartial doesn’t mean dispassionate, hardly any judge sits a bench and not feel something about at least ten percent of their cases.
Impartial means not allowing that emotion to be the main driver. Judges and juries are not robots and the Court system takes this facet into account in appeals.
But, if some dude had jumped at you like a flying squirrel, attacking you and pulling out some of your hair, do you think that you’d be able to make any determinations about that individual without emotion?
She should recuse herself since she’s once of his assault victims.
She had already determined the sentencing, she just needs to deliver it without getting beaten up. If any defendant could get a new judge by assaulting the one assigned, it would bring in a new era of judge shopping.
I think he needs a good long stay in prison. He’s already a convicted felon and this just proved he’s not fit to be in society. The judge is well within her rights to sentence him to life if she chooses.
I think he deserves life in prison as well, but that should be sentenced by another judge.
Yeah. It comes with being a sociopath. Have you met lawyers?
Again you’re mistaking what impartial means. It does not mean zero emotion, it means that emotions cannot be the primary factor.
The judge is a human being, expecting zero emotion is not having a real world view of the court system. Human beings, that feel emotion dictate justice for other human beings. Justice is not an innate construct of the universe, it exists merely as an idea within our mind and nothing more.
There is no such thing as absolute objective justice nor is there absolute subjective justice. It is a balance and each step of the way in the system is to ensure that balance. But there’s no magic string of words that instruct how to keep that balance, it’s just up to the minds of those that preserve justice to do such.