And today in “When Randomly Assigning Judges to Political Cases Goes Wrong,” I present to you the criminal case against Milwaukee County, Wisconsin Circuit Judge Hannah Dugan and U.S. District Judge Lynn Adelman.
Dugan, as you may recall, is facing felony charges of concealing a person from arrest and obstruction of proceedings after she helped an illegal immigrant inside her courtroom evade Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials who had come to take him into custody.
Last month, Eduardo Flores-Ruiz, a Mexican national, was appearing before Dugan for a pre-trial conference on three counts of misdemeanor battery with modifiers for domestic violence when ICE showed up to detain him. Not only did Dugan allegedly furiously confront the officers, she took the defendant and his attorney back into her chambers then got them out a private exit, so they could attempt an escape.
This didn’t work, mercifully, and while Dugan now faces the potential for years in prison should she be convicted, she’s also become a hero of #TheResistance2.0, such as it may exist.
Now, as you may or may not know, cases are assigned randomly to judges, usually by electronic systems, so there can be no question of tampering. Indeed, there’s no evidence that the system has acted in a non-random manner in this case or others — but therein lies the problem with a strictly random system, as constitutional scholar Jonathan Turley noted in a thread on X: Dugan’s case will be provided over by Judge Adelman, who has a long history of extrajudicial activism.
Turley, a professor at George Washington University Law School, noted that the move “will add even greater controversy to an already controversial case.”
“Adelman has a history of injudicious and biased political commentary,” Turley wrote in a thread on social media Tuesday.
“Judge Adelman attacked Chief Justice Roberts as lying in his confirmation hearing and described Trump as ‘an autocrat’ who is ‘disinclined to buck the wealthy individuals and corporations who control his party,’” he noted.
…Judge Adelman attacked Chief Justice Roberts as lying in his confirmation hearing and described Trump as “an autocrat” who is “disinclined to buck the wealthy individuals and corporations who control his party.”…
— Jonathan Turley (@JonathanTurley) May 20, 2025
Is the choice of judge in this case fair?
“He was previously reversed and rebuked in a voter ID case after largely ignoring controlling precedent. For many conservatives, they may see little difference between the two judges in the case in terms of their demeanor and detachment,” Turley continued.
“Judge Alderman’s public commentary is another example of how extrajudicial statements undermine the judiciary. This history should not be added to a controversial case and raise questions over the objectivity and neutrality of the court.”
…Judge Alderman’s public commentary is another example of how extrajudicial statements undermine the judiciary. This history should not be added to a controversial case and raise questions over the objectivity and neutrality of the court. https://t.co/VXrfJKt7Yv
— Jonathan Turley (@JonathanTurley) May 20, 2025
Turley linked to a piece he had written a few days earlier about “extrajudicial comments made by [Supreme Court] Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan”:
The troubling trend has created the impression of justices maintaining constituencies on the left and the right. The adoration and attention can have a corrosive effect on a jurist caught up in the moment. Previously, Sotomayor was criticized when she directly called for political action from young law students to defend abortion rights.
Sotomayor acknowledged, “I am pointing out to that when I shouldn’t because they tell me I shouldn’t.” However, she criticized a recent decision of the court from which she had dissented and chastised her conservative colleagues who “have opted to bury their heads in the sand.” She added, “You know, I can’t change Texas’ law but you can and everyone else who may or may not like it can go out there and be lobbying forces in changing laws that you don’t like.”
Kagan, Turley noted, has a history of flip-flopping on precedent, particularly when it comes to venue-shopping for universal injunctions during oral arguments over a case involving birthright citizenship:
In 2022, when President Biden faced a fraction of the injunctions imposed against Trump, Justice Elena Kagan publicly condemned the use of universal injunctions in an interview at Northwestern University School of Law. She lashed out at the obvious “forum shopping” to get before favorable courts and said “It just cannot be right that one district judge can stop a nationwide policy in its tracks and leave it stopped for the years it takes to go through the normal [appellate] process.” She added, “You look at something like that and you think, that can’t be right.”
Now, in the Trump administration, Kagan has a case that can right that wrong by requiring parties to certify a national class action if they want a national injunction. However, Kagan raised some eyebrows by quickly stating that “this case is very different” and then suggesting that there was a need for national injunctions against Trump.
As Solicitor General John Sauer tried to distinguish between the procedural question before the Court from the merits (which have not been fully briefed), Kagan and Sotomayor insisted that the unconstitutionality was clear. Kagan snapped “Every court is ruling against you.”
Kagan and Sotomayor, of course, have a greater purview than Judge Adelman does, and there’s no system to force their recusal from cases, but this makes an excellent argument for something at lower levels that would discourage extrajudicial judicial activism.
In cases like Dugan’s, where the political import is clear, there needs to be a clear mechanism to flag both judges who have made these comments and cases that might carry political significance — based around discrete criteria in both situations, so there isn’t a slippery slope — and a mechanism that precludes these judges from being matched up with these cases, whether their political views comport or clash with those of the parties involved.
This doesn’t need to be a laundry list or put a gag on judges who feel that they need to exercise their First Amendment rights outside of their job as independent arbiters of the law inside their courtroom. Rather, it removes the stench of doubt that will hang over this case if Dugan manages to get a hung jury or an acquittal. Questions will then invariably arise about what evidence was allowed to be introduced, what questions were allowed to be asked of witnesses, and so on and so forth.
Judges may have political leanings, and identifiable ones, but when they make clear their opinions on the events on partisan matters outside of their opinions and obvious partisan matters happen to come up before them, it’s not rocket science that the appearance of conflicts of interest need to be avoided.
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