Allegations that suspended Mobile County Circuit Judge Herman Thomas paddled inmates should not have come as news to the veteran jurist. Five years earlier, a prisoner had sued him making the same accusations, supported by sworn statements from three other men with criminal records.
In the fall of 2002, convicted murderer Michael Dewayne Anderson charged in a lawsuit that authorities were “fully aware of Judge Herman Thomas continually going to the Mobile County Metro Jail, and getting teenage boys out for a paddling on their butt. I know of teenage boys with trafficking cases that pulled down their pants and took a paddling, and agreed to spend time with Judge Herman Thomas and he put them on the streets free.”
Anderson sued Thomas for “bad faith, fraud and misrepresentation” in his judicial role, alleging the judge pressured him for a personal relationship after his release from prison in 1994 and punished him from the bench when he refused.
The affidavits
Three men supplied sworn statements supporting Anderson’s account.
John Richardson, whose record was filled with property crimes between 1999 and 2002, said in a Nov. 26, 2002, affidavit: “When I used to be in the Mobile County Metro Jail, it was sad to hear the young dope dealers out of Toulminville and Prichard saying that they were going to take a paddling on their butts from Judge Thomas to be released. They would call Judge Thomas at his home like this was just something to do, but he would come just as they said he would. This court only has to check the records of the Mobile County Metro Jail, and the truth will come to light.”
Gary Blunt, whose record included burglary, robbery and theft between 1997 and 2006, swore in an Oct. 10, 2002, statement that Thomas “always told me that I would need his help in the long run, and it would be good to have him in my corner,” and that when Blunt made clear he was not interested, the judge “became angry” and said he would make sure Blunt went to prison. “He didn’t lie,” Blunt said.
Nathaniel Agee Jr. said in a Nov. 22, 2002, statement that he and Thomas “started off going fishing together, hanging out together,” and that Thomas gave him money in jail and secured his release when Agee promised they could spend time together. Agee said Thomas warned him not to testify against Prichard police officers in a federal investigation. He testified anyway, he said, and was told to get ready for prison.
“Judge Thomas takes advantage of young men’s lives with his power of the court, and it’s hard to get around him if you’re on his docket,” Agee stated.
Dismissed, and dismissed again
The complaint went nowhere. The late Judge Robert G. Kendall, then presiding judge of Mobile County Circuit Court, dismissed it almost immediately, according to court records. Anderson tried to revive the case in federal court in December 2003; Senior U.S. District Judge W. Brevard Hand dismissed that complaint too, 39 days later.
Court personnel have long learned to treat the claims of career criminals with deep skepticism, and Anderson was a convicted murderer serving time for the 1995 shooting of Walter Jasper Hawthorne. The other three men all had records of their own. Yet as prosecutors themselves argue when they put lawbreakers on the stand, it is criminals rather than Sunday school teachers who tend to have firsthand knowledge of wrongdoing.
The inquiry catches up
By September 2007 Thomas was suspended and under investigation by the Alabama Judicial Inquiry Commission, which had expanded its review to include the paddling allegations. The judge was reported to have kept a second, smaller windowless office at the courthouse where he allegedly struck inmates with a wooden paddle.
Thomas himself had originally requested the JIC inquiry after other judges complained that he had taken cases off their dockets without their knowledge — case tampering that allegedly included sentence reductions and outright releases from jail.
Asked about the paddling claims by a reporter for the daily newspaper that first disclosed the expanded inquiry, Thomas was quoted as saying, “This is news to me.” He offered no further comment, consistent with his silence toward the press throughout. A message left at his home was not immediately returned.
The ethics charges were set for trial before the Alabama Court of the Judiciary in Montgomery on Oct. 29. In an irony not lost on the courthouse, Anderson — by then 45 and imprisoned in Springville — had a pending ineffective-counsel motion assigned earlier that month to the docket of “HYT,” Judge Herman Young Thomas. It was scheduled for 10 a.m. Friday, Nov. 2. In Thomas’s absence, his docket was being handled by retired Circuit Judges Teddy McDermott and Braxton Kittrell.