Seventeen months after he stepped down from the Mobile County circuit bench, the case of Herman Young Thomas remained, in every sense that mattered, unfinished.
Thomas resigned on Oct. 1, 2007, a move that aborted a public trial before the Alabama Court of the Judiciary on charges of judicial misconduct. Because the court lost jurisdiction the moment he surrendered his judgeship, the allegations were never tested in the open proceeding his fellow circuit judges had urged. They simply stopped, mid-sentence, and were left to linger.
By early 2009 the former judge was still a familiar figure around Mobile, appearing in courtrooms, at political events and in television commercials for The Brandyburg Group, where he kept a private law practice. The Alabama Bar Association member directory continued to list him with the honorific of his old office. Yet the road ahead looked far from smooth.
What the allegations described
The charges brought against Thomas were extraordinary. They ranged from poaching cases off other circuit judges’ dockets and altering sentences to checking inmates out of the Mobile County Metro Jail for outings, some of which allegedly included paddling sessions in a secluded second office the judge kept at the courthouse. Why prisoners would submit to being paddled — what leniency they may have gained by consenting, or what penalty they may have risked by refusing — was never explained in any public forum.
Thomas denied violating judicial ethics in his written answer to the Judicial Inquiry Commission complaint. His response was absolute but did not address the specific charges point by point. He did not return a call seeking comment.
Loose threads keep surfacing
The resignation did not close the file, in part because the defendants who passed through Thomas’s courtroom remained in the system or on the streets. Douglas Martin Hill, charged with murder in a Grand Bay killing at Thanksgiving, surfaced with a record showing that Thomas had ordered his release from custody on at least five occasions, according to court records — a history examined in a January 2009 news article on crime and leniency.
Then came John Furman, a veteran prosecutor under District Attorney John Tyson Jr., who accused his former boss in a late-January news article of letting politics rather than justice guide the handling of the Thomas matter.
One longtime criminal defense attorney saw partisanship, and perhaps a vendetta, in the appetite for pursuing Thomas further.
“This thing has been punted back and forth between larger state and federal players,” the attorney said. “The consensus has always been that they really need a lot more than the word of a few miscreants to bring a prosecution of a judge who is seen by many to be the victim of a vendetta within the court house.”
Tyson confirmed an investigation but said nothing beyond that. The FBI, the office of Attorney General Troy King and the Mobile County Bar Association were all believed to be examining the record. In politically delicate matters, federal authorities customarily take the lead, and the FBI’s investigative pace ranges from stately to glacial. Adding to the uncertainty, the U.S. Attorney’s office in Mobile was nearing a change in leadership following the election of Barack Obama.
A career that began quickly
Thomas’s rise was rapid. Gov. Guy Hunt, a Republican, chose him — a Democrat — in 1990 from a list of three names to fill the district court seat left by the late Judge Nick Kearney. Thomas had been admitted to the bar only three years earlier. At his swearing-in he pledged to make everyone proud, and for years his civic involvement was, by the standards of the local bench, without precedent.
Former District Attorney Chris Galanos, who hired Thomas as an assistant in 1988 and campaigned for him, said he had no knowledge either way of the specific allegations. But he said he noticed a change.
“In my opinion Herman’s personality changed when he became a circuit judge and I found him to be somewhat arbitrary and heavy-handed in his decision-making,” said Galanos, who later served five years as a circuit judge himself and said he never once checked an inmate out of jail.
“A good judge does not relish power,” Galanos said. “A good judge at times fears the power that he has because of the impact of his decisions.”
An older complaint
Long before the formal charges, at least one man had made similar claims on the record. In the fall of 2002, convicted murderer Michael Dewayne Anderson sued Thomas for bad faith, fraud and misrepresentation, alleging that the judge removed teenage boys from Metro Jail for paddlings. Anderson supplied affidavits from three other men with criminal records who swore to their own experiences.
The late Judge Robert G. Kendall, then presiding judge of Mobile County Circuit Court, dismissed the complaint almost immediately. A federal refiling in December 2003 was dismissed as well, by Senior U.S. District Judge W. Brevard Hand.
Court personnel are trained to treat the claims of criminals with skepticism. Yet as prosecutors themselves argue whenever they put a lawbreaker on the stand, it is generally the lawbreakers who possess first-hand knowledge of wrongdoing. That tension — between witnesses no one wants to believe and allegations no one has disproved — was what left the Thomas matter suspended, and what kept Mobile’s criminal justice community rumbling, periodically, like a waking volcano.