The long-running ethics case against suspended Mobile County Circuit Judge Herman Thomas grew more tangled this week after attorneys for Alabama Attorney General Troy King withdrew from the Judicial Inquiry Commission’s investigation of the judge, citing a conflict of interest between the two state offices.
The withdrawal came in a filing styled an “Emergency Notice of Withdrawal of Counsel for, and Motion to Continue on Behalf of, the Judicial Inquiry Commission.” In it, the commission asked the Alabama Court of the Judiciary for a 90-day continuance of the trial, which had been scheduled to begin July 25. According to the commission, more time is needed to hire new counsel and to conduct the additional investigation necessary to properly resolve the charges that Thomas violated the state’s code of judicial ethics.
The two prosecutors departing the case were Deputy Attorney General Bill Lisenby Jr. and Assistant Attorney General W. Brent Woodall. The motion to withdraw was submitted Tuesday, July 17.
A conflict between two arms of state government
At the center of the reshuffling is an awkward structural reality of Alabama government: the attorney general’s office serves as legal counsel to state agencies and officers across the executive branch, while the Judicial Inquiry Commission is itself a state body charged with investigating and prosecuting judicial misconduct. When the subject of a disciplinary investigation is another statewide constitutional actor — in this case a sitting circuit judge suspended from the bench — the boundaries of who may represent whom become difficult to draw. Attorneys for the attorney general concluded that representing the commission in a case with these stakes put the office’s competing obligations on a collision course, and they stepped aside rather than press forward under that cloud.
The departure of Lisenby and Woodall removes the two lawyers who had been shepherding the commission’s case through the Court of the Judiciary, the specialized tribunal that hears disciplinary matters involving Alabama judges. Their withdrawal does not end the prosecution, but it forces the commission to rebuild its legal team from the ground up before the evidence can be presented at trial.
How judicial discipline works in Alabama
Alabama judges answer to a discipline system that operates apart from the ordinary criminal and civil courts. Complaints about a judge’s conduct are filed with the Judicial Inquiry Commission, a panel made up of judges, attorneys and citizen members appointed from across the state. The commission investigates those complaints in confidence, and if it finds sufficient grounds, it files formal charges with the Alabama Court of the Judiciary.
The Court of the Judiciary is a nine-member body empowered to discipline or remove judges who violate the canons of judicial ethics. Its members include appellate and circuit judges, practicing lawyers and appointed lay members, and its decisions range from dismissal of charges to public censure, suspension and removal from office. A judge charged before the court may be suspended pending trial, which is the posture Thomas has occupied since the case began. Because the commission acts as prosecutor and the court sits as judge and jury in these matters, the identity and independence of the commission’s lawyers matter a great deal — which is precisely why the change in counsel resonated through the courthouse this week.
For the Mobile County legal community, the proceedings against Thomas had already become one of the most closely watched judicial matters in memory. A once-prominent member of the circuit bench found himself suspended and facing a formal disciplinary reckoning before the Court of the Judiciary, the state tribunal empowered to discipline or remove Alabama judges who run afoul of ethical canons. With the trial postponed and the prosecution team in flux, the timeline for that reckoning remained uncertain.
Mediation collapsed first
Judicial Inquiry Commission Chairman Randall L. Cole, a circuit judge in Fort Payne, laid out the sequence of events in a letter to King written the same Tuesday. Cole noted that King’s attorneys disclosed the conflict on Friday, July 13, in the aftermath of a lengthy but ultimately unsuccessful attempt to mediate the complaint.
“In the light of your further discussion of this matter with the Commission’s staff yesterday, the Commission is of the opinion that representation by outside counsel is necessary,” Cole wrote.
The reference to mediation is significant. In judicial discipline matters, as in much of civil litigation, the parties are encouraged to explore settlement before a full trial, and a lengthy mediation effort usually signals that both sides saw room to resolve the charges without a contested hearing. That the talks ran long and still ended without agreement means the case will now be fought out in full view before the Court of the Judiciary, with all of the public attention that accompanies a sitting judge’s defense.
Parties to the dispute said the commission’s requests were virtually certain to be granted, and they noted that the panel’s decision to split from the attorney general’s office in favor of outside counsel was not without precedent.
Hiring new counsel takes time
The 90-day continuance the commission requested reflects more than a scheduling formality. Retaining new counsel for a case of this magnitude is a deliberate process: the commission must identify lawyers with trial experience and no entanglements of their own, negotiate the terms of the engagement, and give the incoming team time to absorb a file that has grown across months of investigation. The commission also told the court that fresh investigation remains necessary to properly resolve the charges, which means the new lawyers will not simply try the case as inherited — they will be expected to finish building it.
Continuances of this length are not unusual in complex disciplinary matters, and the Court of the Judiciary has historically granted reasonable delays where the purpose is to protect the integrity of the proceeding rather than to run out the clock. Because the request came from the prosecuting body itself, rather than from the accused, observers expected little resistance — and Thomas, notably, raised no objection of his own.
The shake-up also leaves open questions about how the outside counsel will be retained and at what cost, matters the commission has not detailed publicly. What is clear is that the case will proceed under new legal leadership, and that the trial date of July 25 is effectively off the calendar.
Thomas does not object
Through his attorney, Dave Boyd, Thomas said he did not oppose the delay, though he neither agreed nor disagreed that it was necessary. Boyd asked that a scheduling conference be held once the commission engaged new counsel to guide the case forward.
That posture keeps the defense in a patient position. By neither endorsing nor fighting the continuance, Thomas preserves his own options while the commission reorganizes. The defense’s request for a scheduling conference once new lawyers are on board is a practical one: trial dates, discovery deadlines and motion practice all hang on who is prosecuting the case and how quickly they can be ready.
Thomas was first charged in March with violations of the state’s code of judicial ethics. Additional counts were later added after most of the local bench complained that Thomas had been shifting cases onto his own docket from the dockets of fellow judges, often without their knowledge or consent.
The docket-shifting complaints
The allegations about case assignments have given the ethics case much of its texture. In a circuit court, cases are ordinarily distributed under established administrative procedures designed to spread the workload evenly among judges and to keep litigants from shopping for a favorable courtroom. Complaints from a large share of the local bench that cases were being pulled onto one judge’s docket without notice strike at the heart of that system, because they involve not a single disputed ruling but the machinery by which justice is allocated among the county’s courtrooms.
Those additional counts, layered onto the original charges from March, expanded the scope of the commission’s investigation and made a prompt trial increasingly difficult. The accumulating counts, and now the change in prosecutors, all but guaranteed that any resolution would stretch well into the fall.
What comes next
Once the commission retains new counsel, the case is expected to return to the Court of the Judiciary for a fresh scheduling order, with the additional investigation the commission described likely to run in parallel. For Mobile County’s courthouse regulars — the lawyers who practice before the circuit bench, the judges who shared its administrative burdens, and the litigants whose cases move through it — the immediate effect is a longer wait for certainty about who will be deciding their cases and under what authority.
What was clear was that the commission intended to press ahead once it secured new lawyers, and that the additional investigation it described suggested the matter was far from winding down. For now, the calendar cleared, the attorneys reshuffled, and a courthouse that had followed every filing settled in to wait for the next chapter.