The public importance of scandalous misconduct by judges – including a magistrate who used a patrol car to make a joke and another who spoke of doing “patriarchal monitoring” on TikTok – motivated the president of the Supreme Court of Justice, John Pérez, to leave to face the criticism and to highlight that in all cases disciplinary procedures were opened to investigate the conduct of the magistrates in question. But the five cases cited by the president are not the only ones. According to court figures to which he agreed The Observercurrently has 25 files in process.
One corresponds to a case of a justice of the peace that occurred in 2020, there are 16 open cases in 2021 and eight this 2022 (until March 14). In these three and a half months, the Court initiated the same number of disciplinary proceedings as in all of 2020, eight. In 2021, in total, there were 27. According to President Pérez, the processes are generally opened due to “delays or malfunctions”, although he acknowledged that there were serious cases, for example that of a lawyer from the Interior that in 2021 ended in his dismissal.
This was the case of the former judge of Rivera María Noel Sánchez, who was charged with the crime of embezzlement, repeated crimes of abuse of functions and a crime of private violence, all of them under a real reiteration regime. She allegedly intimidated some of the people whose cell phone her husband stole from them, so that they would not file a criminal complaint, using her position as a magistrate. The complicity of her professional also reached the point of giving her husband the key to the courthouse, which made it easier for the man to enter the courthouse in recent days, and damaged some computers.
The sanctions are varied, but the most common is reprimand (six of the eight procedures started in 2020 ended with this result). Another is still in process and the rest was imposed the loss of the right to promotion for one year.
In 2020 there were three reprimands, but there were also cases in which the magistrate was suspended from office for 15 days without pay and another was warned and censured orally (a call for attention transmitted orally). On the other hand, there were three cases of files that were closed.
The stage prior to the beginning of a disciplinary process (which may or may not lead to a sanction), is the request for reports. At this stage, the judges can explain the reason for a certain action that was called into question. In 2020, the Court requested reports from a total of 143 magistrates. One had to do it in 24 hours, 18 in 48 hours, 111 in 72 hours, one in five days and 12 in 10 days. In 2021 this figure increased significantly: there were 587 requests for reports. 584 had to respond within 72 hours and three of them within five days.
So far in 2022, the Court has requested reports from 34 magistrates, all to be answered within 72 hours. One of them is the case of Judge Ada Siré, for the video that she uploaded to the TikTok social network with comments about machismo and in which she spoke of doing “patriarchal monitoring.” In the middle, she was certified for medical leave and the term was suspended. After it resumed, a summary was initiated.
Beyond the requests for reports and the disciplinary processes, the most serious event prior to the sanction is the administrative investigation. According to regulation of the Judiciary, is “the procedure tending to determine or verify the existence of irregular or illicit acts or facts committed in the service or that directly affect it -even if they are foreign to it-, and to identify the alleged perpetrators”. There, the trend is reversed: there were more in 2020. While in that year there were 11, in 2021 they were reduced to five. So far in 2022 none have been opened.
