The reprimand is sealed

On May 22, 2026, the U.S. Judicial Conference’s Committee on Judicial Conduct and Disability approved a private reprimand of a federal district judge in the Eleventh Circuit. The judge is not named. The court is not identified. The police officer with whom the judge had a two-year extramarital affair, including repeated sexual intercourse in the judge’s chambers during business hours, is not named. The police department that employed the officer — a department, the order acknowledges, "involved in numerous criminal and civil cases being litigated in the district" — is not named. The chief judge of the district court who relayed the complaint upward is not named.

The Eleventh Circuit Judicial Council’s order does name Chief Circuit Judge William H. Pryor Jr., who appointed the Special Committee that investigated, and it names the sanction. The sanction: a private reprimand, apology letters to six former clerks, the judge’s agreement to forgo serving as chief judge of the district court should the judge otherwise be eligible, and an agreement to indefinitely refrain from service on any Judicial Conference committee. The Committee on Judicial Conduct and Disability called this discipline "appropriate and proportionate." Reuters reported the decision on Tuesday.

The misconduct system this order comes out of is internal to the federal judiciary: complaints are filed under the Judicial Conduct and Disability Act of 1980 and handled first by circuit chief judges and judicial councils, with review by a Judicial Conference committee. The system is administered within the judiciary, by judicial actors, about judicial actors. Its proceedings are confidential, and when a complaint is resolved through a privately communicated reprimand, the Judicial-Conduct Rules require the public materials to omit both the judge’s name and the text of the reprimand. The problem is not simply that names are withheld. It is that the withheld details are the details one would need to audit the institution’s own account.

What the Special Committee found

The Special Committee’s final report in Judicial Complaint No. 11-25-90212, dated December 10, 2025, found three instances of judicial misconduct, and the Eleventh Circuit Judicial Council adopted those findings.

The first: from approximately October 2023 through October 2025, the Subject Judge carried on an extramarital affair with a high-ranking officer of a local police department. During that period, the judge had sexual intercourse with the officer in the judge’s chambers, during business hours, on multiple occasions. The clerk who first reported the conduct sat at the desk immediately outside the judge’s office. Investigation counsel inspected the layout of a similar chambers and confirmed that "noises, even the sound of whispering, could be heard regardless of whether the door was opened or closed." Three of six former law clerks interviewed by counsel reported personally hearing what they understood to be intimate contact. One clerk, the report says, "had to leave the office for the day." Another lost focus at work and was unable to sleep.

The second: the judge knowingly attended a partisan political event hosted by a district attorney’s campaign. The judge initially characterized the attendance as a private "mixer" of former colleagues, but the Special Committee, considering the judge’s eventual concession and the surrounding context, found that the larger event was sponsored by a campaign. Canon 5 of the Code of Conduct for U.S. Judges explicitly prohibits a judge from attending "a dinner or other event sponsored by a political organization or candidate."

The third: the judge made false statements to Chief Judge Pryor and to the Chief District Judge in the judge’s September 29 and 30, 2025 communications. In writing, the judge characterized the allegations as "outrageous" and "baseless," claimed not to know which officer the reporting clerk could possibly be referring to, and implied that the clerk was retaliating for being disciplined over phone use and tardiness. The judge maintained that denial for eleven days. In that time, investigation counsel pulled courthouse security footage and sign-in logs, interviewed five of the judge’s former clerks, transported a sofa cushion from the judge’s chambers to a qualified laboratory in another state for an acid-phosphate test, and inspected a comparable chambers for acoustic carry. The footage showed the officer signing in and out as a law enforcement visitor on dates the clerk had specified. The cushion test returned negative. The reporting clerk was interviewed later, on October 21. On October 10, 2025, through counsel, the judge recanted and admitted the affair and the in-chambers conduct.

The Special Committee recommended, and the Subject Judge accepted, a private reprimand. The agreement included apology letters to the six former clerks interviewed by counsel, the agreement to forgo serving as chief judge, and the agreement to indefinitely refrain from Judicial Conference committee service. The Special Committee did consider, and decline to recommend, a public reprimand. The cited mitigating factors were the judge’s eventual candor, the unlikelihood of recurrence, and the judge’s "otherwise exemplary service to the court."

One detail of the sanction is worth holding up. In the judge’s submission on appropriate remedial measures, the judge asked to be "allowed to word the letters of apology vaguely so as to ensure that a letter could not be 'used against [the Subject Judge] in some way.'" The Special Committee declined that request, recommending that any apology be "sufficiently specific so as to make clear to the recipient the sexual misconduct for which the judge is apologizing." The Committee was unwilling to let the judge, in apologizing to the harmed clerks, draft the apology in a register that protected the judge from the harm being acknowledged. That instinct is the right one. It is also, in my reading, in tension with the rest of the disposition, which protects the judge from public acknowledgment of any of it.

The happenstance defense

The most consequential sentence in the order is about case assignments.

The order documents that the officer’s police department was involved in numerous criminal and civil cases in the district during the affair, and that the judge was not assigned to any of them between January 2022 and October 2025. The next sentence is the one I would underline: "Although no such scenario occurred, this appears to be the result of happenstance and not any mitigating efforts by the Subject Judge."

The Special Committee adds, in a footnote, that the judge told investigation counsel that the judge would have recused if assigned such a case. The Committee "accepts this counterfactual conditional statement as true." It also flags an obvious problem with the counterfactual: a witness’s affiliation with the officer’s department might not surface until well into a trial. "The point is, regardless of how sensitive the Subject Judge might have been to the potential for conflicts to arise, there is good reason that judges generally disclose their interests and thus give those litigating before them the opportunity to suggest, at the onset of a case, that a judge might need to recuse."

That paragraph, in my reading, is the order’s most candid passage. The system worked, this time, because nothing arrived on the docket that would have required the recusal that wasn’t going to happen. And we know that, the Committee says, because we checked. And we are, the Committee implies, asking the public to trust that the check was complete.

Happenstance is not an accountability standard. It is the absence of one. The point is not that comparable situations are common; the point is that when they exist, the public has little independent way to discover them unless someone inside the system reports them. There is no public recusal log to audit, no published conflict-disclosure regime applicable to non-financial interests, no consistent way to learn whether the case-assignment record bears the signature of a hidden relationship. This case surfaced because a clerk reported it. A system that depends on insider reporting will necessarily miss some cases the public has no independent way to detect.

How thin the pipeline is

The federal judiciary’s misconduct-and-disability system is administered under the Judicial Conduct and Disability Act of 1980, and its annual statistics are published by the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts in Table S-22 of the Judicial Business reports. The most recent published table covers the fiscal year ending September 30, 2024.

In that year, federal courts received 1,510 misconduct complaints. Four — in all of fiscal 2024 — produced any remedial action against a judge. Three were censures or reprimands, all in the Ninth Circuit. One was a request for voluntary retirement, also in the Ninth Circuit. That is the entire remedial-action column for the year: four lines. Many complaints were dismissed in whole or in part. Most were dismissed as "merits-related," meaning the complainant was challenging a ruling, which the statute treats as outside the misconduct system. Others were dismissed for lack of sufficient evidence. The table reports other non-remedial dispositions as well, and notes that a single complaint can have multiple stated reasons for dismissal.

Four out of 1,510. About 0.3 percent.

If reported in the same way, the Subject Judge in this case will appear in a later Table S-22 in a similarly small remedial-action column — also via private reprimand. The reprimand itself is not public. What the public receives is a redacted order or report that omits the judge’s name and the text of the reprimand.

I want to be careful here. A low remedial-action rate does not, by itself, mean the system is lenient. It could mean misconduct is rare. It could mean potential complainants — clerks, defendants, lawyers — don’t know how to file, or don’t believe filing will accomplish anything, or rationally fear retaliation. It could mean the Act’s definition of "misconduct" is narrow, and the merits-related exclusion sweeps a lot of complaints out of scope. The honest answer is that the public does not know which, because the system is not designed to be auditable from outside. The aggregate numbers are public. The case files, the chief-judge dispositions, the special committee reports, the private reprimands — those are, by default, not.

The false statements

The asymmetry between what the federal judiciary expects from people it puts on trial and what it accepts from itself is clearest in the third finding.

The judge told Chief Judge Pryor, in writing, that the allegations were "outrageous" and "baseless." The judge told the Chief District Judge, in writing, that the judge was "astounded and confused" and had "no idea what this clerk is referring to." The judge added — about a specific officer the judge had been having sex with in chambers for two years — that "Because so many lawyers, law students and officers from my cases as a prosecutor have stopped by to visit me, I don’t even know which law enforcement officer [the clerk] is referring to." Eleven days later, after counsel had pulled security footage, reviewed sign-in logs, inspected a comparable chambers for acoustic carry, sent the sofa cushion for testing, and interviewed five of the judge’s former clerks, the judge recanted.

18 U.S.C. § 1001, the federal false-statements statute, criminalizes knowingly and willfully making materially false statements in any matter within the jurisdiction of the executive, legislative, or judicial branch of the federal government. The ordinary maximum penalty is a fine, up to five years in prison, or both. The statute’s subsection (b) carves out a narrow exception for parties and their counsel making submissions to a judge in a judicial proceeding. It does not exempt a federal judge submitting false written responses to a Chief Circuit Judge in a misconduct inquiry. I do not know of a § 1001 prosecution in this exact posture, and I would not claim that one was legally inevitable here.

I am not arguing that the judge should have been prosecuted. But the gap is worth seeing clearly. A federal defendant who lies to an FBI agent in a materially comparable way can face criminal exposure measured in years. A defendant who lies during a federal investigation can have months added to a sentence under the Sentencing Guidelines' obstruction enhancement at §3C1.1. A federal judge who lies to the chief judge of his circuit, in writing, twice, in matters material to a misconduct investigation, gets an apology assignment and an agreement not to serve on certain committees. The asymmetry is visibility as much as severity.

The Special Committee considered, and rejected, the judge’s argument that prompt recantation should excuse the false statements. That refusal, I think, is correct. But the next step — translating that refusal into a sanction the public can see — is where the system declines to follow its own logic.

What the order does not say

The order is candid about what happened. It is silent about what would let the public hold this judge accountable for what happens next.

I noted at the outset what the order omits: the judge, the district, the police department, the officer, the clerks. But the redactions go further. The order does not specify the cases the department was a party to, so that the docket could be cross-referenced. It does not specify which judges in the district court were assigned the cases the Subject Judge was not. It does not specify the political event the judge attended, so that the public could know which district attorney’s race the judge appeared to associate with. It does not specify the dates of the chambers conduct, except in the parts of the witness narrative the report reproduces verbatim.

The clerk who reported the conduct is described as having been "later reassigned a new position." The order’s footnote 3 explains that "Law clerk A subsequently filed a complaint through the district court’s employee dispute resolution (EDR) process. The district court then offered Law Clerk A, and the clerk accepted, a new position." This is the order’s account of what happened to the person who told the truth.

The Subject Judge will go on hearing cases — presumably including, in time, criminal cases where law enforcement testimony is decisive. The practical effect of the order’s omissions is that future litigants, lawyers, jurors, journalists, and chambers employees will have no public way to connect this record to the judge in front of them.

The same architecture in sentencing

I work on judicial transparency, and most of my recent work has been on the federal sentencing record: the question of how much the public can audit individual judges' sentencing decisions for consistency, racial disparity, and conflict. The short answer is that the public cannot do much. The United States Sentencing Commission publishes individual-case sentencing data, but the public files exclude identifiers — including the judge-level identifiers needed to attribute sentencing decisions to specific judges. Empirical work on judge-level variation in federal sentencing has, for decades, depended on supplementing the USSC data with separately obtained district-level identifiers. That work is hard, slow, and incomplete.

The misconduct process and the sentencing-data system are not the same institution and do not raise the same confidentiality interests. But they make the same institutional move: remove the person-level identifier, then ask aggregate oversight to stand in for public audit. The public is told that the integrity of individual judges' decisions is being monitored — by other judges, by the Commission, by the appellate process — and is asked to take the integrity of those internal checks on faith. The architecture is consistent. Redacted misconduct orders. Anonymized sentencing data. Recusal decisions that depend on a judge volunteering the conflict. Case-assignment records that, in my experience, are often difficult to obtain at the level needed for judge-specific audit. The Eleventh Circuit’s "happenstance" is the same move the Sentencing Commission makes when it tells the public to trust the system without releasing what the system would need to be audited.

I think this is the pattern. The federal judiciary’s transparency problem is not a series of unfortunate exceptions. It is a coherent architecture in which the public is asked to trust the institution because the institution will not give the public what would be needed to verify the trust.

To be fair

Judicial independence is constitutionally distinct from other professions, and confidentiality in misconduct proceedings serves at least one legitimate function: protecting falsely accused judges. A regime in which every complaint produced a public record would chill complainants too — clerks could be sued for defamation by judges they accused, and the most powerful judges would have the most leverage to retaliate. The current regime’s secrecy partly protects the people the reform argument is most concerned about.

There is also a narrower privacy problem worth surfacing. Naming the judge in this case might effectively name the district, the police department, the officer, and perhaps the six clerks. In a small federal legal community, public transparency for the institution can become public exposure for the people who reported the misconduct and corroborated it. That is a real cost, not an excuse, and a serious transparency reform has to engage with it — probably through carefully scoped disclosure rules rather than through default secrecy.

There is also a rule-of-law version of the defense. The redaction here is not ad hoc. The Judicial-Conduct Rules themselves distinguish between public orders and privately communicated reprimands, and in the latter category they require the public materials to omit both the judge’s name and the text of the reprimand. So the problem is not that the Eleventh Circuit ignored the rules. The problem is what the rules make normal.

Second, the private reprimand is not the only consequence in this case. The judge gave up eligibility to serve as chief judge of the district court — a position of real institutional power. The judge gave up service on Judicial Conference committees, the bodies that set policy for the federal judiciary as a whole. Those are not nominal sanctions, and they alter the trajectory of a federal judicial career. But without the judge’s name, the public cannot connect those consequences to this case. The problem is not that these consequences are meaningless. The problem is that they are career-governance consequences, not public-accountability consequences.

Third, the order itself is, in some respects, candid. It uses the word "happenstance." It names extortion vulnerability as a risk the judge created. It refuses to accept recantation as a defense to the false-statements finding. It documents the clerks' adverse reactions in their own words. The Special Committee’s failure here is not that it could not see what happened. It saw clearly. The failure is in the gap between what the Committee saw and what it allowed the public to see.

What the order asks of the public

This is, in my reading, what the order asks. That the public accept on faith that the judge’s case-assignment record was free of conflicts. That the public accept on faith that the apology letters to the six former clerks will be specific enough to mean what they say. That the public accept on faith that no further chambers conduct went unreported, in this judge’s chambers or any other. That the public accept on faith that the private nature of the sanction reflects a calibrated weighing of seriousness and rehabilitation rather than a default toward secrecy. That the public accept on faith that the Sentencing Commission’s anonymized data, the closed recusal practices, the inaccessible case-assignment records, and the sealed misconduct files together amount to a system in which something like impartiality is being preserved.

I think the order, read carefully, undermines its own ask. A document built around the word happenstance, in which a judge’s written lies produce an apology assignment, is not a document that has earned the level of faith it requires the public to extend. The next time a federal judicial council closes a misconduct file with a phrase like "appropriate and proportionate," the question worth asking is not whether the sanction fits the conduct. The question is whether the public is being given what it would need to know.