On February 15, 2012, a Wayne County Circuit Court judge named Wade McCree was seated on the bench in Detroit, Michigan, presiding over a child support hearing. While the hearing was in progress — while parties and attorneys stood before him, while the machinery of the court turned — McCree was texting. The messages were not about the case. They were not to a clerk, a bailiff, or a colleague. They were to Geniene La'Shay Mott, a woman whose child support case was before his court, with whom he was conducting a sexual affair, and who was at that moment pregnant with his child. The texts he sent from the bench that day included a photograph of himself in a state of undress. He sent it while wearing his judicial robes.

This is not a story about a judge who made bad decisions in his personal life. It is the story of a sitting judge who systematically weaponized the power of his office to exploit a vulnerable woman, who compromised the integrity of at least one murder prosecution, who was removed from the bench by the Michigan Supreme Court — and who then, in an act of breathtaking audacity, ran for re-election to the same court that had just stripped him of his judgeship.

He nearly won.

The Wade McCree scandal is, in miniature, everything that is wrong with judicial accountability in America. It took years of misconduct, a murder investigation, a pregnancy, a national media firestorm, and a formal Judicial Tenure Commission proceeding before the Michigan Supreme Court could bring itself to remove McCree from the bench. The systems designed to detect and address judicial misconduct failed at every level and at every stage. The lawyers who appeared before McCree while he was conducting this affair said nothing. The court staff who observed his behavior said nothing. The Michigan Judicial Tenure Commission received complaints and moved at the speed of institutional self-protection. The Michigan Supreme Court, which has the ultimate authority to remove judges, did not act until the evidence was so overwhelming and the public attention so intense that inaction was no longer defensible.

And after all of that — after the removal, after the disgrace, after the exposure — the voters of Wayne County nearly returned him to the bench.

How It Began: A Judge, a Litigant, and an Abuse of Power

Wade McCree was first elected to the Wayne County Circuit Court in 2008, running as a Democrat in a heavily Democratic county where winning the party's endorsement was tantamount to winning the seat. He had a legal career and political connections in Detroit, and nothing in his public profile at the time of his election suggested that he would become one of the most notorious judicial misconduct cases in Michigan history.

Geniene La'Shay Mott came before McCree's court as a litigant in a child support dispute — one of hundreds of such cases that rotate through Wayne County's family and domestic relations dockets every year. The power dynamic between them could not have been more skewed: McCree was a sitting judge with the authority to enter or modify child support orders that would directly determine the financial circumstances of Mott's life and the life of her child. Mott was a woman seeking relief from the court. Whatever personal characteristics made her attractive to McCree, the relationship that developed between them was not between equals. It was a relationship between a government official with coercive power over a litigant and the litigant herself.

The affair reportedly began sometime in 2011 and continued into 2012. During that period, McCree continued to preside over Mott's child support case — a flagrant violation of the most elementary judicial ethics principles, which require a judge to recuse from any matter in which the judge has a personal relationship with a party. McCree did not recuse. He did not disclose the relationship to opposing counsel or to the court system. He sat on her case while he was sleeping with her, texting her from the bench, and — as would become clear — impregnating her.

The texts McCree sent Mott from the bench became the central exhibit in the public scandal when they were disclosed to Michigan media outlets in 2012. The messages were explicit in both senses of the word: sexually explicit, and explicit in their demonstration that McCree viewed the courtroom not as a place of solemn public trust but as a platform from which he could conduct his personal life with complete impunity. He sent a photograph of himself partially undressed while wearing his judicial robes. He sent messages of a sexual nature during proceedings in which other litigants — people who had no idea that the judge presiding over their case was simultaneously conducting an affair with a former litigant — were present in his courtroom.

The robes were not incidental. They were the symbol of the office he held and the authority he exercised. Their presence in the photograph was a statement — perhaps unconscious, but unmistakable — that Wade McCree understood his judicial office and his personal appetites as one continuous thing, inseparable and mutually reinforcing.

The Murder That Changed Everything

The Wade McCree scandal might have remained a Detroit tabloid story — a disgraced judge, an affair with a litigant, explicit texts, embarrassing but finite — had it not intersected with a murder investigation that introduced a far darker dimension.

In 2011, a woman named Jessica Haban was murdered in the Detroit area. The prime suspect in her killing was Robert Harris — who was, at the time, the ex-boyfriend of Geniene La'Shay Mott, the same woman with whom Judge McCree was conducting his affair. Mott was a material witness in the murder investigation. She had information about Harris, about his relationship with Haban, and about events surrounding the killing that prosecutors needed to build their case.

The connection between McCree's affair and the murder investigation created a situation of extraordinary legal complexity and ethical toxicity. A sitting judge was in a sexual relationship with a witness in an active murder prosecution. That judge had ongoing communications with the witness — communications that, when later reviewed by investigators and defense attorneys, raised serious questions about whether McCree had said or done anything that could have influenced Mott's cooperation with prosecutors, her testimony, or the overall integrity of the investigation into Haban's death.

What is established by the formal record is this: McCree was communicating with Mott at a time when she was a witness in an active murder prosecution. He was a judge — an officer of the court with statutory and ethical obligations to preserve the integrity of judicial and legal proceedings. And his conduct — the affair, the texts, the pregnancy — created conditions under which a defense attorney could credibly argue that the witness's relationship with a sitting judge had compromised her independence, her credibility, and the integrity of any statement she made to law enforcement.

Robert Harris was ultimately convicted of the murder of Jessica Haban. But the McCree scandal created grounds for post-conviction challenges based on the argument that the relationship between McCree and a key prosecution witness constituted a corruption of the proceedings that Harris deserved to have disclosed and examined. Those challenges, litigated through the Michigan appellate courts, added years of uncertainty to a murder prosecution that should have been straightforward. The Michigan Court of Appeals ultimately upheld Harris's conviction, finding that the McCree-Mott relationship had not been shown to have directly affected Mott's testimony in ways that prejudiced Harris's defense. But the multi-year appellate litigation the scandal generated was a direct and quantifiable cost of McCree's misconduct: resources expended by both sides, uncertainty imposed on the victim's family, and a cloud that hung over the prosecution's case for years.

A judge who conducts a sexual affair with a murder witness does not just harm the witness. He potentially harms the victim's family, the prosecution, the defendant's right to a clean and untainted proceeding, and the integrity of the verdict that the jury returns. The waves of judicial corruption spread in ways that are impossible to fully track and often impossible to fully remediate.

“The judicial Power of the United States shall be vested in one supreme Court, and in such inferior Courts as the Congress may from time to time ordain and establish. The Judges, both of the supreme and inferior Courts, shall hold their Offices during good Behaviour…”

The Pregnancy, the Coercion, and the Cover-Up Attempt

By early 2012, Geniene Mott was pregnant with McCree's child. What happened next — as documented in civil court filings, text message records, and the formal Judicial Tenure Commission proceedings — illustrated the second and more insidious dimension of the McCree scandal: not just that he had exploited a litigant, but that when the relationship began to unravel and exposure became a possibility, he attempted to use his power and position to control, intimidate, and silence her.

Mott, according to the civil lawsuit she later filed against McCree, received communications from him that she characterized as coercive — messages that she interpreted as attempts to influence her decisions about the pregnancy and about whether she would go public with information about their relationship. The lawsuit, filed in federal court and ultimately settled, alleged that McCree had engaged in conduct that constituted sexual harassment under federal civil rights law, that he had abused the judicial power of his office to facilitate and maintain the relationship, and that his subsequent conduct amounted to retaliation against her for terminating it.

The text messages that became public in the spring of 2012 — including the bench-texting incident and the photograph of McCree in his robes — were disclosed by Mott. The disclosure was the act of a woman who understood that she was in a relationship with someone who held enormous coercive power over her life, and who made the decision that exposure was safer than continued silence. It was, in the most direct sense, a whistleblower act — and it carried exactly the costs that whistleblowing typically carries. Her private life became public. Her own conduct was scrutinized. Her credibility was attacked by McCree's defenders. She was simultaneously the victim and the exhibit.

McCree's response to the exposure was consistent with the pattern of behavior that had characterized his conduct from the beginning: denial, minimization, and attempted damage control. He disputed various elements of Mott's account. He suggested that their relationship had been consensual and that any characterization of it as exploitative was unfair. He continued to show up to work, to preside over cases, and to present himself as a functioning member of the judiciary while the investigation around him intensified.

He did not resign.

The Judicial Tenure Commission: A System That Moves at the Speed of Self-Protection

Michigan, like every state, has a mechanism for disciplining and removing judges who violate the standards of judicial conduct. The Michigan Judicial Tenure Commission is the body that investigates complaints against Michigan judges, makes findings, and recommends sanctions to the Michigan Supreme Court, which has final authority over judicial discipline. In theory, it is the system's immune response to corruption and misconduct — the mechanism that protects the public from judges who have forfeited the trust the office requires.

In practice, as the McCree case illustrated, the system is slow, opaque, insufficiently resourced, and structurally resistant to the kind of decisive action that genuine judicial misconduct demands.

Complaints about McCree's conduct began reaching the Commission in 2012, around the time his texts with Mott became public. The Commission investigated. It gathered evidence. It built a record. This took time — more time than any member of the public being asked to accept a judge's authority over their case, their liberty, or their family should have to wait for an institution to decide whether that judge is fit to serve.

The formal proceedings revealed the full scope of McCree's misconduct: the affair with a litigant, the bench-texting, the photograph, the pregnancy, the coercive communications. The Commission found that McCree had violated multiple provisions of the Michigan Code of Judicial Conduct, including the foundational requirements that judges avoid impropriety and the appearance of impropriety, that they perform their duties impartially, and that they not use the prestige of judicial office for personal benefit.

The Commission's recommendation: removal from office.

The Michigan Supreme Court agreed. In October 2013, the Court issued an order removing McCree from the Wayne County Circuit Court and prohibiting him from serving as a judge in Michigan for three years. The opinion was scathing, finding that McCree had engaged in a sustained pattern of behavior that struck at the core integrity of the judicial office, that his actions had compromised actual court proceedings, and that lesser sanctions would be inadequate given the gravity of the misconduct.

It was, by any measure, the right result. It was also a result that should have been reached at least a year earlier, after the initial public disclosure of the texts and the photograph. That it took the better part of two years of formal proceedings — during which McCree continued to hold his judicial office — is itself an indictment of the system. During those two years, McCree continued to preside over cases. Litigants continued to appear before a judge who the accountability system had every reason to know was unfit to serve. The slow pace of institutional action was not administrative routine — it was a continuing harm.

He Ran for Re-Election While Under Investigation

Here is the detail that, more than any other, captures the particular pathology of judicial accountability culture: Wade McCree ran for re-election to the Wayne County Circuit Court in November 2012 — while he was under active investigation by the Michigan Judicial Tenure Commission for the very conduct that would result in his removal the following year.

He ran. He campaigned. He asked the voters of Wayne County to return him to the bench that he had turned into a staging area for his sexual exploitation of a litigant. And the voters of Wayne County — perhaps not fully informed of the extent of his misconduct, perhaps conditioned to the kind of political loyalty that makes people vote for familiar names regardless of disqualifying conduct — came within a few thousand votes of giving him what he asked for. He lost his re-election bid, but only narrowly.

The fact that McCree could run at all reflects a critical gap in Michigan's judicial accountability architecture. There was no mechanism to prevent a judge under formal investigation for misconduct from seeking re-election to the same court they were being investigated for corrupting. The Judicial Tenure Commission's investigation was a parallel process that did not automatically disqualify McCree from the ballot, did not result in interim suspension, and did not prevent him from presenting himself to voters as a sitting judge in good standing.

This is not a quirk unique to Michigan. Most states have similar gaps. A judge under investigation for misconduct can continue to hear cases, continue to exercise the power of the office, and — unless the state's disciplinary system moves with unusual speed — continue to run for re-election on the basis of a judicial record that is in the process of being formally condemned. The structural message this sends is not subtle: judicial accountability is an afterthought, a process that happens at institutional pace, while the misconduct continues in real time.

“The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands, whether of one, a few, or many, and whether hereditary, self-appointed, or elective, may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny.”

The Civil Rights Dimension: When a Robe Is a Weapon

The civil lawsuit that Geniene Mott filed against Wade McCree raised a legal theory that deserves more attention than it received in media coverage: that a judge who exploits a litigant whose case is pending before the court has not merely committed an ethical violation — he has committed a civil rights violation under federal law.

The theory rests on the intersection of 42 U.S.C. § 1983 — the federal civil rights statute that allows individuals to sue state actors for constitutional violations — and the due process guarantees of the Fourteenth Amendment, which protect litigants' right to a fair hearing before a neutral and impartial decision-maker. When a judge is conducting a sexual relationship with one party to a case before the court, that judge is not neutral. That judge is not impartial. The litigant who is sleeping with the judge has, in effect, received an extrajudicial advantage that the opposing party cannot access and cannot counter. The due process rights of the non-favored party have been violated.

Mott's own civil rights claims were premised on a related theory: that McCree had used the coercive power of his judicial office to facilitate and maintain the sexual relationship, creating conditions of sexual harassment under color of state law. The power of a judicial office is delegated by the state, constrained by the Constitution, and exercised in trust for the parties who appear before the court. When a judge turns that power to personal use — to sexual exploitation, to coercion, to the enhancement of his own position at the expense of litigants' rights — he has committed an act that federal civil rights law was specifically designed to address.

The McCree case settled before producing a definitive judicial ruling on these theories. But the civil rights framework it raised has broader implications for how we think about judicial exploitation of litigants. Most state judicial accountability systems treat judge-litigant exploitation primarily as a disciplinary matter — a violation of the Code of Judicial Conduct subject to professional sanction. The McCree litigation suggested that federal civil rights law could provide a parallel remedial path. That path has not been adequately developed in the case law, in part because settlements and qualified immunity barriers make it difficult to obtain appellate precedents. It should be developed. The exploitation of a litigant by a judge is a federal civil rights violation, not merely an ethical lapse, and the remedies available should reflect that reality.

The Broader Michigan Judicial Accountability Failure

The McCree case did not happen in isolation. It happened in a state where the judicial accountability infrastructure had been subject to criticism for years before McCree's misconduct became public. The Michigan Judicial Tenure Commission had been criticized for moving too slowly, for operating with insufficient transparency, and for failing to impose meaningful interim measures while investigations were pending. The McCree case confirmed every one of those criticisms.

But the structural problems went beyond the Commission's pace.

The absence of interim suspension authority. During the entire period of the Commission's investigation — from 2012 through the Michigan Supreme Court's October 2013 removal order — Wade McCree continued to serve as a Wayne County Circuit Court judge. Michigan law at the time provided no mechanism for interim suspension of a judge under investigation for serious misconduct, short of the full removal proceeding that the Commission's process required. This gap — which exists in many states — means that the period between the discovery of serious judicial misconduct and its formal resolution is a period during which the corrupted judge continues to exercise coercive power over litigants who have no idea who they are standing before.

The election system's immunity to the accountability process. The fact that McCree could run for re-election while under active investigation reflects a structural reality of elected judiciaries: judicial accountability processes and electoral processes run on parallel tracks that rarely intersect. When those two tracks diverge — when the accountability process has not yet completed its work while the election cycle demands a vote — voters are asked to make a decision about a judge whose fitness for office is actively in dispute, without any official notice of that dispute on the ballot.

The legal profession's silence. The attorneys who appeared before McCree during the period of his affair with Mott — attorneys who were professionally obligated under the Michigan Rules of Professional Conduct to report judicial misconduct that raised substantial questions about a judge's fitness for office — said nothing. The culture of the bar, which depends on maintaining working relationships with judges, creates powerful disincentives to report judicial misconduct even when the obligation to report is unambiguous. This silence is not unique to Michigan. It is endemic to the relationship between the practicing bar and the judiciary everywhere in America.

What Accountability Actually Looked Like — and What It Should Have Been

McCree was ultimately removed from the bench. That is the outcome the system produced. Measured against the standard of complete impunity — the standard that governs the vast majority of judicial misconduct in America — it represents accountability. Measured against what the harm demanded, it falls far short.

He was removed. He was not criminally prosecuted. Using the coercive power of a judicial office to exploit a litigant — to extract sexual compliance from someone over whose case you have authority — maps onto criminal statutes addressing official misconduct, coercion, and sexual exploitation by persons in positions of authority. No criminal charges were filed against McCree in Michigan. The conduct that resulted in his removal was treated, by the criminal justice system, as a disciplinary matter rather than a crime.

He was removed. He was not disbarred. McCree retained his law license after his removal from the bench — a result that reflects the general pattern in judicial misconduct cases where the sanction imposed by the disciplinary body is limited to removal from judicial office without referral to the state bar for attorney discipline. A judge who exploited a litigant, sent explicit photographs from the bench during active hearings, and whose affair with a murder witness contributed to years of appellate litigation in a homicide case retained the credential that had given him access to the legal system's power in the first place.

He was removed. He was prohibited from serving as a judge for three years — not permanently. After the three-year period expired, McCree was legally eligible to return to judicial office. The most severe sanction available to the Michigan Supreme Court for conduct of this gravity was a temporary bar from the bench.

This is what passes for accountability in the American judicial discipline system: a slow process, a removal, a temporary prohibition, a retained law license, and no criminal exposure for the exploitation of state power to coerce a vulnerable woman. The message to every other judge in Michigan — and in every other state watching — was clear: this is the worst that can happen.

The Pattern McCree Belongs To: Judicial Exploitation Across America

The impulse to treat the McCree case as an aberration must be resisted. The particular combination of elements — the affair with a litigant, the bench-texting, the murder investigation connection — was unusual in its concentration of outrage. The underlying pattern of a judge exploiting the power of the office for personal benefit, and the accountability system's slow and incomplete response, is distressingly common.

In Tennessee, Judge Richard Baumgartner — who presided over the high-profile Christian-Newsom murder trials — was discovered to have had an addiction to prescription pills supplied by a criminal defendant's associate, creating grounds for post-conviction challenges in one of the most publicized murder cases in Tennessee history. Baumgartner pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor. The convictions in the Christian-Newsom cases were vacated and the defendants retried — at enormous cost to the victims' families — because a judge's personal corruption had tainted the proceedings.

In New York, former Bronx Family Court judge Gerald Garson was convicted of accepting bribes from a matrimonial attorney in exchange for favorable custody rulings — a corruption that directly harmed the children and families who appeared before his court seeking protection. The Garson case produced years of post-conviction litigation over custody orders entered during the corruption's operation.

In Georgia, in Texas, in Ohio, in Louisiana — the pattern repeats. Judges who exploit their positions for personal benefit, accountability systems that move too slowly to prevent ongoing harm, and incomplete sanctions that leave the corrupted judge's other institutional footprint intact. McCree belongs to this company not as an outlier but as a representative specimen.

The Voter Question: Why Did He Almost Win?

The 2012 election result in Wayne County deserves sustained examination, because it is a data point that should disturb everyone who believes that democratic accountability is an adequate substitute for institutional oversight of the judiciary.

McCree ran for re-election in November 2012 — more than six months after his texts with Mott had been reported in Michigan media, months after the pregnancy had been confirmed, months after the Judicial Tenure Commission investigation had been publicly disclosed. Every voter in Wayne County who paid attention to local legal news knew, or could have known, that McCree was under formal investigation for misconduct. He nearly won anyway.

The reasons are instructive. Wayne County is a heavily Democratic county where judicial elections are typically low-information contests dominated by ballot position, name recognition, and party endorsement. McCree had a name, had run before, and had the brand recognition of an incumbent. The voters who pulled the lever for him were not, for the most part, endorsing his conduct. They were probably not fully aware of it. Local judicial elections in most American cities are among the least-covered electoral contests — conducted with minimal media attention, minimal candidate vetting, and minimal voter engagement.

The near-miss is a warning about the limits of electoral accountability for judicial misconduct. The theory that voters will remove corrupt or incompetent judges depends on voters knowing about the corruption or incompetence. In the information environment of American local politics — where judicial races share a ballot with gubernatorial contests, congressional races, and a dozen other higher-profile elections — that knowledge is not reliably transmitted. Judges who are removed by disciplinary proceedings are not automatically taken off the ballot. Judges who are under investigation retain the presumption of incumbency. The electoral process, as a check on judicial misconduct, is insufficient in virtually every realistic scenario.

“It is error alone which needs the support of government. Truth can stand by itself.”

Reform Blueprint: Fixing the Systems That Failed in Detroit

The McCree case, and the broader pattern of judicial accountability failure it represents, points toward specific structural reforms that would reduce the likelihood of similar harms in the future and improve the response when they occur:

1. Establish mandatory interim suspension authority for judicial conduct commissions. Every state's judicial accountability body should have the authority to suspend a judge from hearing cases — with pay — during the pendency of a formal investigation into serious misconduct allegations. Interim suspension is not a finding of guilt; it is a protective measure ensuring that a judge under investigation for exploiting litigants is not continuing to preside over new litigants during the investigation. Michigan and the majority of other states lack this authority in any meaningful form. It should be a baseline feature of every state's judicial discipline system, modeled on the interim suspension mechanisms that exist for attorneys in most state bar disciplinary systems.
2. Require automatic electoral disclosure when a judge is under formal investigation. When a sitting judge is the subject of a formal complaint before the state's judicial conduct commission — at the stage where the Commission has made a formal determination that the complaint warrants full investigation — that fact should be disclosed on the election ballot and through official election communications. Voters exercising their democratic choice over who sits on the bench deserve to know when the judicial accountability system is actively reviewing whether a candidate is fit to hold judicial office.
3. Mandate criminal referral for judicial exploitation of litigants. State judicial conduct commissions should be required by law to refer to state attorneys general any finding of judicial misconduct that involves the exploitation of a litigant's dependence on a judicial officer for personal benefit — including sexual exploitation. The current system treats such conduct as disciplinary rather than criminal. Most states have criminal statutes prohibiting persons in positions of authority from using that authority to coerce sexual compliance; judicial officers should not be implicitly exempt, and referrals should be mandatory when the Conduct Commission finds facts that could support a criminal charge.
4. Create a federal clearinghouse for judicial misconduct records with mandatory reporting. No comprehensive federal database of judicial disciplinary actions currently exists. State-level records are maintained inconsistently and are often difficult to access, creating the risk that a judge removed or disciplined in one state can seek judicial office in another without those facts being readily available. A federal clearinghouse — modeled on the national practitioner databank that tracks physician disciplinary actions — would make judicial misconduct records portable, searchable, and publicly accessible.
5. Strengthen attorney reporting obligations for judicial misconduct. The Michigan Rules of Professional Conduct, like those of most states, obligate attorneys to report judicial misconduct that raises substantial questions about a judge's fitness for office. In practice, this obligation is almost never enforced, and attorneys who report judicial misconduct face informal professional retaliation. State bars should create formal, protected whistleblower mechanisms for attorneys reporting judicial misconduct — including specific protections against retaliatory judicial assignments and other forms of professional retaliation against reporting attorneys.
6. Extend permanent disqualification to judges removed for exploitation of litigants. The Michigan Supreme Court's three-year prohibition on McCree's service as a judge reflects the maximum sanction available under the state's current rules. For conduct that involves the direct sexual exploitation of a vulnerable litigant — conduct that strikes at the most foundational trust relationship between the judiciary and the public — a permanent or substantially longer disqualification should be available. The three-year prohibition was not proportionate to the harm. Reforming the sanctions framework in judicial disciplinary proceedings to permit permanent or extended disqualification in cases of serious litigant exploitation would bring accountability sanctions into alignment with the gravity of the conduct they address.
7. Provide automatic post-conviction review for criminal cases touched by judicial conflicts of interest. When a judge is found to have had an undisclosed relationship with a party or witness in a criminal case during the period of that case's investigation or prosecution, the defendant in that case should have an automatic right to post-conviction review focused specifically on whether the undisclosed relationship affected the proceedings. This review should not be subject to procedural default rules that typically limit post-conviction challenges. The discovery of an undisclosed judicial conflict is precisely the kind of information that was unavailable at the time of trial and that could not have been raised through ordinary appellate channels. Robert Harris's challenge to his murder conviction should not have required years of litigation to reach a decision on the merits.

The Robe and What It Represents

The robe that Wade McCree included in his explicit self-portrait was not incidental. It was the entire point. The robe is the symbol of everything the judiciary is supposed to be: impartial, elevated, bound by law, answerable to no one's private interest. When a judge poses in his robes to send a nude photograph to a litigant, he is not just committing a personal indiscretion. He is defiling the symbol. He is demonstrating his contempt for everything the symbol represents. He is announcing, to everyone who cares to see it, that the robe means nothing to him — that it is just a costume, a prop in his personal drama, a brand extension for his sexual availability.

The question that the McCree case leaves open — the question that the entire history of judicial accountability failure in America leaves open — is whether the institutions that vest judges with the authority that robe represents care enough about what it means to protect it. The Michigan Judicial Tenure Commission eventually acted. The Michigan Supreme Court eventually acted. The system eventually worked — after two years, after a pregnancy, after a murder case was tainted, after re-election was nearly granted, after every other safeguard had failed.

Eventually is not good enough. The people who appeared before Wade McCree while he was texting Mott from the bench — people who had no idea that the judge deciding their cases had his mind, and his phone, somewhere else entirely — deserved better than eventual accountability. Geniene Mott, who was exploited by a man with coercive power over her life and then had to fight a federal lawsuit to obtain recognition of that wrong, deserved better. Jessica Haban's family, whose path to justice ran through a prosecution tainted by the judge's affair with a key witness, deserved better.

They all deserved a system that took its own standards seriously enough to act before “eventually.” Until we build that system, the robes will keep getting used for photographs, and the texts will keep flying from the bench, and the accountability will keep arriving too late to undo the harm that the corrupted court has already done.