Case file 10-29, a federal courtroom in Dallas. I've been in the tunnels a long time. I've seen a raccoon run a sting operation on a dumpster. I've seen a man argue with a parking meter for forty minutes. I had never seen a federal judge look at a Latino lawyer, listen to him say he wasn't white, and overrule him on his own ancestry.
Here's what the evidence shows.
On April 24, U.S. District Judge Ada Brown held a hearing in a tenure dispute between a black former law professor and Southern Methodist University, according to the court transcript reported by Bloomberg Law and the Daily Caller. The professor's lawyer was Ezra Young, a civil rights attorney who is Latino.
According to the transcript, the judge told Young he carried "white privilege." She said he showed "white mediocrity." She called him a "white savior, come to save all the stupid black lawyers in Texas who need your help, from New York." She also said he was intimidated by "black excellence."
Young answered the only way a man can when a federal judge assigns him a new race from the bench. "I'm not white, Your Honor," he said. He had disclosed his ethnicity more than once, the transcript shows.
Think about that for a second. A civil rights lawyer walks into court to argue a discrimination case and leaves as Exhibit A.
Then came the paperwork, which is where cases like this always get interesting.
Young filed a misconduct complaint. The Fifth Circuit's judicial council reassigned the judge's cases on Sept. 29 and blocked new ones for three months, the Dallas Express reported. Investigators found she had withdrawn from more than 40 cases and ordered a psychiatric evaluation. A special committee led by Chief Judge Jennifer Walker Elrod has ordered her to appear.
Next, according to Bloomberg Law, the judge emailed sealed court records to roughly 140 judges, lawyers and reporters. Sealed records are the ones the court seals. Sending them to 140 people is the opposite of a seal. That's a newsletter.
The judge has denied wrongdoing in a 76-page response. She also said she could have handled the race discussion "more delicately."
More delicately. Seventy-six pages, and the only thing she'd change is the font.
I've worked a lot of cases. Usually a court at least gets the names of the parties right. Here the court skipped the facts, skipped the lawyer's own testimony, and went straight to sentencing him for a privilege nobody can find in his family tree.
Here's what stings for regular people. You will never get a federal judge's attention without a lawyer, a filing fee, and about two years. You pay that lawyer by the hour, and some of those hours were apparently spent getting told what color he is. A former federal appeals judge, Andre Davis, told Bloomberg Law the case for removing Brown "would be compelling" on the current record.
So the lawyer who came to court to fight a race case ended up winning one he never filed. Young is still not white. The judge, so far, is still not convinced.
Case remains open. The rat in the evidence locker has been asked his race twice this week and is now refusing to answer without counsel.
The Demorat is satire. This article is a parody based on real news reports and is not meant to be taken as literal fact.
The real story that inspired this
