Legal Ethics

Judge who remarked on 'temptresses' who are 'asking for it' faces ethics complaint

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An Alaska judge is accused in an ethics complaint of making insensitive remarks, including statements about “temptresses” who are “asking for it.”

Judge Timothy Dooley of Nome is accused of making insensitive statements on six occasions between May 2013 and September 2014, report the Alaska Dispatch News and KTUU. The ethics complaint (PDF) alleges:

• At a November 2013 sentencing hearing, where the victim was a 14-year-old girl, Dooley said, “This was not someone who was, and I hate to use the phrase, ‘asking for it.’ There are girls out there that seem to be temptresses. And this does not seem to be anything like that.”

• At a May 2013 sentencing hearing, Dooley asked, “Has anything good ever come out of drinking other than sex with a pretty girl?”

• At an October 2013 sentencing hearing, Dooley said, “What you’ve done with this young girl, it’s a strange thing, routinely done in Afghanistan where they marry 6-year-old girls. In our society, and in the society of the local tribal communities, supposed to be totally forbidden.”

• At an August 2014 civil trial with unrepresented litigants, Dooley said, “I’m gonna enforce these oaths, and they’re enforceable with a two-year sentence for perjury. And I’d be the sentencing judge. I also have a medieval Christianity that says if you violate an oath, you’re going to hell. You all may not share that, but I’m planning to populate hell.”

• During off-the-record comments to a jury in August 2014, Dooley asked if they could hear a witness and said, “I’m sorry folks, but I can’t slap her around to make her talk louder.”

• Told an unrepresented criminal defendant in September 2014 that he couldn’t negotiate a sentencing deal with him, “but in the past year and a half when someone has pled ‘no contest’ to this offense, I have given them time served. And I would do that today, probably, but I can’t promise you that.”

Dooley and his lawyer did not immediately respond to requests for comment by the Alaska Dispatch News and KTUU.

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