Judges want legal avenue to defend themselves

el paso judge mike herrera for keeping his divorce case in his court for months. and the state also criticized the council of judges for paying lawyers to essentially represent him when his ex-wife’s attorney tried to remove him from the case. that’s improper. the law says judges have to remain impartial when someone is trying to remove them from a case. but as maria garcia reports … some judges say that leaves them completely open for false allegations without being able to correct the record. 12:05 some of these allegations are pretty wild allegations, everything from he tried to steal one of my cases to somebody slept with somebody’s sister, i mean anything administrative judge for the council of judges – alma trejo says judges are often accused of crazy things when lawyers are trying to remove them for a case. a higher judge will usually hear the reasons why an attorney wants the original judge removed. 10:04 once you file a motion you can allege anything you want in that motion to recuse, you make it part of the case and then it becomes part of the record. the issue though – is that often there’s no one vetting the allegations against the original judge. 03:35 the potential danger in a recusal hearing is that it becomes one sided. it’s just the person making the allegations and there’s no on there to cross examine them or seek the truth. so the council of judges is looking into possibly trying to change state law – so someone can check the evidence. but there’s a big difference between that and what happened with judge mike herrera. in that case the council of judges actually paid for attorneys to file motions on behalf of the judge – which is not allowed. and judge trejo says it happened before herrera too. 18:22 it wasn’t through council of judge’s action – the procedure was that it went through the administrative judge. 03:10 there was an opinion by the commission late 2015 basically stating we shouldn’t be doing that. that practice has seized and it hasn’t been done anymore. judge trejo has been the administrative judge for the council of judges for about a year – so the issue with judge herrera was before her time. the administrative judge then was patrick garcia. the council of judges can’t appeal or speak out against the state commission’s report. texas is shaking things up in the classroom again. … by changing how it evaluates your child’s performance… and compares him or her to every other student