and learned why she couldn’t have children. But Stump was ultimately found by his peers to be
shielded by immunity from any lawsuit. “A judge will not be deprived of immunity because the
action he took was in error, was done maliciously, or was in excess of his authority,” the court ruled. Sparkman, now Jamie Renae Coleman, wrote a book
about her experience, The Blanket She Carried. It chronicles her lifelong grief of never being able to
have children because of the ruling. In a West Virginia appeals case that was analyzed
for judicial immunity reform by a University of Chicago law professor, Supreme Court Justice Brent Benjamin decided against recusing himself from a case in which the defendant was a CEO who had contributed $3 million to Benjamin’s reelection campaign. Benjamin then overturned a $50 million jury award
against the CEO. The power judges wield is so intimidating, lawyers
would only talk to Newsmax about the problems with judicial immunity on the condition of anonymity. Texas Family Court Judge Bar-
bara Stalder received a slap on the wrist from the State Commission on Judicial Conduct in 2022 after order- ing bailiffs to shackle two lawyers to courtroom benches in separate cases after lecturing them about their behavior in the courthouse hallway. Stalder was found to have immunity from her orders. Not all judges are huddling in the immunity bullpen. In his dissenting opinion in Stump v. Sparkman,
STALDER
Justice Potter Stewart argued, “A judge is not free, like a loose cannon, to inflict indiscriminate damage whenever he announces that he is acting in his judicial capacity.” There was a glimmer of hope that the otherwise
ironclad judicial immunity was fallible with Gibson v. Goldston, a 2023 appellate decision in which a West Vir- ginia family court judge lost her immunity after conduct- ing a bizarre, warrantless search of the home of a man in a divorce case. Judge Louise Goldston initially received the usual
slap on the wrist from the state judicial ethics board, but when Matthew Gibson filed a civil rights lawsuit against her, he was supported by three appellate judges who unanimously ruled Goldston acted beyond the scope of her authority. “Judicial immunity is strong medicine,” they wrote
in their opinion. “When it applies, it is absolute. It not only protects judges from ultimate liability in a case, but also serves as a complete bar to suit. But the medicine’s potency cautions against its indiscriminate prescription. And so there are limitations.”
Judiciary Ignored Bias Against Trump
B
efore being tapped to be the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, Rep. Elise Stefanik, R-N.Y., wrote two
scathing ethics complaints detailing allegations of judicial abuse against two judges in the cases against President Donald Trump. Neither resulted in any action. Judge Arthur Engoron, who presided over Trump’s civil
fraud trial, refused to recuse himself — even after calling the president “a bad guy” and stating his support for New York Attorney General Letitia James going after him. Engoron, 77, a judge on the Manhattan Supreme Court since
2013, found Trump liable last year for fraud and ordered him to pay $355 million for overinflating the values of his real estate properties. At one point during the trial, Engoron — a former cab driver
and Democratic Party donor — threatened Trump’s lawyer Chris Kise not to file a routine motion, telling him that he wasn’t interested in what he had to say and “to just sit down.” He even issued a gag order against Trump that left the
ACLU troubled. Stefanik also lodged a complaint against Juan Merchan, the
New York state Supreme Court judge who presided over the separate hush money case in which Trump was convicted of 34 felony counts of falsifying business records. In a September post on X, Stefanik said she had uncovered
evidence that Merchan was tied to the Kamala Harris campaign through his daughter. The New York Judicial State Commission on Judicial
Conduct never acted on either complaint. In a twist of hypocrisy, while Merchan remained shielded
by his judicial immunity, he refused to recognize Trump’s presidential immunity, which was recently afirmed by the Supreme Court. Trump denounced Merchan as a “radical partisan” and
accused him of writing “an opinion that is knowingly unlawful, goes against our Constitution and, if allowed to stand, would be the end of the presidency as we know it.”
FEBRUARY 2025 | NEWSMAX 15 JAMES ENGORON MERCHAN
TRUMP AND ONGORON/SHANNON STAPLETON-POOL/GETTY IMAGES / JAMES/SETH WENIG/POOL/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES / MERCHAN/AP IMAGES
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