After news outlets revealed that the judge in the Dylann Roof case had used a racial slur in a previous case, the South Carolina Supreme Court removed him from the case.
The State Supreme Court reprimanded Charleston County Magistrate James Gosnell Jr. in 2005 after he used the word “ni**er” in a previous case.? The judge was quoted as saying to the defendant (a Black man) in that case,
“There are four kinds of people in this world: black people, white people, rednecks, and ni**ers.”?
Although the move to have another judge preside over the criminal case is procedural, Gosnell’s racist comments have brought attention to the need to monitor judge’s records in cases involving high-profile defendants. In Roof’s case, where possible hate crime charges may be brought by prosecutors, any sign of impropriety by a judge could endanger the prosecutor’s ability to bring charges.
A disciplinary record of Gosnell’s reprimand shows that he claimed that he was helping the defendant by repeating something he had heard from a black veteran sheriff’s deputy. He said he was trying to “encourage” the defendant to change the path he had chosen, and Gosnell dismissed his used of the phrase because he knew the defendant as well as his father and grandfather.
Gosnell had gained immediate attention in the Roof case after he claimed Roof’s family were also victims, in addition to the nine people that Roof slaughtered, leaving one additional victim injured, in the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina last week.
In another case, the judge showed partiality to another (white) judge by altering records and holding a hearing out of court hours so that his drunk-driving judge friend would be released from jail sooner. The racists comments from the 2003 case were brought up at the disciplinary hearing following the ruling on the drunk-driving incident in an effort to show that he favored his friend because he was white.
Many people believe that these two incidents, when taken together, show a pattern of prejudice in the execution of this judge’s rulings.
