“This thing is a judge? What a charade!”
An Atlanta, Georgia, judge who ordered white lawyers out of his courtroom so he could lecture African-American defendants called that decision a “mistake” Tuesday night.
“In retrospect, it was a mistake,” Judge Marvin Arrington told CNN. “Because my sheriff said to me, ‘Judge, that message should be given to everybody’ — ‘Don’t violate the law, make something out of yourself, go to school, find a role model, somebody that will help you advance your life.’”
Arrington, who is African-American, is a judge in Fulton County, Georgia, which includes the city of Atlanta.
He said he got fed up seeing a parade of young black defendants shuffle into his courtroom and decided to address them one day last week — out of the earshot of white lawyers.
“I came out and saw the defendants, and it was about 99.9 percent Afro-Americans,” Arrington told CNN affiliate WSB-TV of Atlanta, “and at some point in time, I excused some lawyers — most of them white — and said to the young people in here, ‘What in the world are you doing with your lives?’”
