Court worker who claimed judge libeled her in irrelevant footnote loses on immunity ground
Mississippi Supreme Court building. Nagel Photography / Shutterstock.com
A judge who criticized his former court administrator in a footnote inserted in four court orders can’t be sued for libel, the Mississippi Supreme Court has ruled.
The court said that Judge Jeff Weill of Hinds County is protected by judicial immunity, the Jackson Clarion-Ledger reports.
Former court administrator Karla Watkins Bailey had claimed that Weill’s footnote wasn’t protected by judicial immunity because it was irrelevant to the issue before him. But relevance is not an exception to the judicial immunity doctrine, the court said in an opinion (PDF) by Justice Josiah Coleman.
Bailey had sued over two of Weill’s assertions in the footnotes. One stated that Weill had reprimanded Bailey for improper ex parte communications with an assistant public defender with whom he was having an ongoing dispute. The other said Bailey presumably was responsible, in her new job as deputy clerk, for listing the assistant public defender as counsel of record to a motion.
Because Weill entered the orders in his capacity as a judge, he had jurisdiction over those matters and was protected by immunity, the court said. Allegations of irrelevance and malice do not remove immunity protection, the court said.
Justice Leslie D. King wrote a special concurrence, joined by one other justice, to express his concern about the “alleged judicial behavior in this case.”
“I find it concerning,” he wrote, “that this opinion may allow judges to claim judicial immunity for any gratuitous remarks made in an opinion or order, so long as the judge has overall authority to promulgate the opinion or order in the first place. …
“I believe that this court may need to revisit this notion at a later date, especially when, as here, the actions were alleged to have been taken with malice and were allegedly irrelevant to the underlying judicial action.”
