The reprimand is sealed

On May 22, 2026, the U.S. Judicial Conference’s Committee on Judicial Conduct and Disability approved a private reprimand of a federal district judge in the Eleventh Circuit. The judge is not named. The court is not identified. The police officer with whom the judge had a two-year extramarital affair, including repeated sexual intercourse in the judge’s chambers during business hours, is not named. The police department that employed the officer — a department, the order acknowledges, "involved in numerous criminal and civil cases being litigated in the district" — is not named. The chief judge of the district court who relayed the complaint upward is not named.

The Eleventh Circuit Judicial Council’s order does name Chief Circuit Judge William H. Pryor Jr., who appointed the Special Committee that investigated, and it names the sanction: a private reprimand, apology letters to six former clerks, the judge’s agreement to forgo serving as chief judge of the district court should the judge otherwise be eligible, and an agreement to indefinitely refrain from service on any Judicial Conference committee. The Committee on Judicial Conduct and Disability called this discipline "appropriate and proportionate." Reuters reported the decision on Tuesday.

This order comes from the federal judiciary’s internal misconduct system: complaints are filed under the Judicial Conduct and Disability Act of 1980 and handled first by circuit chief judges and judicial councils, with review by a Judicial Conference committee. Its proceedings are confidential, and when a complaint is resolved through a privately communicated reprimand, the Judicial-Conduct Rules require the public materials to omit both the judge’s name and the text of the reprimand. Those omissions prevent outsiders from checking the judiciary’s account.

What the Special Committee found

The Special Committee’s final report in Judicial Complaint No. 11-25-90212, dated December 10, 2025, found three instances of judicial misconduct, and the Eleventh Circuit Judicial Council adopted those findings.

The first: from approximately October 2023 through October 2025, the Subject Judge carried on an extramarital affair with a high-ranking officer of a local police department. During that period, the judge had sexual intercourse with the officer in the judge’s chambers, during business hours, on multiple occasions. The clerk who first reported the conduct sat at the desk immediately outside the judge’s office. Investigation counsel inspected the layout of a similar chambers and confirmed that "noises, even the sound of whispering, could be heard regardless of whether the door was opened or closed." Three of six former law clerks interviewed by counsel reported personally hearing what they understood to be intimate contact. One clerk, the report says, "had to leave the office for the day." Another lost focus at work and was unable to sleep.

The second: the judge knowingly attended a partisan political event hosted by a district attorney’s campaign. The judge initially characterized the attendance as a private "mixer" of former colleagues, but the Special Committee, considering the judge’s eventual concession and the surrounding context, found that the larger event was sponsored by a campaign. Canon 5 of the Code of Conduct for U.S. Judges explicitly prohibits a judge from attending "a dinner or other event sponsored by a political organization or candidate."

The third: the judge made false statements to Chief Judge Pryor and to the Chief District Judge in the judge’s September 29 and 30, 2025 communications. In writing, the judge characterized the allegations as "outrageous" and "baseless," claimed not to know which officer the reporting clerk could possibly be referring to, and implied that the clerk was retaliating for being disciplined over phone use and tardiness. The judge maintained that denial for eleven days. In that time, investigation counsel pulled courthouse security footage and sign-in logs, interviewed five of the judge’s former clerks, transported a sofa cushion from the judge’s chambers to a qualified laboratory in another state for an acid-phosphate test, and inspected comparable chambers to hear how easily sound traveled beyond the judge’s office. The footage showed the officer signing in and out as a law enforcement visitor on dates the clerk had specified. The cushion test returned negative. The reporting clerk was interviewed later, on October 21. On October 10, 2025, through counsel, the judge recanted and admitted the affair and the in-chambers conduct.

The judge accepted the Special Committee’s recommendation of a private reprimand. The Committee declined to recommend a public one, citing the judge’s eventual candor, the unlikelihood of recurrence, and the judge’s "otherwise exemplary service to the court."

In the judge’s submission on appropriate remedial measures, the judge asked to be "allowed to word the letters of apology vaguely so as to ensure that a letter could not be 'used against [the Subject Judge] in some way.'" The Special Committee declined that request, recommending that any apology be "sufficiently specific so as to make clear to the recipient the sexual misconduct for which the judge is apologizing." The Committee required the judge to name the misconduct in the apologies to the clerks. It nevertheless approved keeping the judge’s identity from the public.

The happenstance defense

The order documents that the officer’s police department was involved in numerous criminal and civil cases in the district during the affair, and that the judge was not assigned to any of them between January 2022 and October 2025. The order then says: "Although no such scenario occurred, this appears to be the result of happenstance and not any mitigating efforts by the Subject Judge."

The Special Committee adds, in a footnote, that the judge told investigation counsel that the judge would have recused if assigned such a case. The Committee "accepts this counterfactual conditional statement as true." It also flags an obvious problem with the counterfactual: a witness’s affiliation with the officer’s department might not surface until well into a trial. "The point is, regardless of how sensitive the Subject Judge might have been to the potential for conflicts to arise, there is good reason that judges generally disclose their interests and thus give those litigating before them the opportunity to suggest, at the onset of a case, that a judge might need to recuse."

No conflicting case reached the judge, according to the Committee. The public has to take its word for that.

Happenstance is not an accountability standard. It is the absence of one. When such situations exist, the public has little independent way to discover them unless someone inside the system reports them. There is no public recusal log to audit, no published conflict-disclosure regime applicable to non-financial interests, no consistent way to learn whether the case-assignment record was affected by an undisclosed relationship. This case surfaced because a clerk reported it.

How thin the pipeline is

The Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts publishes annual misconduct statistics in Table S-22 of the Judicial Business reports. The most recent published table covers the fiscal year ending September 30, 2024.

In that year, federal courts received 1,510 misconduct complaints. Four — in all of fiscal 2024 — produced any remedial action against a judge. Three were censures or reprimands, all in the Ninth Circuit. One was a request for voluntary retirement, also in the Ninth Circuit. Many complaints were dismissed in whole or in part. Most were dismissed as "merits-related," meaning the complainant was challenging a ruling, which the statute treats as outside the misconduct system. Others were dismissed for lack of sufficient evidence. The table reports other non-remedial dispositions as well, and notes that a single complaint can have multiple stated reasons for dismissal.

Four out of 1,510. About 0.3 percent.

If reported in the same way, the Subject Judge in this case will appear in a later Table S-22 in a similarly small remedial-action column — also via private reprimand. The reprimand itself is not public. What the public receives is a redacted order or report that omits the judge’s name and the text of the reprimand.

A low remedial-action rate does not, by itself, mean the system is lenient. It could mean misconduct is rare. It could mean potential complainants — clerks, defendants, lawyers — don’t know how to file, or don’t believe filing will accomplish anything, or rationally fear retaliation. It could mean the Act’s definition of "misconduct" is narrow, and the merits-related exclusion sweeps a lot of complaints out of scope. The published numbers do not tell us which explanation fits. The aggregate numbers are public. The case files, the chief-judge dispositions, the special committee reports, the private reprimands — those are, by default, not.

The false statements

The asymmetry between what the federal judiciary expects from people it puts on trial and what it accepts from itself is clearest in the third finding.

The written denials were specific. About an officer with whom the judge had been having sex in chambers for two years, the judge wrote: "Because so many lawyers, law students and officers from my cases as a prosecutor have stopped by to visit me, I don’t even know which law enforcement officer [the clerk] is referring to." Eleven days later, the judge recanted.

18 U.S.C. § 1001, the federal false-statements statute, criminalizes knowingly and willfully making materially false statements in any matter within the jurisdiction of the executive, legislative, or judicial branch of the federal government. The ordinary maximum penalty is a fine, up to five years in prison, or both. The statute’s subsection (b) carves out a narrow exception for parties and their counsel making submissions to a judge in a judicial proceeding. It does not exempt a federal judge submitting false written responses to a Chief Circuit Judge in a misconduct inquiry. I do not know of a § 1001 prosecution in this exact posture, and I would not claim that one was legally inevitable here.

I am not arguing that the judge should have been prosecuted. A federal defendant who lies to an FBI agent in a materially comparable way can face criminal exposure measured in years. A defendant who lies during a federal investigation can have months added to a sentence under the Sentencing Guidelines' obstruction enhancement at §3C1.1. A federal judge who lies to the chief judge of his circuit, in writing, twice, in matters material to a misconduct investigation, gets an apology assignment and an agreement not to serve on certain committees.

The Special Committee rejected the judge’s argument that prompt recantation should excuse the false statements.

What the order does not say

The order also withholds the cases the department was a party to, and the judges assigned to them. It does not name the political event the judge attended. Dates of the chambers conduct appear only in the parts of the witness narrative the report reproduces verbatim.

The clerk who reported the conduct is described as having been "later reassigned a new position." The order’s footnote 3 explains that "Law clerk A subsequently filed a complaint through the district court’s employee dispute resolution (EDR) process. The district court then offered Law Clerk A, and the clerk accepted, a new position." This is the order’s account of what happened to the person who told the truth.

The Subject Judge will go on hearing cases — presumably including, in time, criminal cases where law enforcement testimony is decisive. The practical effect of the order’s omissions is that future litigants, lawyers, jurors, journalists, and chambers employees will have no public way to connect this record to the judge in front of them.

The same problem in sentencing

I encounter the same problem in my work on federal sentencing. The United States Sentencing Commission publishes individual-case sentencing data, but the public files exclude identifiers — including the judge-level identifiers needed to attribute sentencing decisions to specific judges. Empirical work on judge-level variation in federal sentencing has, for decades, depended on supplementing the USSC data with separately obtained district-level identifiers. That work is hard, slow, and incomplete.

The misconduct process and the sentencing-data system raise different confidentiality concerns. In both, removing judges’ identities prevents the public from examining individual conduct. Anonymized sentencing records do not show how a particular judge sentences defendants; this misconduct order does not identify the judge found to have lied. Internal oversight may catch problems, but the public cannot assess it from these records.

Protecting complainants

Judicial independence raises distinct constitutional concerns, and confidentiality in misconduct proceedings serves at least one legitimate function: protecting falsely accused judges. A regime in which every complaint produced a public record would chill complainants too — clerks could be sued for defamation by judges they accused, and the most powerful judges would have the most leverage to retaliate. The current regime’s secrecy partly protects the people the reform argument is most concerned about.

Naming the judge might effectively name the district, the police department, the officer, and perhaps the six clerks. In a small federal legal community, public transparency for the institution can become public exposure for the people who reported the misconduct and corroborated it. Any disclosure rule would have to protect them.

The redaction follows the Judicial-Conduct Rules. They distinguish between public orders and privately communicated reprimands, and in the latter category they require the public materials to omit both the judge’s name and the text of the reprimand. The council followed rules that make secrecy routine.

The private reprimand is not the only consequence in this case. The judge gave up eligibility to serve as chief judge of the district court — a position of real institutional power. The judge gave up service on Judicial Conference committees, the bodies that set policy for the federal judiciary as a whole. Those are not nominal sanctions, and they alter the trajectory of a federal judicial career. But without the judge’s name, the public cannot connect those consequences to this case.

The order itself is, in some respects, candid. It uses the word "happenstance." It names extortion vulnerability as a risk the judge created. It refuses to accept recantation as a defense to the false-statements finding. It documents the clerks' adverse reactions in their own words.

What the order asks of the public

The next time a federal judicial council calls a private reprimand "appropriate and proportionate," I want to be able to read the reprimand and know who received it.