If you spend even a few minutes talking to me, you’ll know that I have no respect for judges who bring their politics to the bench. Having worked for decades as a litigator in the San Francisco Bay Area, I can sum up all leftist judges using the one sentence a judge said to me when I showed that the law mandated dismissing a civil action against my client: “I don’t care what the law says; I think there’s something here.” (He was wrong. There was nothing there, and we eventually had a huge victory.)

I was thinking of that when I read the defense that Judge Hannah Dugan raised against the indictment brought against her for allegedly helping an illegal alien escape imminent ICE arrest. Here’s what Dugan is accused of doing:

In a criminal complaint, the U.S. Justice Department said Hannah Dugan, a Milwaukee County circuit judge, hindered the immigration agents who showed up to arrest the man without a judicial warrant outside her courtroom on April 18, and that she tried to help him evade arrest by allowing him to exit through a jury door. Agents arrested the man, Eduardo Flores-Ruiz, outside the courthouse after he left with his lawyer.

What’s important to note is that Dugan was not acting within her official capacity when she allegedly committed these acts. That is, she was not making a ruling from the bench on a matter before her. (“From the bench,” by the way, is a term of art that doesn’t literally require her to be sitting at the bench in the courtroom. It just means that she is making judicial pronouncements in her role as a judge on a case brought before her in that capacity.)

Instead, as the above quotation shows, the man had already left the courtroom. Moreover, he was not in Dugan’s court on a matter related to his illegal status. Instead, he was appearing before her on entirely unrelated felony charges.

It’s on these facts that Dugan and her attorney have responded to the indictment with a rather surprising Motion to Dismiss. According to the motion,

The problems with this prosecution are legion, but most immediately, the government cannot prosecute Judge Dugan because she is entitled to judicial immunity for her official acts. Immunity is not a defense to the prosecution to be determined later by a jury or court; it is an absolute bar to the prosecution at the outset. See Trump v. United States, 603 U.S. 593, 630 (2024).

(I love it that they have to cite a Trump case to make this argument.)

And yes, judicial immunity is a thing, for it’s a subset of sovereign immunity. In 1978, the Supreme Court explained:

As early as 1872, the Court recognized that it was “a general principle of the highest importance to the proper administration of justice that a judicial officer, in exercising the authority vested in him, [should] be free to act upon his own convictions, without apprehension of personal consequences to himself.” Bradley v. Fisher, supra, at 347. [Fn. omitted.] For that reason the Court held that “judges of courts of superior or general jurisdiction are not liable to civil actions for their judicial acts, even when such acts are in excess of their jurisdiction, and are alleged to have been done maliciously or corruptly.”

You’ll have noted a couple of things in that quotation. First, the judge must be “exercising the authority vested in him.” Second, judges “are not liable to civil actions for their judicial acts.”

Thus, a judge does not get a pass for criminal conduct taken outside the authority vested in him. As Olivia Murray commented, “If that’s what judicial immunity is, I’m going to run to be a judge, then handle some problems myself.”

Olivia’s right. If Dugan and her fellow leftist judges legitimately believe that they can take the law into their own hands, not just on matters pending before them in their role as judges, but as to anything that offends them, then every judge is a 007 agent, roaming the land and handing out vigilante justice according to his or her invariably Marxist values. (I say Marxist because it’s unlikely that conservative judges, who believe in the Constitution and the rule of law, would avail themselves of this license.)

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