Not long after taking the bench for the afternoon docket, Baltimore County District Judge Bruce S. Lamdin noticed a woman leaving the courtroom with a crying baby.
"If she only knew how much I hate kids," the judge said, "she would not have brought that kid in here today."
He later asked a Pennsylvania man caught speeding why every resident of that state "drives like a fool."
FOR THE RECORD - An article in Monday's editions of The Sun about a Baltimore County District Court judge facing disciplinary action incorrectly identified the location of the college where he earned his bachelor's degree. Hampden-Sydney College is 60 miles southwest of Richmond, Va., according to the school's Web site.
The Sun regrets the error.
"What is it up there? Is it in the water?" Lamdin asked. "You know, I get on [Interstate] 83 every day, going back and forth to work, and you all go flying by me. ... What's the big rush to get back to Pennsylvania? It's an ugly state."
Those comments - along with disparaging remarks about drug treatment programs and the Baltimore City criminal justice system, a joke that the county's Circuit Court judges spend their afternoons sipping cocktails rather than working, and profanity not normally heard from the bench - led to charges that Lamdin had violated Maryland's judicial code of conduct.
Last week, the state's highest court ordered the judge to show why he should not be suspended or otherwise sanctioned for his conduct.
It is the first time the Maryland Court of Appeals has scheduled a hearing in such a case since 1984, when the high court removed a judge from office for forging court documents, according to Gary J. Kolb, an attorney and the executive secretary of the state panel that investigates complaints about judges.
Lamdin, 59, did not respond to requests for an interview, and his lawyer declined to comment.
But in letters to the commission, in legal filings from his attorney and during a one-hour public hearing before the panel in June, the judge admitted violating the canons of the judicial code of conduct. He has sought the guidance of three judges who have been mentoring him since June 2006. And he explained that his courtroom commentary is often intended to ease tense moments with humor or to get through to the types of people he represented as a criminal defense attorney in language they can understand.
"I now realize how my comments could be viewed as discourteous, undignified and therefore sanctionable," Lamdin wrote in one letter. "In an attempt to reach criminal defendants with my comments, I talked in language I knew they understood. The comments were not mean-spirited, but I realized I went over the line."
