The judiciary has racked up a tremendous number of public relations disasters over the past year at both the state and federal levels, with many Americans becoming disillusioned with members of a profession once seen as august and now often seen as largely full of incompetent hacks. Adding to the judiciary’s woes was a judge in Atlanta who had to be removed after getting in a drunken squabble with the police outside of an Atlanta nightclub.
That would be Douglas County Probate Judge Christina Peterson. 38 years old and a Democrat, Judge Peterson had been fighting a bevy of judicial misconduct allegations nearly since she was first elected to the bench as a woke candidate in an uncontested election in November 2020. The Georgia Supreme Court finally removed her in late June of 2024.
The final straw for Peterson appears to have come when she was arrested on June 20 of 2024 outside the Red Martini Restaurant and Lounge on Peachtree Road in Buckhead, a relatively posh part of Atlanta. The officer, not knowing with whom he was dealing, saw a woman involved in a disturbance outside the restaurant and attempted to escort the rowdy woman off the premises.
As he did so, the police alleged, a woman later identified as Peterson approached the officer and started berating him. She even shoved him at one point, hitting him in the chest. The officer tried to deal with the woman he had originally been attempting to escort off the premises, but Peterson kept trying to interfere with him, attacking his hands.
Things culminated in Peterson getting arrested after she shoved the officer yet again, once again hitting him in the chest. She refused to provide her identification information, which caused further issues and delays in the officer’s attempts to deal with her.
Entertainingly, as she refused to provide the officer with identification information, she could be heard telling the officer, “Take me where you need to take me — immediately. They will get a fingerprint and find out who I am.” The officer, clearly tired of dealing with her, told her, “That’s not how it works.”
A few days later, on the 25th of June, the Georgia Supreme Court had had enough and announced that Judge Peterson was to be removed from her position on the bench, doing so in response to a whopping 30 ethics charges brought against her by the Georgia Judicial Qualifications Commission.
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Doing so, the Georgia Supreme Court explained, “In light of her multiple violations of the (judicial code) rules in relation to several matters—some of them reflecting a flagrant disregard for the law, court rules, and judicial conduct rules; the pattern of violations that the (JQC) director proved by clear and convincing evidence; the extremely concerning nature of some of those violations, in particular with respect to the criminal contempt matter; and her behavior during the JQC inquiry, we conclude that removal is the appropriate sanction.”
Watch her get arrested here: