The most surprising takeaway from the viral video of a Texas judge losing his temper at an IT staffer for trying to fix the judge’s phone, is that it’s crazy that it’s taken this long for Judge Nathan Milliron to face a firestorm like this. Before we even posted our coverage of the video, we’d already found the judge seemingly gloating online about an earlier incident where he berated an attorney and threatened to issue a bench warrant for a missing litigant.
In a civil case.
It appears that the altercation with IT was just the peppercorn the rest of the Texas legal community needed to start talking about the judge’s behavior.
This is a Republican judge threatening to issue a warrant for a Texas Republican party official because he criticized the judge for throwing a public fit about the local Republican party not attending his celebration. Academics like to say their fights are so vicious because the stakes are so small, but apparently they’ve got nothing on Harris County Texas Republican politics.
Folks are also going public with his past interactions with staff.
An all caps “THAT IS AN ORDER!” in an email to the clerk staffing office. This message was, it seems, the end result of an ongoing dispute with the office that can best be summed up as “the judge was a dick to all his clerks and then got mad that no one wanted to work in his courtroom.”
From a few months before:
And then:
It feels like we were long overdue for this bullying treatment of staff to spill out into public view.
Disturbingly, the judge has taken the intense public rebuke of his attitude and decided to double down, retaliating against lawyers who reached out asking him to apologize for making the profession look bad.
Follow up reporting by Houston Public Media confirmed that the lawyer in question is James Stafford. The Houston County Criminal Lawyers Association put out a social media video of president Brent Mayr condemning the whole affair.
As a reminder, this guy ended up on the bench by a margin of around 300 votes. Judicial elections matter.
Earlier: Judge Throws IT Worker Out Of Courtroom For Doing His Job
Joe Patrice is a senior editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter or Bluesky if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news. Joe also serves as a Managing Director at RPN Executive Search.
The post Judge Who Embarrassed Himself With IT Outrburst Doubles Down appeared first on Above the Law.
The most surprising takeaway from the viral video of a Texas judge losing his temper at an IT staffer for trying to fix the judge’s phone, is that it’s crazy that it’s taken this long for Judge Nathan Milliron to face a firestorm like this. Before we even posted our coverage of the video, we’d already found the judge seemingly gloating online about an earlier incident where he berated an attorney and threatened to issue a bench warrant for a missing litigant.
In a civil case.
It appears that the altercation with IT was just the peppercorn the rest of the Texas legal community needed to start talking about the judge’s behavior.
This is a Republican judge threatening to issue a warrant for a Texas Republican party official because he criticized the judge for throwing a public fit about the local Republican party not attending his celebration. Academics like to say their fights are so vicious because the stakes are so small, but apparently they’ve got nothing on Harris County Texas Republican politics.
Folks are also going public with his past interactions with staff.
An all caps “THAT IS AN ORDER!” in an email to the clerk staffing office. This message was, it seems, the end result of an ongoing dispute with the office that can best be summed up as “the judge was a dick to all his clerks and then got mad that no one wanted to work in his courtroom.”
From a few months before:
And then:
It feels like we were long overdue for this bullying treatment of staff to spill out into public view.
Disturbingly, the judge has taken the intense public rebuke of his attitude and decided to double down, retaliating against lawyers who reached out asking him to apologize for making the profession look bad.
Follow up reporting by Houston Public Media confirmed that the lawyer in question is James Stafford. The Houston County Criminal Lawyers Association put out a social media video of president Brent Mayr condemning the whole affair.
As a reminder, this guy ended up on the bench by a margin of around 300 votes. Judicial elections matter.
Earlier: Judge Throws IT Worker Out Of Courtroom For Doing His Job
Joe Patrice is a senior editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter or Bluesky if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news. Joe also serves as a Managing Director at RPN Executive Search.
