A Detroit courtroom devolved into a confusing and traumatic experience for a group of young teens on an educational field trip. The unsuspecting teens found themselves having to decide whether one of their peers should be sent to a detention center for her actions.
Judge Kenneth King of the 36th District Court in Detroit wanted to make an example of a 15-year-old girl who fell asleep in the courtroom and gave him “attitude” after she was reprimanded, he told WXYZ Detroit.
King has since been suspended for his unexpected decision making and will undergo training.
The group of teens were a part of a nonprofit summer program Greening of Detroit to meet a judge and watch a real-life trial play out. But things took a humiliating turn when the judge slapped a teen into handcuffs and made her wear a jail uniform — all for falling asleep in the courtroom.
The mother of the young girl, Latoreya Till, later explained to the news outlet that her daughter was nodding off during the Aug. 13 courtroom visit because the family does not have permanent housing.
After an internal investigation by the 36th District Court, Chief Judge William McConico ordered that King be temporarily removed from his docket on Aug. 15. He will undergo training to “address the underlying issues that contributed to this incident,” McConico said in a statement, per the Detroit Free Press.
“The 36th District Court, known as ‘the people’s court,’ remains deeply committed to providing access to justice in an environment free from intimidation or disrespect. The actions of Judge King on August 13th do not reflect this commitment,” McConico said.
The disrespectful actions he’s referring to were caught on video and showed the increasingly angry judge blasting the 15-year-old for being tired.
“Wake up!” the judge shouted. “You fall asleep in my courtroom one more time, I’m gonna put you in back, understood?” the Judge told the girl during an introductory Q&A with the kids before the legal proceedings got underway.
In video footage of the incident, the agitated judge warned the tired teen, “One thing you’ll learn about my courtroom is that I’m not a toy. I’m not to be played with.”
Judge King then forced the teenager to change into a jail uniform. In the video, she can be seen standing in front of her peers, handcuffed and wearing a jail jumpsuit. The situation took an especially frightening turn when the Judge threatened the teen with jail time at the juvenile detention facility and asked the other students to vote on her fate. “I’m gonna go to sleep tonight while you’re sitting in the juvenile detention center,” he told her.
Using graphic imagery, he described what could lay ahead for her: “The thing about the juvenile detention facility is a lot of the people that are there are not just bad kids. You have a lot of mentally ill kids there. The last time I was there, I had a kid who was actually sticking a spoon up their rectum and spreading feces on the wall.”
Ultimately, the teen was uncuffed and allowed back into her clothes before the field trip concluded.
After the incident, the judge — who has his own Facebook fan group — doubled down on his actions in an interview with WXYZ, claiming he was justified because he hadn’t “been disrespected like that in a very long time.”
“Was I really going to do that? Probably not,” he told the station. “Could I have? Probably so. But that’s not what I want to do to a kid who’s there on a field trip,” King said about threatening her with lock-up. “Do I think I was heavy-handed in what I did? No, I don’t. Because I’ll do whatever it needs to be done to reach these kids and make sure that they don’t end up in front of me.”
The nonprofit group promotes environmental stewardship and hosted the field trip as part of a summer youth program. Till, the child’s mother, told WXYZ Detroit she enrolled her daughter to keep her busy and was reportedly unaware of the incident until the news outlet approached her.
“Would you want someone to treat your child like that?” the single mother of two said with tears streaming down her face in an interview.
“To belittle her in front of the whole world and her friends, to make her feel even more worse about her situation. I’m a single mother. I’m trying my best. I’m doing everything that I can,” she said, adding, “How do you know my baby got a home? How do you know my baby got her own bed that she can sleep in? She don’t have that right now, so she was tired.”
The Judge explained to reporters that his discipline method “was my version of ‘Scared Straight,’” referencing a 1978 documentary where repeat juvenile offenders were locked up with prison “lifers” for three hours to deter them from committing more crimes.
“You didn’t scare nobody straight,” responded Till in her interview. “You made a parent upset. You scared my child. She was nervous; she had never been inside no courtroom.”
As the video made its round on social media. Some questioned whether the judge would have reacted the same way toward a white teen. One user wrote on Atlanta Black Star’s Facebook page, “This uncle Thomas wouldn’t have done that to an upper class white teen.”
“Although the judge was trying to teach a lesson of respect, his methods were unacceptable,” said Marissa Ebersole-Wood, the chairwoman of the Greening of Detroit. “The group of students should have been simply asked to leave the courtroom if he thought they were disrespectful.” She acknowledged that “the young lady was traumatized.”
In his statement reprimanding the Judge, McConico said, “We sincerely hope that this incident does not undermine our longstanding relationships with local schools. Our thoughts and actions are now with the student and her family, and we are committed to taking these corrective measures to demonstrate that this incident is an isolated occurrence.”
Judge King has served on the 36th District Court since 2006, according to his biography on the court’s website, and was the presiding judge of the court’s criminal division when the incident happened. There’s no word on how long he will be suspended from his duties.
