A longtime town justice in upstate New York was removed from the bench on Tuesday after the state’s highest court affirmed a disciplinary panel’s finding that he had repeatedly used a racist slur while recounting a personal story.
The judge, Walter W. Jones of Canandaigua, used the slur outside court in May 2024 while telling a story about a Black man who Mr. Jones said had worked in his grandfather’s cotton fields in Texas during the Depression, the panel, the state Commission on Judicial Conduct, found.
The two people to whom Mr. Jones, 82, told the story — a member of the court staff, and a public defender — testified to the panel that he had referred to the worker more than once as Harry, with the name preceded each time by the slur, a derogatory term for Black people.
Mr. Jones acknowledged to the panel at a hearing that he had used the slur, but said he had done so only once and not in his own voice but in quoting his father, whom he described as “racist.” Mr. Jones said he did not consider himself a racist.
“The lesson I was trying to get across was that with tolerance, dignity and respect, we could overcome the differences between us, among us, become something else,” he said at the hearing, records show.
Mr. Jones was first elected as a town justice in Canandaigua, in the Finger Lakes region, in 1999, records show. He earned just over $30,000 in the part-time position. His most recent four-year term, which he won with 99 percent of the vote while running unopposed on the Republican and Conservative lines, was to expire at the end of next year.
Mr. Jones’s use of the slur made both people who heard it uncomfortable, records show. They shared their concerns with others.
Five days later, at the arraignment of a Black defendant, Mr. Jones made racially insensitive remarks about her, including that she had “played the race card” by accusing him of setting her bail inappropriately high because she was Black.
The two episodes were the basis for a formal complaint filed against Mr. Jones by the commission. After an investigation, the panel recommended his dismissal. He appealed the recommendation, which the ruling by the state’s highest court, the Court of Appeals, upheld.
The racial slur that Mr. Jones used, the court wrote, was “unquestionably offensive and followed just days later” by his “racially biased, on-the-record comments regarding a Black defendant who had appeared before him.”
The judges added that his “inability to recognize the impact that his statements could have on the public’s confidence in the judiciary’s impartiality and integrity demonstrate his lack of understanding of the need for judges ‘to both be and appear to be impartial.’”
Levi Stoep, a lawyer for Mr. Jones, said that his client had “no comment while we explore our options for federal relief.”
Robert H. Tembeckjian, the judicial commission’s administrator, said it was “an unpleasant duty to discipline a judge for unethical behavior.”
Nonetheless, he added, the decision by the Court of Appeals “should again reassure the public that both the court and the commission endeavor to uphold the highest standards of conduct among our judiciary.”
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