Bar Urges Dress-Wearing Judge to Reconsider Resignation

[WSJ_law_blog]

Should drunk-driving charges necessitate a judge’s removal from the bench? Suppose he’s wearing a dress when arrested. Should that matter?

Those are the weighty questions being flung around by the Boston bar these days after Robert Somma, a bankruptcy judge who was arrested while wearing a dress and was later charged with drunken driving, resigned from the federal judiciary. He then reportedly tried to unresign, according to the Boston Globe.

On February 13, Somma (pictured in mug shot from the Boston Globe) pleaded no contest in New Hampshire to a first-degree misdemeanor charge of driving while intoxicated and agreed to pay $600 in fines and penalties in connection with a February 6 car accident. He had rear-ended a pickup truck at a traffic light.

As his lawyer later confirmed, he was wearing a woman’s dress and appeared to have makeup on. Somma submitted his resignation two days later.

His resignation was originally to take effect April 1. But officials at the First Circuit delayed it for six weeks after Somma began expressing second thoughts. The resignation was supposed to take place five days ago, but Somma is reportedly still employed by the federal judiciary, leaving the legal community to wonder whether a letter-writing campaign, led by Paul D. Moore, urging the court to let Somma rescind his resignation, might have worked.

“We’re all continuing to wait with some hope,” Goodwin Procter’s Michael J. Pappone told Massachusetts Lawyers Weekly. Pappone practiced law with Somma and signed the petition. “We’re all speculating. All of us who supported urging him to reconsider certainly hope that the 1st Circuit allows him to withdraw his resignation and restores our excellent bankruptcy bench in Massachusetts to full strength.”

In a letter to Massachusetts Lawyers Weekly posted online on April 1, Somma wrote that an outpouring of support from judges, lawyers, and others had led him to conclude, “contrary to my initial belief, that the media frenzy occasioned by this episode would not be an impediment to my continued service as a judge.”

Spokeswomen for the U.S. Courts for the First Circuit and the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts in D.C. declined to comment on Somma’s status.