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| Allegheny County Common Pleas |
An advocacy group that has spent the last two years observing
criminal proceedings in Allegheny County Common Pleas Court and has been
highly critical of the overuse of probation in the county, last month
filed more than five dozen misconduct complaints against Judge Anthony
M. Mariani with the state Judicial Conduct Board.
The list of complaints was attached to a 48-page report
issued by the Abolitionist Law Center on Tuesday that addressed the
case of Gerald Thomas, who was being held at Allegheny County Jail for a probation violation when he died of natural causes in March.
“The tragic death of Gerald Thomas at Allegheny County Jail was not
random—it was the predictable result of overlapping, systematic patterns
of state violence that have become commonplace in this county,” wrote
staff attorney Dolly Prabhu. “City police, county probation, county
courts and the county jail all contributed to the manner of Mr. Thomas’
death.
“At each phase, racism likely played a role in Mr. Thomas’ arrest and
continued detention. And, at each phase, common sense reforms could
have prevented his needless incarceration and perhaps even his death.”
The report focuses heavily on Mariani, who was the judge presiding over Thomas’ case.
Mariani did not return messages seeking comment on Tuesday afternoon.
Among the allegations against him: that he uses racist language with
defendants before him — commenting on defendants’ physical size and
strength and talking about the need to “lasso” them; that he deprives
defendants of due process in their probation violation hearings; and
that he insults defendants who try to defend themselves.
“While Judge Mariani is not the only common pleas court judge
engaging in harmful practices, he stands out as a judge whose regular
disparaging and belittling of defendants, witnesses and attorneys alike
has routinely appalled observers in his courtroom,” the report said.
“Judge Mariani’s behavior demands a rigorous inquiry into his fitness to
serve as a judge. He is routinely rude, discourteous and
unprofessional.”
The complaint process with the Judicial Conduct Board is kept
confidential unless and until it decides to file formal charges with the
state Supreme Court of Judicial Discipline.
David A. Harris, a law professor at the University of Pittsburgh,
said that filing the Judicial Conduct Board complaints seems to be
appropriate, based on the observations made in the Abolitionist Law
Center report.
Being a judge is “a position of great privilege and responsibility,”
he said. “You don’t always deal with easy people and easy
circumstances.”
Harris said that judges must be able to maintain the kind of demeanor and temperament that reflects the position.
“If he cannot control his temper, or consistently makes observations
of people in personal ways that have nothing to do with the case,”
Harris said, perhaps Mariani should step down.
“My speculation is (the Judicial Conduct Board) would see it as a
pattern and take it seriously,” he said. “I think the pattern is
evidenced from just what I saw in the report.”
The report highlights what happened to Thomas, 26, who died at Allegheny County Jail from natural causes on March 6.
Thomas was on probation for a case in Mariani’s courtroom when he was
pulled over by Pittsburgh police for rolling through a stop sign. The
officer who stopped Thomas searched the car and found a handgun in the
glove compartment, and Thomas was charged with illegal possession of a
firearm. Even though a magistrate judge set bail at $2,000, Thomas was
detained on a probation violation.
Thomas’ defense attorney, Ken Haber, filed a motion to suppress the evidence because the search was illegal, and Mariani agreed.
He threw out the evidence, and the district attorney’s office withdrew the charges on Jan. 27.
However, Mariani would not lift Thomas’ detainer. Thomas was on
probation for drug-related convictions, according to court records.
At a probation violation hearing on Feb. 17, the judge said Thomas
was driving without a license, and that the officers who stopped him
said they saw him put the gun in the glove box before they searched the
car.
Mariani gave the prosecution and defense time to brief the issue, but
Thomas died from a pulmonary embolism before that could happen.
The report also highlights dozens of other observations made by the Abolitionist Law Center’s Court Watch program since 2020.
Fifteen times, the report said, Mariani “made inappropriate comments about a Black man’s physical appearance.”
In one instance, it continued, Mariani said to a defendant, “‘You
look pretty meaty, how many pushups can you do without stopping?’”
In another, he said, “‘When I look at you, I see a well built guy. No
one’s going to touch you if you don’t want them to … I wouldn’t fight
you if I had a club in my hand. You’re built strong, stocky.’”
It only happened twice with white defendants, the report said.
“Based on my personal observations, the Black defendants Judge
Mariani directs these inappropriate comments to are often of
average-looking physique,” Prabhu said. “Judge Mariani engages in racist
stereotyping with a shameful pedigree dating back centuries in this
country every time he describes what he sees when he looks at a Black
man: a big, strong, violent danger to society.”
The report also addresses the overuse of probation and what the
Abolitionist Law Center sees as the flaw of incarcerating people for
technical violations.
“Probation has never been the rehabilitative program it claims to be.
Probation sets people up to fail, and traps people into a harmful and
destabilizing cycle of reincarceration and supervision,” the report
said. “Today, community supervision is the primary driver of mass
incarceration, both in jails and prisons.”
The report argues that probation detainers are redundant, since new
criminal charges initiate the process of revoking probation anyway.
“Technical violations, which by definition are non-criminal, rarely
justify prolonged pretrial detention. Thus, probation detainers serve
virtually no justifiable public safety purpose. Instead, the courts’
overuse of this tool keeps the Allegheny County Jail full, and ensures
that a large proportion of those on probation will be trapped in
destabilizing and traumatic cycles of incarceration and supervision.”
As of Tuesday, there were 1,663 people incarcerated at Allegheny County Jail, according to the county’s jail dashboard.
Of those, 522 were being held on some kind of county, state or
external probation detainer. 413 were awaiting trial, and 68 were
serving their sentence.
Harris said it is clear that probation — and particularly long periods of probation — are being overused.
“To me, this is one of the real problems for our county and
Pennsylvania, generally,” Harris said. “It will cause our incarcerated
system to resist further efforts to shrink its size and have fewer
people under state control.”
Particularly difficult, Harris and the report noted, are the very
strict conditions attached to probation — such as zero tolerance of
alcohol or drug use, or requirements to have a job — that can lead to a
person’s failure.
“Some people manage to succeed at it, but it makes it very hard,” Harris said.
d.
Harris acknowledged that, like in Thomas’ case, a person on probation
who illegally has a firearm would be concerning to any judge.
“If you use probation, you have to play by its rules,” he said. “If
probation is part of the legal sentencing apparatus, and one of the
conditions is no firearm, you certainly have to consider that as a
judge.”
The report suggests a number of potential reforms — prohibiting split
sentences which include incarceration and long tails of probation;
removing police from traffic enforcement and instead use technology to
issue warnings and fines for speeding or other infractions; and
prohibiting the use of probation detainers for technical violations such
as unpaid fines and fees.
