According to The Commercial Appeal, Memphis Criminal Court Judge Jim Lammey posted a virulently racist and anti-Semitic essay to his Facebook page.
The essay, by noted Holocaust denier David Cole, calls Muslim immigrants "foreign mud," blasts schools for getting caught up in the "integration craze," and said that Jews should "get the f*ck over the Holocaust."
Confronted about the hate speech in the article he shared, Lammey said that "I don't know if that meant that I agreed with it all," and said he doesn't like that Cole denies the Holocaust. He claims that his late friend is Jewish and that he is not a racist because he has read "The New Jim Crow" and agrees with a lot of it.
But local advocacy groups allege that Lammey, who has substantial sentencing power up to and including life imprisonment and the death penalty in some cases, has a history of discriminating against Hispanic immigrants in his court, forcing them to register with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) before granting them probation.
On at least one occasion, he kept a probation-eligible defendant in jail for not signing up with federal authorities.
Tennessee judicial conduct rules prohibit judges from discriminating on the basis of ethnicity or national origin.
