A New York jurist who reportedly bragged openly about pulling a loaded gun on a Black man in his courtroom almost a decade ago was booted from the bench.
The New York State Court of Appeals, which is the state's highest court, ruled on Thursday to uphold a recommendation from last year by the state’s Commission on Judicial Conduct to rid Robert J. Putorti from his position as Whitehall village town judge.
“We have never had a situation other than this case, where a judge — with or without justification — pointed a gun at a litigant in a courthouse,” Robert Tembeckjian, the commission’s administrator and counsel, told the New York Times, and atomizing the 2015 episode as “a very singular act of misconduct.”
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Tembeckjian further touted the record of the lion's share of those ruling from the benches in the Empire State, telling the outlet that in the past 10 years, out of about 3,400 judges, Putorti is the tenth to have been forced out.
"He's a judge. We're supposed to be looking at him as a judge," Judge Shirley Troutman said shortly after condemning the judge's action. "We have to conduct ourselves in a certain manner."
It was reported that weighing heavily in the decision to dismiss Putorti was his hyping himself up following the 2015 confrontation and loosely using a racist stereotype to describe the Black man whom he targeted with the loaded semi-automatic pistol.
When he recounted the incident to relatives and colleagues over the years it is said Putorti, a white man, described the Black man who stood 6-feet-tall and weighed 165 pounds, as an “agitated” “big Black man” -- exaggerating his size to “6-feet-9 inches tall” and “built like a football player,” the Times wrote, citing the decision following his appeal.
Further, Putorti tried to claim that he turned to the gun because he “feared for his safety.”
The appeals board disagreed.
Tembeckjian wrote in the decision that Putorti had “exploited a classic and common racist trope that Black men are inherently threatening or dangerous,” and that his actions at the time and afterward demonstrate bias.
“Clearly his constant repetition of the racial element and his exaggeration of the physical characteristics of this particular defendant were shocking and totally undignified and inappropriate for a judge to make,” Tembeckjian said, according to the Times.
Raw Story's attempts to reach Putorti were not immediately returned.
Records show that, while Putorti served as a judge, he also is the owner of Bigboy’s Guns in Whitehall.
Putorti argued that not only did he have a license to carry the pistol, but that he made it a habit of safe-keeping it attached to the underside of the bench while he heard hearing cases, according to the Times.
And that in the moment he pulled the gun, the unnamed litigant had lunged toward the bench too quickly.
However, the Times detailed how Putorti ultimately backed off that account, acknowledging at the time that nobody in the court including the uniformed officer nor an assistant district attorney would be able to support his version of events.
