opinion

The short, unhappy tenure of Judge Gorcyca

It's a gig that provides an annual salary of roughly $140,000 -- and a front-row seat to enough misery and heartache to stagger a mule team.

But if you want to be Oakland County's next family court judge, now would be an excellent time to make your aspirations known, because there's about to be an opening.

Unless the facts alleged in a 17-page complaint Michigan's Judicial Tenure Commission filed this week prove utterly false, the Michigan Supreme Court will likely cut short Oakland County Circuit Judge Lisa Gorcyca's seven-year career sometime early next year.

A vacancy could occur even sooner if Gorcyca decides to resign. Otherwise, one of the worst days she ever spent on the bench will get a very public airing when a Judicial Tenure Commission referee hears charges stemming from a 2015 custody hearing in which Gorcyca found three Oakland County children in contempt of court for refusing to have lunch with their estranged father.

Like most of those who witnessed it live, I winced when I read the transcript of the June 24 hearing, in which the judge compared the children -- then ages 9, 10 and 13 -- to mass murderer Charles Manson's cult followers and insinuated they could be forced to spend the rest of their childhoods at Children's Village, which is both a detention facility and a way station for children in crisis.

But a review of the 5 1/2-year record of the underlying divorce and custody case led me to conclude that Gorcyca had merely suffered an unseemly meltdown in the course of a long, frustrating campaign to maintain the children's emotional ties to both parents.

In the social media firestorm that erupted after the children's mother took her story to a local TV station, Gorcyca hastily vacated her contempt judgment against the children and ordered them transferred to a summer camp in Ortonville.

But the hearing attracted the attention of the Judicial Tenure Commission, which issued a complaint late Monday ordering Gorcyca to respond the commission staff's allegations that her behavior in the June 24 hearing violated the state's Code of Judicial Conduct. The commission's investigators specifically accused Gorcyca of ridiculing the divorcing couple's children in court, exaggerating the legal punishment she could impose for their continued failure to engage with their father, and generally scaring the stuffing out of them.

The complaint alleges that Gorcyca had a sheriff's deputy handcuff the children in open court and laughed at them even as the youngest wept and trembled with fear.

Unfortunately for Gorcyca, all this took place an Oakland County courtroom where video cameras capture every word and gesture of the participants in any legal proceeding.

Gorcyca might nevertheless entertain the hope of escaping with a suspension or reprimand if she had simply acknowledged the numerous lapses of judgment and demeanor documented by the courtroom cameras.

Instead, the tenure commission says in its complaint, the judge lied to its investigators in two instances:

In the first, she said that when she used her index finger to make circular moments at her right temple, she was describing "the forward movement he would make" in court-ordered therapy. Investigators concluded the gesture, made while Gorcyca was comparing the children to Manson cult followers, clearly conveyed the judge's conclusion that the 13-year-old was crazy or brainwashed.

In the second instance, Gorcyca denied that she had found the children in contempt of court for refusing to have lunch with their father. Investigators said the court record proved that her answer to the commission was false.

In a pantheon of judicial folly that has ranged from fixing tickets to trysting with litigants, little has angered the tenure commission (and the state Supreme Court justices who ultimately rule on its disciplinary recommendations) more than judges who lie to those investigating allegations of official misconduct.

Two years ago, in a decision ejecting another judge from office, those justices decreed that lying under oath "is entirely incompatible with judicial office and warrants removal," a bright line the high court has since underscored in rulings that removed two other miscreants, former Wayne County Circuit Judge Wade McCree and District Judge Sylvia James, from the bench.

Anybody, even a judge, can have a bad day at work. But the historical precedent is clear: You can't lie to the Judicial Tenure Commission about your bad day and still be a judge when the smoke clears.

Contact Brian Dickerson: bdickerson@freepress.com