Impulsive act costs judge his position

A Napa County judge who took a couple of business card holders from the San Francisco City Club during a dinner last year has agreed to resign from the bench, the state’s judicial disciplinary agency said Monday.

Superior Court Judge Michael Williams will take leave on Oct. 19 and formally resign on Dec. 5, said the Commission on Judicial Performance. The commission issued a censure of Williams for conduct that “undermines public confidence in the integrity of the judiciary” and said he has agreed not to seek judicial office in the future.

“I was extremely disappointed in myself,” Williams said in an interview. “A moment’s impulse should be resisted. It was stupid and wrong.”

Williams, 70, a former machinist and Peace Corps volunteer, went to law school at night, then was an attorney for the county public defender’s office from 1986 to 1996 and research attorney and general counsel for the county courts until the judges chose him as a court commissioner in 2001.

He spent 11 years handling traffic-court hearings, family-law matters and similar cases before Gov. Jerry Brown appointed him to the bench in 2012. Williams was elected without opposition to a six-year term in 2014.

The commission said Williams attended the City Club’s “Judges’ Night” dinner, sponsored by the American Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers, in March 2016 and took the business card holders, worth $30 to $50 each, from a table as he was leaving. He said he had planned to use them to hold some “joke business cards” that he and a friend had printed 40 years earlier.

He returned the holders, included a letter of apology and contacted the judicial commission, after a lawyer told him he had been seen on video taking them.

The letter read, “I have no excuse but that I had a couple of glasses of wine and was not thinking of what I was doing.”