Judge fails to disclose donors
A newly elected Oklahoma County district judge was ordered to pay $3,000 for campaign reporting violations, more than any other judicial candidate who ran last year, records show.
Kendra Coleman was assessed the compliance fees for not disclosing her campaign donor son time. Her last required report was due more than six months ago at the Oklahoma Ethics Commission.
“Having failed to file more than one report timely you are deemed to have intentionally violated the Ethics Rules,” the watchdog agency's executive director, Ashley Kemp, told her campaign in February.
“Nothing could be further from the truth,” an attorney, Joe White, said in a written statement last week on the judge' s behalf .“Judge Coleman had remained in consistent communication with the Ethics Commission concerning her final campaign finance reports. Judge Coleman has been dutifully, in her private time, preparing her final ... reports.”
Questions about Coleman's campaign surfaced in May
after prosecutors complained she had displayed bias in a manslaughter case in favor of a defendant represented by a key donor. “My rulings are not for sale,” she said in response.
Coleman, 43, of Oklahoma City, sound ly defeated an incumbent district judge, Michele McElwee, in the Nov. 6 general election. Coleman also drew public scrutiny in May for ordering a spectator in her courtroom to jail for five days after his cellphone went off.
The Ethics Commission assesses candidates $ 100 a day for filing reports late, up to $1,000 per report.
Coleman was assessed $1,000 last year after filing her third report more than a month late and $1,000 more after filing her fourth report 10 days late. She paid those fees in January, just before the Ethics Commission sued 14 former candidates over unpaid fees.
She filed on time the report due days before the general election. It shows she had raised almost $ 20,000 through Oct. 22.
She then missed the Jan. 31 deadline for her next required report and was assessed another $1,000, which remains unpaid. She subsequently missed deadlines for two optional reports. All three reports remain past due as of Sunday evening.
Judges are supposed to stop accepting donations 60 days after being elected so the Ethics Commission does not require them to keep filing reports after that. Most file anyway.
White said Coleman got behind because she has been doing the reports herself on her own time, because she has a “lot on her plate” at the courthouse and because of confusion over how to complete them.
“Certainly, there's never been an effort to hide, deceive or anything like that. She doesn' t have anything to hide,” said White, who gave her $2,700.
Coleman got a bachelor's degree in accounting in college before going to business school and then law school, according to an online biography.
About a fifth of the more than 100 judicial can didates who ran f or election in Oklahoma last year were assessed fees for late reports, Ethics Commission records show. The fees ranged from $100 to the $3,000 assessed Coleman.
Many failed to file so-called last-minute contribution reports after spending their own money on campaign supplies. A number said they were not aware they had to under those circumstances.
“It was a mistake ,” said McIntosh County Associate District Judge Brendon Bridges, who paid a $1,000 fee. “I learned from it.”