Meet the rudest judge in Britain
A SENIOR has been formally disciplined over an astonishing series of ‘gratuitously rude’ outbursts in court.
Judge Robert Stephen Dodds stunned parents and lawyers with his withering put-downs when considering sensitive family cases.
But even though judicial watchdogs have ruled that his brutally blunt comments amounted to serious misconduct, the judge will be allowed to continue sitting in family court sessions.
In one hearing, involving a 13year-old girl’s bid to discover her real father, he seethed: ‘Can I tell you how bitterly resentful I am at how much of my Saturday I spent reading this codswallop?’ He also referred to the case being brought by ‘lunatics’.
In another case everyone in court ‘crumbled under his caustically expressed views’ – before he blasted the mother for looking ‘upset and bewildered’ by his diatribe.
And in a third, he mocked the intelligence of lawyers who wanted a young boy to live with his grandparents in Poland, telling them: ‘This is a game of chess, not draughts.’
In his most blistering outburst, Liverpool-based Judge Dodds, 63, refused the bid from a teenage girl, known as ‘S’, for a DNA test to establish who her father was.
Although it was considered an ‘uncontroversial’ application, it was refused by the judge who warned the lawyers: ‘You may want to put your crash helmet on’, before raging: ‘If she told you that the moon is made of green cheese will you say, “Yes, S, no, S, three bags full S?” For heaven’s sake, in this day and age especially, just because the lunatic says, “I want, I want”, you do not have to respond by spoon-feeding their every wish.’
He said he was ‘appalled that it was thought that public funds could be expended upon such nonsense’.
But his judgment was overturned, with Appeal Court judge Lady Justice King calling his ‘unrestrained and immoderate bombast’ both ‘deplorable’ and ‘unacceptable’.
She said his outbursts left lawyers ‘feeling browbeaten and impotent and, rightly, as though their clients have been denied a fair hearing.’
In another case, Judge Dodds dismissed an 11-year-old boy’s bid to return to his mother ‘within minutes’. Lady Justice King said the judge’s rudeness so stunned the family and lawyers they could not explain that the situation was ‘more complicated than the one the judge clearly saw’.
The Judicial Conduct Investigations Office said Lord Chancellor Michael Gove and the Lord Chief Justice had issued an official reprimand.