A judge in Detroit has been suspended after he ordered a teenage girl to be handcuffed and threatened her with jail after she fell asleep in his courtroom during a field trip.
District Court Judge Kenneth King was temporarily removed from the docket after an internal investigation and will “undergo the necessary training to address the underlying issues that contributed to this incident,” Chief Judge William McConico said in a statement Thursday.
The 15-year-old girl was in King’s courtroom Tuesday as part of a group trip organized by the Greening of Detroit, a local nonprofit organization, to help young people learn about the judicial process. A now-deleted YouTube video showed the girl falling asleep between hearings, when King yelled at her and ordered her to be put in handcuffs and to change into a Wayne County Jail jumpsuit, the Detroit Free Press reported.
Colleen Robar, a representative for the Greening of Detroit, said in a statement Tuesday that the judge “chose to make an example of a 15-year-old girl in front of her peers,” calling his punishment “unacceptable.”
The girl’s mother told NBC News that her daughter was tired because they don’t have permanent housing and that they had arrived late at the place they were staying the night before the trip. She told the Free Press: “My daughter is hurt. She is feeling scared.” King’s excessively punitive reaction to the teen falling asleep has been widely condemned. He told WXYZ-TV on Tuesday that he was not so much “disturbed” by her falling asleep but by her “whole attitude and her whole disposition.” “That’s not something that normally happens. But I felt compelled to do it because I didn’t like the child’s attitude,” King told the local outlet. “I haven’t been disrespected like that in a very long time.”
Clarissa-Jan Lim is a breaking news reporter for MS NOW. She was previously a senior reporter and editor at BuzzFeed News.
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