Fox News perspective is that she broke court procedures in order to obstruct federal agents.
Prior cases seem to support that:
https://www.ice.gov/news/releases/massachusetts-judge-court-...
Case concluded with some kind of judicial reprimand (not criminal, but administrative). This one is further over the line.
Neutral description to LLM also supports that the judge acted improperly (but LLM didn't think this would lead to a conviction). LLMs aren't great at legal analysis, but are actually pretty good at pattern-matching cases.
One thing helpful to have is a lawful plan. The courthouse might have handled ICE without breaking protocols by having protocols. Protocols should be prima facie neutral, but it's reasonable to expect people in courts, schools, and other places we actually want them to show up to feel safe there. That shouldn't involve sneaking people through back doors or hiding them in jury areas.
ICE has been regularly overstepping its bounds and going after people in ways that impact our legal system's ability to function. This is a terrible precedent to set for no other reason than it impacts the rule of law. If people who are accused of crimes can be disappeared without a trial, just for showing up to court, what incentive is there for anyone to go to court? They are literally ignoring the "innocent until proven guilty" that is critical to the rule of law.
If you take away people's ability to get justice within the system, you are making it inevitable that they will go outside the system to get justice.
We can agree with what the judge did, but it doesn't make it legal.
We can also agree that ICE is breaking laws, but it also doesn't make what the judge did legal. It does help a bit -- in another comment I explained why -- but not enough to change the legal analysis.
As a footnote, modern LLMs aren't worse than Fox News. They have a lot of case law in their training set. They make mistakes so shouldn't yet be used for anything critical, but the legal analysis from Claude or GPT4.1 is a lot better than e.g. 95% of forum posts here.
It might be a mistake to beat someone bloody, but it isn't an accident.
Let's say I beat someone bloody. We can play through several scenarios:
- Someone broke into my house, and I was fearful for my life
- Plain clothes police broke into my house, and I was fearful for my life
Let's say a police officer did so:
- Someone was a gang member, and the police officer did so in self-defense
- Ditto, based on mistaken beliefs
A lot of the protections in place for police and judges are based on the fact that mistakes like these happen. In general, people aren't individually liable for mistakes make in their official capacity as a government employee, unless they cross very extreme lines. They might get fired, but not prosecuted.
There are exceptions (such as handling of classified materials), but as a guideline, if a police officer beats someone bloody, but has good reason to believe they were a criminal and that this was the least force they could use to keep themselves safe, they're protected even if they're wrong.
