Eleventh Circuit Chief Judge William Pryor has dismissed a misconduct complaint against Judge Roy Altman of the Southern District of Florida, clearing him of all allegations.
The complaint centred on Altman’s repeated media appearances, filmed from his courthouse chambers, in which he made remarks widely criticised as Islamophobic, including referring to the keffiyeh as a “terror scarf.”
Pryor dismissed the complaint without appointing a special committee, finding the allegations “lack any factual foundation or are conclusively refuted by objective evidence.”
The dismissal came on the same day Pryor received a letter from House Judiciary Republicans demanding answers about a separate misconduct case involving a Democratic-appointed judge.
That case involved Judge Eleanor Ross, who received only a private reprimand after allegations she had sex in her chambers, attended a partisan campaign party, and lied about it to two chief judges.
Critics have noted that the Eleventh Circuit appears to have applied a similarly lenient standard to both cases, regardless of which political party appointed the judge in question.
In his response to the original complaint, Altman argued the logistics of his schedule made using his chambers a practical necessity for the interviews.
“It’s simply impossible, with my packed courtroom schedule, to drive thirty or forty minutes from my chambers to my house for a fifteen-, thirty-, or sixty-minute interview and then to drive thirty or forty minutes back to chambers,” Altman wrote.
Pryor accepted Altman’s contention that he was not using his chambers for extrajudicial work “to any substantial degree,” the threshold set by Canon 4G, noting he participated in thirteen days of interviews across five months without straining office internet resources.
Observers have pointed out that the central concern was never the precise amount of time logged on right-wing talk shows, but the appearance of judicial impartiality being compromised.
The use of an official public office to make sweeping claims about Islam and media control raised significant questions about whether a sitting federal judge could be perceived as impartial.
The dismissal stands alongside the Ross case as an illustration of what critics describe as a permissive culture toward judicial misconduct within the Eleventh Circuit’s oversight framework.
Republicans Jim Jordan, Darrell Issa, and Clay Fuller have demanded Pryor explain by September 15 how a private reprimand was intended to restore public confidence in the Ross case.
Both cases together raise broader questions about whether existing judicial misconduct mechanisms are adequate to maintain public trust in the federal judiciary.