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After Kentucky inmate Adam Satterly heard from Jefferson County Judge Olu Stevens that his bond had been revoked, he waited until he had left the courtroom to shout a racially charged response to the decision.
“Punk-ass n—ger!” he screamed, apparently unaware that Stevens could still hear him.
A short time later, Satterly was escorted back into the courtroom to learn that the judge decided to further punish him for speaking in the courtroom hallway.
“Is there something that you wish to say to me?” Stevens asked.
Satterly responded that he made the comment to his brother and “didn’t mean it like that.”
The judge shot back that no one is allowed to use “disrespectful” language within his earshot of his courtroom.
“You don’t speak those words in here,” he asserted. “And that word particularly, you don’t use that word.”
After announcing that Satterly would face a 60-day additional sentence for contempt of court, Stevens warned him: “Don’t ever do it again.”
While there was little social media sympathy for Satterly, given his offensive outburst, more than a few individuals had a problem with the way Stevens handled the situation.
“The case was over,” one reader wrote in response to an article by TheBlaze’s Jon Street, “the man was heated emotionally and heading back to jail. While I understand it was stupid, and ‘don’t mess with the judge,’ freedom of speech still applies – that is what the courtroom is supposed to defend. It may be disrespectful but the judge shouldn’t have the authority to jail someone simply for feeling disrespected or insulted.”
This was not the first questionable – and racially motivated – move to come from the bench in Stevens’ courtroom. As Western Journalism reported last year, a case against two black armed robbers was punctuated by the judge’s admonition of the victims.
When it was revealed that a 3-year-old at home at the time of the robbery has since expressed fear of black men in general, Stevens concluded that the adults in that house must be racist.
“My exception,” he told the victimized family, “is more with her parents and their accepting that kind of mentality and fostering those type of stereotypes.”