The judges talked over each other. They rolled their eyes.
One judge told the young single mother before her that she could file a request to remove her cousin as the executor of their disputed grandfather’s estate. The other warned her that filing more motions could cost her the $5,000 her grandfather left her.
The third judge, two weeks into her job, sat stone-faced as the scheduling conference for a contested will last week — usually, a 15-minute affair — stretched out to 90 minutes. It lasted through tears and outbursts, and two lengthy recesses after the judges couldn’t decide who spoke for the court.
“Having fun yet?” the attorney for one side asked me during a break.
Two years into the feud between Chief Judge Vicki Gipson and Associate Judge Marc Knapp, the Orphans’ Court of Anne Arundel County remains a target of derision in the legal community.
That could change this month, when the Maryland Commission on Judicial Disabilities begins considering complaints against both judges, potentially disciplining or even removing them.
Unfortunately, they dragged me into this.
“As discussed, we intend to issue you a subpoena to testify at two separate proceedings pending before the Maryland Commission on Judicial Disabilities,” Derek A. Bayne, deputy assistant investigative counsel for the commission, emailed me.
So far, I’ve been subpoenaed to testify at Gipson’s hearing later this month.
The judges allegedly brought disrepute to the judiciary by speaking with me (and others) about their concerns.
The commission alleges they did far more than that, of course.
Knapp faces administrative charges that he harassed Gipson, made inappropriate remarks about an individual’s ethnic background and, in layman’s terms, behaved like an unrepentant jerk.
Gipson has to defend herself against charges that she acted unprofessionally, violated confidentiality obligations, improperly used her title in asking for a protective order against Knapp and — according to me, the layman — allowed her court to devolve into chaos.
And both are accused of wrongdoing for speaking with journalists about their dispute after it landed in District Court a year ago for a hearing.
“I signed up to do this job,” Knapp told me that day in Annapolis. “Judge Gipson doesn’t want me to. Screw her.”
Gipson was there to ask a judge for an order keeping Knapp at bay, but a deadline passed and she walked out of the courtroom in tears.
“I feel like nobody’s really responsible for the safety of judges in Anne Arundel County,” she said. “At least orphans’ court.”
So, I wrote that this dispute was a sign that Maryland should abolish the court. The commission apparently didn’t like that, based on allegations in the complaints against both judges.
The Maryland Judiciary hasn’t addressed the many problems surrounding Orphans’ Court. It didn’t step in when this started after Knapp’s election in 2022, when he joined Gipson on the lowest county bench.
Anyone can be an orphans court judge in most of Maryland. Win the popular vote, and you get sized for a black robe.
Anne Arundel, like many counties, doesn’t require judges to be lawyers, or if they are, to understand estate law. Howard, Harford and Montgomery counties abandoned this system, moving to alternatives such as a special magistrate.
Worse, Maryland is the only state that still uses a three-judge panel to settle probate cases, giving rise to personal disputes like this one.
That could be about to change.
Gov. Wes Moore signed a bill into law this year that created the Task Force to Study Fiduciary Adjudication in Maryland. It will examine these courts and seems sure to recommend changes to the General Assembly.
That won’t come soon enough for the nondescript courtroom in a beige office strip tucked behind a parking deck on the fringe of Annapolis. Gipson, Knapp and Associate Judge Stacey-Anne Scott sat together July 29, facing a broken family fighting over an old man’s money and house.
Scott, who has a law degree from Howard University, was appointed three weeks ago by Moore to fill the vacancy created when Judge David Duba decided he’d had enough.
As Gipson and Knapp offered competing observations to the young woman appearing without an attorney, I wondered what Scott was thinking.
Moore appointed this Annapolis High School graduate to a hometown job. If she’s there to straighten out this mess, it isn’t apparent yet.
I get that judicial decorum is an indisputable good. You don’t want a judge yakking to beer buddies about hammering some miscreant before him.
That’s not what Gipson and Knapp did when they spoke to me. They were exercising their right to talk about perceived wrongs and hope that a journalist would do something the court system would not — address the problem.
Despite warnings about deadly threats to judges, the courts didn’t take any effective action after Gipson claimed another judge threatened her. Despite Knapp’s public complaints that Gipson was unqualified, they did not intervene and ask what was wrong.
The judiciary allowed a court where people come seeking wisdom to make itself the fool.
In demanding that I come to court, the commission is compounding the problem by establishing an obstacle for any journalists who want to write about disputes on the bench — time away from work and legal fees. The Banner has moved to quash the subpoena on First Amendment and other legal grounds.
As I sat in the white-walled courtroom, a clock on the back wall ticking time away during one of the recesses, I wondered whether Scott, the warring sides, or even the deputy sheriff sitting in the back row understood how broken this court is.
Or that when this probate case reaches a final hearing in February, Gipson and Knapp may not be the ones who decide it.
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