Lawsuit Filed Against Detroit Judge Kenneth King

The Black Detroit judge who must have been working on his advanced law degree in House Slave-ology when he had a 15-year-old black girl handcuffed for essentially falling asleep in class is now facing a lawsuit filed by the teen’s mother.

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According to The Detroit News, Latoreya Till, the mother of 15-year-old Eva Goodman,  filed the lawsuit in federal court Wednesday naming Judge Kenneth King, the security guards in the courtroom, and two court officers as defendants. The suit accuses King of malicious prosecution, unlawful arrest and prosecution, intentional infliction of emotional distress, false arrest, and invasion of privacy.

Till’s lawyer, Fieger Law Firm attorney James Harrington, said the suit isn’t asking for a specific amount of damages but is necessary to hold King accountable nonetheless.

“This is a very troubling case. We had a member of our bench berate, humiliate and essentially incarcerate a 15-year-old kid,” Harrington said at a press conference Wednesday announcing the lawsuit. “This was very, very real to her, very, very scary to her and somebody in a position of trust, somebody that was in a position of authority and power is threatening her about jail time, is threatening her by literally placing her in handcuffs.”

Seriously, it’s not like Eva was in the Sunken Place judge’s courtroom because she had committed a criminal offense. She was there on a field trip. As we previously reported, Eva didn’t have a permanent home, which may have had much to do with why she was exhausted while sitting in King’s courtroom. But even if that wasn’t the case, there’s really no justifying putting a Black child who has no experience going through the criminal justice system — because she’s not a criminal — in handcuffs and a jail uniform in front of her peers just to teach her some nonsensical lesson on how things work in the real world as if, in that world, a person could be legally arrested and jailed for failing to stay awake while at school or at a school activity.

“I wanted this to look and feel very real to her, even though there’s probably no real chance of me putting her in jail,” said King, who was temporarily suspended and fired from a teaching job at Wayne State University behind the incident.

Todd Perkins, King’s attorney, echoed his client’s nonsense about teaching kids valuable lessons, saying: “He only wants the best outcome for this young person and all young people. She matters. They matter. They are our future.”

Oh, word? That’s what he wants? The “best outcome?”

Before Eva sat in King’s courtroom during a field trip, she hadn’t experienced the humiliation of being berated by a judge in front of her classmates. She hadn’t experienced being put on trial. she hadn’t experienced being put in a jail jumpsuit or being handcuffed and detained by police officers. Eva hadn’t experienced any of the things teenagers who haven’t committed crimes don’t typically experience—unless they are Black teens who cops and officers of the court see no issue in arbitrarily criminalizing. 

From the Detroit News:

He berated her, ordered her to be jailed, handcuffed her and demanded she take off her clothes and dress instead in the uniforms prisoners wear in Wayne County, according to the lawsuit. He conducted a “fake trial” with her classmates and possibly his internet followers as her jurors and his audience, according to the lawsuit.

“Then, making a mockery of the justice guaranteed by the due process clauses of the United States Constitution, while panning the camera to focus upon his juvenile audience for the benefit of his internet fans, Defendant JUDGE KING asked (the teen’s) peers to serve as a fake jury of public opinion and decide whether to let her go home to her mother and grandmother, or to serve time in the juvenile jail that he had but moments before denigrated as unfit.”

During the press conference, Till also weighed in on what the “outcome” of King’s actions was for her daughter.

“She’s asking me, why did the judge do me like this, out of all the kids?” Till said. “She’s embarrassed and humiliated. And I can’t blame her. … I just want Judge King to take accountability for the way he humiliated my daughter.”

Till noted that Eva and her other daughter don’t have a permanent home and are going back and forth between her mother’s and her aunt’s homes for reasons she didn’t mention. Till’s lawsuit states that all the judge did with his perverse “Scared Straight” lesson was force her daughter  to “relive a traumatic event, causing her to shut down.”

And there’s your “outcome,” judge.