By: Danny Jacobs

Baltimore County District Court Judge G. Darrell Russell Jr. broke his silence about his controversial decision to marry a man accused of domestic violence and his alleged victim the day of the accused’s trial.

Russell e-mailed and spoke with The Baltimore Sun’s Dan Rodricks, who in a column Sunday described a condition he called “judicial glaze” that can affect district court judges who hear a variation on the same case over and over again.

You can read Russell’s comments here. Russell said he never read the statement of probable cause in the case in order to remain unbiased, “so I had no idea of the nature of the offense until I heard it on TV.”

There were two other passages from Russell’s comments I found interesting. First, on the defense request to postpone the trial so the couple could obtain a marriage license:

I had two options. Grant the postponement whereby they would be wed and later she would not testify, or deny the postponement and the public defender would pray a jury trial, thus giving the defendant a three week postponement and plenty of time to marry. What I did was a third option which cut to the chase. I expedited the inevitable. It’s a mentality engendered by big dockets in Essex and the necessity of moving cases.

Second, on what happened when the couple came back with a marriage license that afternoon after having the standard, 48-hour waiting period waived:

I felt I owed it to them to at least talk to them. I took them back in my chambers and questioned them thoroughly before deciding that they were indeed sincere, and why not legitimize their relationship and their children? It was perhaps my Catholic conscience. This was not a woman in any way in fear for her safety. In the courtroom her body language said that she wasn’t going to be a good witness. She wouldn’t stand next to the state’s attorney but rather clung to the defendant. Incidentally, she has since called to thank me.

Russell concluded that he should have let someone else marry them in retrospect and literally offered a “Mea Culpa” for making an “error of judgment out of good intentions.”

Thoughts?