Johnette Cruz Joins

SPEAKER_1 (0:00)

From the WIBC Newsroom, Johnette Cruz joins us. They're saying Cruz.

What's up, what's up? So we've got some judges to talk about. I feel like this could be, you know, top of the hour news. It could be legal stuff. It falls into the category of a number of different things. But let's talk about some of these judges that are getting reprimanded.

Johnette Cruz (0:26)

Oh, my gosh. Yeah. Did you see? I had to highlight everything of all the things that are going on. So first, we're gonna start off with Judge Jeffrey Gaither. He is in Marion Superior Court 9 So that specific court deals with domestic relations. So we're talking about child welfare, family protections, custody, family law, juvenile court, that kind of stuff. So he has potentially right now, three formal misconduct charges. So the first one is failure to rule timely.

So he has repeatedly failed to issue timely rulings and family law in cases between March of 2022 to July of 2026

Seven separate cases were withdrawn from his court under Indiana trial rules, and then also transferred to other judges, essentially due to excessive delays. Then count two, Judge Gaither failed to supervise Magistrate DM. So despite knowing that the Magistrate lacked family law experience and had severe backlogs, Judge Gaither essentially took no corrective action. So he basically left leaving rulings delayed for hundreds of days and dozens of cases. And then his third count is inadequate oversight to court staffs, resulting in just erroneous court orders, dormant cases, lacking future court dates, missing hearings, journal entries across 105 cases. To me, that's the biggest problem right there, Johnette.

SPEAKER_1 (1:40)

That's the biggest problem, because it tells me he doesn't give a damn.

Johnette Cruz (1:44)

Right.

SPEAKER_1 (1:44)

Like it's just a case of the blankets. A slacker. Right.

Johnette Cruz (1:48)

Yeah. Completely.

SPEAKER_1 (1:50)

Imagine how bad at your job you have to be to be a judge in Marion County, where others are going, dude, you're taking too long.

Like, because things take a long time in Marion County. We've had a judge problem for a long time, not just from a decision slash activist perspective, which we've had those like Judge Stoner. But now you've got judges that just don't want to do anything.

Johnette Cruz (2:17)

Exactly. And even the the committee, it's the Superior Court Executive Committee, identified 391 cases with incomplete tasks or missing hearing dates while they were doing all of this entire audit. So that's just that's judge number one.

SPEAKER_1 (2:31)

Judge number one. All right. Show me what's behind curtain number two.

Johnette Cruz (2:35)

Right. Current number two is judge Jose de Salinas of Marion Superior Court 23 So that's essentially the drug courts and also the Marion County Drug Treatment Court. It's also a specialty court. So I kind of took some research into this court. It was actually established back in the 1990s where they wanted to establish a way for people who had drug offenses to essentially give them other opportunities not to just put them in jail. So I don't know if this is the reason why there's probably some leniency within this judge or within this court, we'll see.

But this charges stem from decades long pattern of administrative negligence, failure to supervise court staff, untimeliness, procedural failure. So he actually has five counts. So the first one is court staff oversight delayed releases. Judge Salinas failed to supervise staff entering release codes into case management systems, causing defendants to remain detained without bond or face delayed releases. Count two, failure to set hearings and case dismissals. There's a pattern from 2015 to 2025 of failing to take judicial action or schedule future court dates in 43 criminal cases.

This results in five cases being dismissed, and then also additional violations and 15 others being dismissed by the state because of this.

SPEAKER_1 (3:47)

Okay, so one of the questions I was going to ask you, Johnette, is who's filing these charges? Like, is it the state of Indiana? Who's the one, who's the hero that finally came out and said, okay, even by Marion County standards, you guys are zeros.

Johnette Cruz (4:03)

Yeah, so this is the Indiana Commission on Judicial Qualifications. They're the ones that filed the formal judicial misconduct charges against these judges. And so from from this point on, so they they get this information. And then I think they have about about 20 days to respond and then to kind of figure out what they're actually going to be doing with these counts and if there's something at the end of it in terms of like what happens in for next steps. So that was what that was count 2 count 3 failure to process expungements says so Salinas has widespread failure to execute statutory automatic expungements delays range up to 795 days actually directly leading to an individual being wrongfully arrested and jailed in April of 2026 on a level 4 felony charge based on a prior conviction that should have been expunged. So this person actually went to jail for something that should have been already cleared off his record.