http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/29/us/alabama-chief-justice-roy-s-moore-battles-latest-ethics-charges.html 2016-09-29 03:25:46 Alabama Chief Justice Roy S. Moore Battles Latest Ethics Charges For the second time in 13 years, the judge faces removal from the bench, this time over his order that marriage licenses not be issued to same-sex couples. === MONTGOMERY, Ala. — The sequel was not quite the blockbuster media sensation of the original, when TV satellite trucks parked at the state judicial building for days on end. This may be due in part to the But the storyline was utterly familiar, as was the leading man: the Alabama Supreme Court chief justice, Roy S. Moore, who was on trial here Wednesday for the second time in 13 years, on judicial ethics charges that could again cost him his seat on the bench. Gone was the inimitable set piece for that first episode — a 5,280-pound The trial this time centered on a four-page This directive came eight months after a federal judge issued an order to the exact contrary and more than seven months after the United States Supreme Court found marriage a constitutional right for same-sex couples. The Southern Poverty Law Center filed a series of complaints, and in May the state’s Judicial Inquiry Commission, an oversight body, filed charges on six counts of violating the state canon of judicial ethics. Chief Justice Moore was suspended pending the outcome of this trial. Supporters of the chief justice rallied, with veterans of past protests here, in other states and even “People are saying it’s dwindling,” said the Rev. Tom Ford, a Baptist pastor in Montgomery who spoke of freedom and righteousness while eating a Chick-fil-A sandwich on the courthouse steps. “But I just don’t think people understand this case as well as the other one.” Again, the trial took place in the State Supreme Court before the state’s Court of the Judiciary, a special nine-member panel of selected judges, lawyers and outsiders to the legal profession. And again, Chief Justice Moore was unrepentant in his testimony. “What is the law of the land?” he asked, grilling the prosecutor on federal and state judicial sovereignty. “What is the supreme law of the land?” The charges concern a series of cases going back to last year. In January 2015, Callie V.S. Granade, a federal judge in Mobile, ruled that Alabama’s ban on All spring a judicial battle ensued, referred to by prosecutors as “a constitutional game of chicken.” Judge Granade expanded her ruling to apply to every probate judge in the state. The Alabama Supreme Court, meanwhile, said that the state’s law outlawing same-sex marriage was indeed constitutional and ordered probate judges to carry it out. Then on June 26, the Chief Justice Moore’s lawyer, Mathew Staver, argued that the conflicting state and federal orders had thus remained an unsettled issue — indeed, that it is still unsettled since the State Supreme Court has never dismissed the old orders. The United States Supreme Court’s decision was not binding on Alabama directly, he said, and so Chief Justice Moore was only informing confused probate judges what the law was as they waited to hear from the State Supreme Court. “I would not defy a federal court,” Chief Justice Moore said on the witness stand. “I don’t defy federal courts within the law.” Lawyers for the Judicial Inquiry Commission said the matter was just not that complicated: after the United States Supreme Court ruled that same-sex couples had “the fundamental right to marry in all states,” and after the federal injunction went into effect in Alabama, the game of chicken was over. The chief justice, who had called the ruling “immoral, unconstitutional and tyrannical,” had simply been defying the federal courts once again, they said, only this time he was directing 68 other officials to do it, too. “We are here 13 years later,” said John Carroll, acting as prosecutor in the case, “because the chief justice has learned nothing.” The main question is whether this episode concludes as it did the last time, though that will be known soon: the Court of the Judiciary has 10 days to rule.