Judge In TN Divorce Wasn’t Biased Based on Statements Made

Tennessee law case summary on judicial recusal in divorce law from the Court of Appeals.

Dennis Michael Christie v. Shannon Denise Christie  – Tennessee divorce judicial recusal

The husband and wife in this Tennessee divorce case were divorced in 2012.  In 2014, the wife filed a motion to enforce the care plan and parenting plan, and requested an emergency hearing on the motion.  A week later, she filed a motion for the recusal of the trial judge.  The trial judge denied the motion, and the wife appealed that denial to the Tennessee Court of Appeals.

In Tennessee, a party has the right to file an immediate appeal of an order denying a request to recuse the judge.  Such appeals are normally decided without oral argument.  Under the court rules, the appeals court reviews the motion de novo.

The wife, who filed the appeal without an attorney, argued that the trial judge should have recused himself because of negative personal feelings toward her.  In support of the appeal, she argued that the judge questioned her credibility at trial, kept asking her why she hadn’t sought employment, and seemed frustrated by her anxiety.

The test for recusal is whether a reasonable person would think that a particular judge is biased against the litigant.  The bias, however, must come from an extrajudicial source, and not what the judge had learned from participation in this case.

In this case, the appeals court concluded that any hostile remarks at trial were the result of what the judge had observed during the proceedings, not from an extrajudicial source.

The wife also claimed that the judge’s bias was evidenced by his alleged denial of her constitutional rights.  But she was only able to point to a few minor factual inconsistencies in the court’s findings.  The appeals court found that these minor errors were not such that a reasonable person would conclude that the judge was biased.

For these reasons, the appeals court affirmed the trial judge’s ruling and assessed the costs of the appeal against the wife.

No. M2014-01647-COA-T10B-CV (Tenn. Ct. App. Sept. 26, 2014).

See original opinion for exact language.  Legal citations omitted.

To learn more, see The Tennessee Divorce Process: How Divorces Work Start to Finish.