An Arkansas judge has resigned after a state commission accused him of ordering male defendants to be spanked, engage in sex acts and bend over for thousands of photographs to fulfill their “community service,” a senior state official on Tuesday said.
The resignation of then-Cross County district judge Joseph Boeckmann was effective immediately after it was sent to the Arkansas Judicial Discipline and Disability Commission on Monday, commission executive director David Sachar said.
The commission began an inquiry into Boeckmann in 2014 over a possible conflict of interest in an unrelated case on elder care, Sachar said.
However, that case took a surprising turn when court employees began asking investigators, “Did you hear about the boys?”
“Then the dam broke,” Sachar said.
As of Tuesday, no criminal charges had been filed, but Sachar said they were possible.
The commission began uncovering evidence and witness testimony related to the judge’s treatment of male defendants in traffic cases over the past few years, Sachar said.
Men who had appeared before Boeckmann in court said they were asked to go to his house or to some other location with bags of canned goods, ostensibly for charity.
Then, according to their accounts, the judge told them to bend over and pick up the cans as he photographed them from behind for what he said would be evidence of community service, according to a filing on the commission’s Web site.
In one case from 2014, he gave a defendant his telephone number and ordered him to come to his house, where he photographed the man bending over and offered him US$300 to pose as Michelangelo’s statue of David, the commission said.
The commission said it had obtained up to 4,600 photos of men — some identified as defendants — who are shown naked after an “apparent” paddling or other sex acts.
The commission sent about 1,050 of the photos to Boeckmann’s lawyer last week with a letter saying it expected to add them to the allegations about his conduct, Sachar said.
“We are not through processing them,” Sachar said on Tuesday in an interview, referring to the photographs and potential witnesses. “They were defendants in traffic court cases, but possibly some other misdemeanors.”
The judge’s lawyer, Jeff Rosenzweig, declined to comment on the photographs but denied that Boeckmann had done anything wrong.
Rosenzweig said the judge had been near the end of his second elected four-year term when he resigned.
“He did not admit any wrongdoing, and he is not going to admit any wrongdoing,” Rosenzweig said.
The commission was continuing its investigation and it had interviewed hundreds of witnesses since August last year, looking at the judge’s docket sheets, Sachar said.
“We have identified three dozen people by name that we have contacted or know it happened,” he said, referring to people who said they had experienced inappropriate sex acts, paddling or photography or payments by the judge. “We suspect there are more.”
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