NC judge censured after hiring his friend, turning 'blind eye' to harassment

Investigators from the state's Judicial Standards Commission heard from other employees that Ben Tuite, Murphy's assistant, repeatedly made "profane and inappropriate comments," encouraged one employee to sabotage a former employee's career, lied, often didn't do his work and at one point got so angry that he slammed his hand down on a table hard enough to activate the attached panic alarm.

One woman, the commission said, told the judge that Tuite “intentionally ruined her engagement in July 2017."

Murphy, who was elected to the Court of Appeals in 2016, didn't return a phone message left for him at his office Friday afternoon. Attempts to reach Tuite, both through the Administrative Office of the Courts and an online telephone lookup, were not immediately successful. Courts system spokeswoman Sharon Gladwell said late Friday night, after this story posted, that Tuite "separated from employment" at the court in January 2018.

The Judicial Standards Commissions findings referenced in the Dec. 15 Supreme Court opinion censuring Murphy are dated September 2019. Asked about the delay, Gladwell said late Friday that the court doesn't comment on opinions.

Law clerks in Murphy's office told investigators that Tuite made "comments of a sexual or inappropriate nature" and that they told Murphy about it. In one incident, Tuite was talking about a female job applicant and called her breasts "fun bags." The judge, the Judicial Standards Commission reported, was in the room at the time.

The judge repeatedly condoned and enabled toxic behavior, the commission found.

When some of the problems were reported to the Administrative Office of the Courts' human resources department, the judge "lacked candor and downplayed, minimized and mischaracterized Mr. Tuite’s actions," the commission found.

"The evidence shows that [Murphy] willfully engaged in vindictive behavior," the justices said in the unanimous opinion. "The evidence also shows that [he] violated his duties ... by being dismissive of and turning a blind eye to comments and incidents that took place both within and outside of his presence."

The justices wrote that Murphy not only "undermined the dignity of the Court of Appeals, but negatively impacted the work product of his clerks, and ultimately the court, and denigrated the reputation and integrity of the judiciary as a whole."