The single, vulgar comment didn’t obstruct the court proceedings enough to support a criminal contempt conviction, the court ruled.
The Pennsylvania Supreme Court has voided the criminal contempt finding against a courtroom onlooker who spent a month behind bars after referring to a county judge as a “cocksucker.”
In a majority ruling issued on October 29, the court held that a lone crude insult aimed at a judge from the public gallery, while a breach of courtroom manners, did not amount to the kind of obstruction of justice required for a criminal contempt conviction.
In June 2022, Basile Outlaw occupied a seat in the gallery of the Philadelphia County Court of Common Pleas before Judge Roxanne E. Covington. He stood up and declared, “The judge is a cocksucker,” in reaction to Covington’s ruling on a motion brought by the defendant, who was a friend of Outlaw’s.
“What did you say?” Covington asked.
“Never mind, I’m leaving,” Outlaw replied, and he exited the courtroom, according to court records.
Outlaw later returned to Covington’s courtroom, where he was taken into custody for criminal contempt. At a sentencing hearing, he explained that he had come back to apologize and expressed remorse for his outburst. He received a 30-day sentence, which he served in full.
Outlaw challenged the conviction, but the Pennsylvania Superior Court affirmed it in December 2023, concluding that his behavior substantially disrupted the proceedings and undermined the court’s authority because the remark betrayed disrespect for the court and its control of the courtroom.
Outlaw pressed his appeal to the Pennsylvania Supreme Court once more, asking it to determine whether “a single act of profane insult directed at the judge constitutes direct criminal contempt when it did not, in any way, impede the proceedings in any meaningful manner.”
The Pennsylvania Office of the Attorney General (OAG) argued in favor of upholding the conviction, contending that allowing such openly defiant and abusive conduct to stand would “undermine judicial authority in the public eye, thereby obstructing the administration of justice.”
Nonetheless, the high court drew on a prior ruling that found it did not amount to obstruction when a man representing himself in a custody dispute told the trial judge he was “such a fucking asshole.”
“Both remarks fall far below the appropriate standard of courtroom decorum, and in both instances the contemnors spoke out in response to rulings with which they disagreed,” wrote Justice David Wecht for the majority. He added that, in both cases, the outbursts only caused “transient delays” that led the judge to ask, “What did you say?”
The court did not accept the OAG’s attempt to distinguish the two cases by arguing that Outlaw’s outburst was more offensive and thus more disruptive.
“While we will not undertake to rank the obscenities discussed here by level of offensiveness, we do not believe that calling a judge a ‘fucking asshole’ creates an impression that the public may disregard a judge’s orders and rules of courtroom decorum any more than calling a judge a ‘cocksucker’ would,” Wecht wrote.
Although judges possess broad authority to establish rules within their courts, that power is not boundless, as other cases have demonstrated. In October, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit held that a Missouri judge who confined two children to jail cells out of frustration with their conduct could not shield himself from a civil rights lawsuit. The Eighth Circuit concluded that the children had not committed a punishable offense, and therefore the judge violated their clearly established Fourth Amendment right to be free from unreasonable searches and seizures.
Judges have also threatened newspapers with contempt for publishing confidential material, such as when a Florida judge warned the South Florida Sun Sentinel for exposing bureaucratic errors in the lead-up to the mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School.
