A Nassau County judge was censured by a state commission after he threw a fit and publicly chastised a school board for not naming his straight-A son the valedictorian of his graduating high school class last year.
Long Beach City Court Judge Corey E. Klein was censured — or written up for misconduct — by the State Commission on Judicial Conduct, the Albany-based group announced Monday, noting the judge agreed to the censure.
decision not to name his son valedictorian. City of Long Beach
Klein stormed into an April 2024 public school board meeting, seeking to challenge its decision and policies that led to his son not being designated top of the class, according to the commission.
When the school district lawyer Christopher Powers tried to interrupt Klein’s tirade, the judge told him not to “try to outlawyer me” and pressed on, the group said.
Members of the board continued to try and stop Klein’s nonsensical rant and even turned off his microphone. Yet he continued to shout, his voice booming as he apparently grew tired of Powers’ continued reference to him as “Counsel.”
“You can refer to me, Counsel, as judge,” Klein said, according to the commission.
“If you are going to try to be a lawyer, then refer to me by my title as well, okay. Thank you,” he added after his microphone was turned back on.
As board members tried to explain that the public meeting — which was also streamed online — was not a proper setting to appeal the decision on his son’s viability for valedictorian, Klein started to shout over them, the commission said.
“I’m gonna stay up here now and I’m going to continue speaking,” Klein stubbornly insisted.
“Your Honor. We are not in court at this point,” Powers tried to interject, but to no avail as Klein steamrolled over him.
“The fact that I’d have the audacity, okay, because it’s the end of my kid’s career, to come up here and question a decision that you made, okay, so you try to sic your pit bull attorney on me. It’s beyond reproach that you don’t do something like that, okay,” Klein eventually concluded after his heated back-and-forth with the board, the commission said.
The ranting judge was also accused of helping a professional acquaintance get out of $500 worth of unpaid parking tickets, according to his censure.
The person’s car was booted as a result of the unpaid tickets, and Klein reached out to numerous police departments to have it removed. Officers, thinking Klein was acting within his capacity as a judge, removed the boot and the acquaintance eventually paid the tickets, according to the commission.
“It corrodes public confidence in the judiciary when a judge lends the prestige of judicial office to advance a private benefit. Doing so impulsively, in an unseemly public argument over who should be a high school’s honoree, or as a favor to a parking ticket scofflaw, is especially irresponsible,” Commission Administrator Robert H. Tembeckjian said in a statement.
Klein has been a Long Beach judge since 2015. His term doesn’t expire until the end of 2034, according to the commission.
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