In the verdant reaches of Upstate New York, amidst the idyllic sprawl of the Finger Lakes region, an erstwhile arbiter of justice has found herself on the wrong side of the bench. June Shepardson, who served with the weight of the gavel in hand as a town judge in Moravia—a locality with a modest populace of 1,270 souls—has been meted a sentence less severe than her own erstwhile jurisprudence might have allotted.
The once-respected magistrate’s fall from grace began in July when, amid whispers of fiduciary impropriety, she was suspended from the town court. The root of such disquiet: a gaping void where $6,000 of court funds should have been.
As the leaves turned and September woke, Shepardson, entrenched in her role since the dawn of the millennium, abdicated her judicial throne. In the wake of resignation, she bore her guilt as a mantle, conceding to the theft before the austere Cayuga County Courthouse.
The time-worn echelons of justice, embodied by Judge Thomas Leone, decreed that Shepardson’s penance would not be served behind bars but in the invisible shackles of probation—for a stretch of five years. This leniency came in the wake of restitution; the errant judge refilled the coffers she once drained, returning the sum of $6,000.
A shadow of addiction had nipped at Shepardson’s heels, and it was within the hallowed courts that her defense counsel, J. Justin Woods, laid bare his client’s struggle against the siren call of gambling—an affliction that she now seeks to conquer.
“Justice Shepardson, in the twilight of her service, grappled with a gambling compulsion. Her journey to recovery paves her present path,” Woods heralded in December. “Her tenure on the bench was marked by impartiality, though now she turns her gaze to the privacy of personal life, with a resolve to hoist the banner of awareness—casting light on the scourge of gambling’s grasp, particularly across the rural tapestry where support runs threadbare.”
Regret lines Shepardson’s narrative as she has barred herself from the very temples of temptation—the casinos that dot the map within reach: Cayuga Nation’s Lakeside Entertainment establishments and the siren del Lago Resort & Casino.
The town and village courts of New York are bastions of local law, handling the sundry minor infractions of the populace, from the speedster’s ticket to the quarrels over property lines. And within this framework, crimes such as Shepardson’s—fourth-degree grand larceny—do not demand the clang of a prison cell door. Yet, a specter of up to four years’ incarceration had loomed over her.
Robert Tembeckjian, a sentinel of the state Judicial Conduct Commission, weighed in with solemnity. “The guardians of our local courts must hold in sacred trust the financial transactions that pass through their hands,” Tembeckjian avowed. “To falter here casts a long shadow over the judiciary’s collective character.”
The moral of Shepardson’s tale is not one of singularity. The annals of U.S. judicial history whisper of judges ensnared by vice. In 2010, U.S. District Judge Thomas Porteous was cast from his lofty perch by the Congressional hammer after succumbing to corruption—an admixture of gambling debts and alcohol, sweetened by the bitter pill of bribery.
The disgrace of Shepardson and Porteous alike serve as a grave reminder: even those appointed to wield justice are not immune to the fallibility of human weakness.
