The Commission on Judicial Conduct of the State of Washington has dismissed a case against retired Clark County District Judge Darvin Zimmerman due to his poor health, the commission announced Friday.
A YouTube livestream captured Zimmerman making derogatory remarks about a 21-year-old Black man shot and killed by Clark County Sheriff’s deputies in 2020. The livestream had been set up to record a court hearing that day, and it continued to broadcast even after the hearing ended — apparently without Zimmerman’s knowledge.
Zimmerman made the remarks in March 2021, apologized, announced he would take time off from the bench and then retired. He was 70 and earned $190,116 annually.
On Friday, the judicial conduct commission said it had dismissed its case against Zimmerman in part because “there is very little likelihood that Respondent will return to judicial service” due to an undisclosed medical condition.
The dismissal order notes, however, that the commission may resume its case if Zimmerman’s health recovers and he seeks reemployment as a judge.
Zimmerman had called Kevin Peterson Jr., whom deputies shot and killed in October 2020 after Peterson ran from a drug sting with a .40-caliber Glock 23 semiautomatic handgun, “dumb” and “the Black guy they are trying to make an angel out of.”
Zimmerman’s son was then a sergeant with the Clark County Sheriff’s Office. The son was involved with the Peterson case but wasn’t one of the three deputies who fired on Peterson 34 times, hitting him four times.
“He could have been a shooter and then they would be marching out at his house with signs saying, ‘You’re a murderer’ and all that bullshit,” the judge said.
An attorney for Peterson family’s, Mark Lindquist, called the judge’s remarks “deeply disturbing.”
“Kevin Peterson Sr.’s son was shot and killed,” Lindquist told The Oregonian/OregonLive in 2021. “Imagine his pain. The judge apparently cannot. His lack of empathy for a grieving father, his lack of a sense of shared humanity, is part of the problem.”
