Olu Stevens Retired

Jefferson Circuit Court Judge Olu Stevens used Facebook and a public bar association speech to accuse Louisville's chief prosecutor, by name, of being a racist who wanted to preserve all-white juries. Kentucky's Judicial Conduct Commission found that crossed a real ethical line — not just a political disagreement — and Stevens agreed to a 90-day unpaid suspension after pleading guilty to six counts of judicial misconduct.

The dispute began in 2014, when Stevens dismissed an entire panel of 41 potential jurors — nearly all white — in a criminal case involving an African American defendant, without evidence that anyone had intentionally excluded Black jurors from the pool. Jefferson County Commonwealth's Attorney Tom Wine, who is white, appealed the ruling, questioning whether a trial judge had the authority to dismiss an entire jury panel on those grounds alone.

Stevens responded on Facebook, writing that Wine was appealing "to protect the right to impanel all-white juries," and separately accused him of using the media "to deceive the people while he does his deeds." He repeated similar accusations in a speech to the Louisville Bar Association. Kentucky's Chief Justice removed Stevens from further involvement in the underlying case over the posts.

The Judicial Conduct Commission charged Stevens with eight code-of-conduct violations over the comments. He pleaded guilty to six of them on August 8, 2016, and accepted the 90-day unpaid suspension — Kentucky's own ethics body concluding that a sitting judge had crossed a line by publicly accusing a named prosecutor of racism without evidence.

Stevens later walked the accusation back as part of resolving the charges: "I do not believe Tom Wine is a racist," he said. "I apologize for any statements that implied as much." That apology is as close to an admission as the record gets that the original accusation shouldn't have been made — not from a reviewing court correcting his legal reasoning on the jury panel itself, which might have been a defensible, if reversed, judicial call on its own, but from Stevens himself, after Kentucky's own judicial ethics commission had already found the underlying conduct crossed a real line.

Stevens is no longer on the bench. He left office in January 2023.