Casey Stokes Reprimanded

Casey Stokes, a Meigs County, Tennessee General Sessions judge, was publicly reprimanded by the Tennessee Board of Judicial Conduct in January 2023 after calling a litigant a "tough guy," telling the man's daughter to "shut up" as she tried to explain her mother's neurological disability, and mocking the disabled woman by impersonating her involuntary movements in open court. Stokes admitted the conduct and accepted the reprimand; the disciplinary panel noted he had previously been informally warned for a similar lack of self-control in his courtroom.

More than a year later, in May 2024, Stokes — not wearing his judicial robe at the time — encountered Hannah Ashbrook in a second-floor courthouse hallway and ordered her drug-tested on the spot, telling a deputy he "guaranteed she would be dirty," according to a federal lawsuit Ashbrook later filed. She was taken into a restroom and given 30 seconds to produce a urine sample; a probation officer pronounced it positive before discarding it, and Stokes personally entered a contempt judgment sending Ashbrook to jail for 10 days, without a hearing, an attorney, or the chance to post bond.

Ashbrook's $5 million federal civil rights suit named Stokes, the sheriff, a probation officer, and a deputy, alleging violations of her Fourth, Sixth, and Fourteenth Amendment rights. The case was resolved in mid-2026: Stokes was dismissed from the lawsuit on the grounds that judges are generally protected from civil liability by judicial immunity, and the remaining claims against Meigs County separately settled.

A judge personally ordering a bystander drug-tested and jailed without any hearing is a serious due-process problem regardless of how a later immunity ruling resolved his own legal exposure — and it came from a judge already on the record, in his own words, for mocking a disabled litigant's family from the bench.