Teresa Cataldo

Teresa Cataldo, an Elkhart County, Indiana Superior Court judge, was ordered by the Indiana Supreme Court to recuse herself from four post-conviction relief cases — three murder convictions and one armed robbery — in which the defendants, Iris Seabolt, Reginald Dillard, Leon Tyson, and Pink Robinson, all claimed wrongful conviction. The Supreme Court's reasoning centered on consistency: Cataldo had already recused herself from a related case, Andrew Royer's, when his 2005 murder conviction was set aside as wrongful, yet she denied change-of-judge requests in the four related cases despite similar bias concerns.

Petitioners raised specific concerns about her impartiality, including that she worked in the Elkhart County prosecutor's office from 1998 to 2002 and is friends with the current prosecutor, and that she was previously married to an Elkhart police officer without disclosing it (they divorced over 20 years earlier). Cataldo herself had called one of the underlying bias allegations "defamatory," which the petitioners' legal team argued suggested she had prematurely dismissed allegations of systemic misconduct within the police department.