State officials are investigating an incident where a West Virginia Circuit Court judge waved a weapon and laid it on the bench pointing at the defense team of lawyers who had just made a request for the judge to recuse himself due to a perceived conflict of interest, the Daily Beast reports.
New Martinsville Judge David W. Hummel Jr. was hearing a motion from the lawyers for EQT, a fracking company that leases lands from West Virginians to extract the fossil fuels, who urged Hummel to recuse because his parents receive payments under a similar lease that Hummel himself will eventually inherit.
The case concerned EQT cutting payments to local residents for the leases on their lands, with payments being tied to the amount of gas extracted from the lands. EQT reduced the amount of gas extracted as the price fell, and residents were upset that their payments were cut.
Attorney Lauren Varnado said that for some reason during the trial, Hummel removed a handgun from a drawer at the bench and began waving it around during an April 2021 hearing while detailing his family history and complaining that a cousin didn’t like the way he treated her at a wedding.
Varnado said the gun waving incident happened after Hummel ordered security the lawyers had hired excluded from entering the courthouse. Hummel chided the defense team for hiring private security, even though they had gotten threats, and said, “I promise you, I’ll take care of them. We were never told these folks were security until most recently,” the judge said, before pointing to a court officer. “I got this man here carrying a man purse, which I make fun of him every damn day for wearing such a sissy-ass contraption. And I hear he has blood coagulant. I have blood coagulant up here too, and I’ve got lots of guns. Like, bigger ones too.
In other court sessions, Hummel displayed similarly unstable behavior. “Okay. Excellent. And I’m Judge Hummel, and I have no conflicts, Supreme Court said, so here we are. And this time I don’t have to talk about my Aunt Rose’s numerals or which shoe I put on first or anything,” he said on July 19, 2021, according to a court transcript.
“You don’t understand what a terrible victimization it is,” said Lauren Varnado, the attorney who was standing at the podium when the judge pulled out his gun. “It was pretty traumatic for multiple people. The whole trial was insane. We have no power in this situation,” she said. “It was way scarier than even just a normal person on the sidewalk. You need more power over us than you already have right now? That’s frightening, because he could order us to do whatever. Why would you ever need to pull out a gun?”