Judge's claim of judicial ignorance in accepting baseball tickets preposterous

I find Judge John Lakin's excuse of inexperience and/or ignorance for accepting a gift of baseball tickets from a law firm whose case he was presiding over at the time as being incredulous.

A first-year law student and certainly a judge would be aware of the appearance of a potential conflict of interest. Judge Lakin, as a lawyer, would have taken and passed the professional code of conduct before being licensed as an attorney. Now he expects the citizens to believe that he just didn't know there was anything wrong with accepting a gift from counsel in a case he was hearing is preposterous.

Judge Lakin has now potentially set up as questionable any decision or any ruling he has given on cases being handled by Kallins Little & Delgado law office.

You can bet that the first case that will be appealed will be the case handled by Kallins Little & Delgado. A jury trial in June ruled in favor of Walmart in the Wittke v. Walmart case. Lakin later overturned the decision to the benefit of Wittke, the law firm's client, shortly after receiving the free baseball tickets.

This judicial behavior goes beyond bad judgment and harms the reputation of our judicial system as being fair and impartial. Free tickets to a baseball game are hardly worth the damage of credibility it has caused.

LeeAnne Metz

Bradenton Beach

This story was originally published February 13, 2016 at 12:00 AM with the headline "Judge's claim of judicial ignorance in accepting baseball tickets preposterous ."