Christina Peterson has only been a Douglas County Probate Judge for a year and a half, but she’s made more headlines than Nick Cannon.
She is facing 50 counts of judicial misconduct by the Judicial Qualification Commission (JQC), which investigates complaints against judges.
In a March 2022 town hall meeting for the residents of the Silver Creek Range neighborhood in Douglas County, Christina demanded that the Home Owners Association Board be thrown out to make way for a special election.
You have the ability to call a special election. To give the homeowners an opportunity to come, congregate, nominate, and elect their own board.
An HOA member on the board sarcastically replied:
The probate judge knows what she’s talking about.
Listen to her. She has two pending lawsuits against us right now.
One of the lawsuits she referenced was filed against the HOA in 2017 by Christina and others.
The lawsuit resulted in a $70k settlement, but according to a complaint against Christina filed by the JQC, she never shared the money with her clients.
After the HOA member made her comment, other people in the meeting started calling Christina out for stealing the $70k settlement.
Christina stood her ground and confidently responded to her critics.
The JQC accused Christina of violating the code of judicial conduct in the meeting by:
advising (the HOA) that they are getting bad advice from their legal counsel.
During Christina’s first year as Probate Judge, she ordered a woman jailed for contempt of court for asking to change her father’s name on her marriage license.
The woman put the uncle who raised her name on the document because she didn’t find out her father’s real name until after she was married.
Christina accused the woman of “lying under oath” and “providing false information to the court.”
The woman’s husband said he thought it would be an “easy fix,” and had he known his wife would go to jail, he would’ve told her to forget about it.
He said Christina told him the only way to get his wife out of jail was to come up with $500 cash.
The JQC said Christina:
…failed to respect and comply with the law.
Christina denied the allegations.
She has also been accused of violating safety rules by allowing people in the courthouse for weekend wedding ceremonies while no deputies were assigned to the security checkpoint.
The Sheriff’s office told her not to allow people in the courthouse during the weekend without being screened by the security team, but she did it anyway, according to the JQC.
Watch the news reports below:
Christina Peterson also raised eyebrows in her first year as probate judge when Douglass County Commissioner allowed her to keep all fees collected for birth and death certificates, which boosted her salary from $127k/year to approximately $280k/year. She made more money than Georgia’s governor and U.S. Senators in her first year as Probate Judge.
Watch the news report below:
There were signs that Christina may be problematic before she took office.
As judge elect, she asked for cash gifts for her birthday on her Instagram page in August 2020.
She listed her Cash App account along with the message:
if anyone feels like sharing their quarantine wealth.
When she was asked about the post she said she thought the post was made to her private personal page, and she was wondering why she was receiving money from people she didn’t know.
Reportedly, she also used her judge elect status to promote two restaurants, and she recorded a video on her Twitter page giving relationship advice that the JQC deemed “inappropriate sexual commentary.”
Watch the news report below:
Christina Peterson is involved in so much mess she would have Olivia Pope scratching her head.
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