Dallas City Wire

A Dallas County Family Court judge has applied the law in unconventional and frustrating ways, according to a sampling of attorneys who have argued cases before her.

An attorney with more than 30 years of experience who was representing a wife in a divorce case recalls “locking horns” with Judge Andrea Plumlee.

The wife was having to decide whether to pay the children’s tuition at a private school or whether to make the mortgage payments. Both the husband and wife had agreed the house was not worth it so the wife decided to pay the tuition not the mortgage.

“Judge Plumlee did put my client in jail for non-payments of mortgage which is blatantly against the law, the attorney said. "There is not debtors’ prison in the state of Texas. She had a bias against my client, who was an attractive black female, married to an attractive black male.”

To top it off, it was the Friday before Christmas and the wife had to spend the time in jail.

“She did it on – the hearing was on a Friday – so I couldn’t run a writ of habeas corpus. By Monday I had, but before I could serve it on the judge, she vacated the order," the attorney said. “She turned to my clients and said, ‘I hope you learned your lesson.’”

The attorney filed to recuse, which cost $45,000 to $50,000.

“But the presiding judge recused her," the attorney noted. "I won getting her out. It was an overall pretty bad situation and the presiding judge granted it.”

Plumlee has impressed on people that it’s her job to pass judgments.

“Her position as a judge is, it’s to send messages – that was concerning to me because she is sitting five feet above me and wearing a black robe,” the attorney said.

If Plumlee does something that doesn’t technically follow the law, it’s not because she doesn’t know the law, it’s because she wants to make a statement, even if it means she’ll get reversed, the attorney said.

“She was given the impression when you put on the black robe you become a quasi-god of some sort, not really bound by the law. I think that case taught her a lot – you have restraints of what you can and cannot do; it was a learning situation for her,” the lawyer said.

The case was a few years ago, not long after Plumlee was elected to her first term on the bench in 2014.

“I think she got some very poor advice from other people who had been on the bench,” the attorney said. “It was well known at the courthouse, and I was told by a number of people don’t go back in [her courtroom].”

Plumlee apparently has issued decisions, for example, that she thinks would be in the children’s best interest even if it doesn’t technically follow the law, which resulted in mandamus action. 

“Generally, the decisions of a lower court made in the course of a continuing case will not be reviewed by higher courts until there is a final judgment in the case … A writ of mandamus offers one exception to this rule," the attorney said. "If a party to a case is dissatisfied with some decision of the trial court, the party may appeal the decision to a higher court with a petition for a writ of mandamus before the trial proceeds. The order will be issued only in exceptional circumstances.

“She’s done some things that are stupid, doesn’t really listen to evidence, denied legal rights to make bills of review; for a lot of people it takes people who will say, ‘with all due respect’ for her to accept somebody has a right to make [a statement.]”

When the attorney has appeared before Plumlee since that case, he noted, “When I walk in, I get a wide berth; it’s an aura of ‘OK’; she has different quills.”

As for the case where Plumlee put his client in jail:

“It was a domestic matter," the attorney said. "They were both accountants. As part of a temporary order, the wife had the house and it came down to cash flow – tuition or mortgage – and because neither of them wanted the house, [the wife] made a business decision to pay for the kids [school] rather than the house, and the judge said there was no pleading up and based on that, she said if you haven’t paid mortgage payments then you can go to jail and put her in jail.

“She refused to look at the law and then put her in jail. This was an upwardly mobile, attractive black women, a CPA.”

The attorney continued that Plumlee has favorite attorneys, one of whom apparently was appointed to many cases in her courtroom and made somewhere around $140,000 in fees. He said it came out in the news.

Plumlee could be getting bad advice behind the scenes.

The attorney said Plumlee took “most of her direction” from a former judge who is currently an attorney. This former judge apparently told Plumlee that the family court code was “just something to look at as a guideline, and [so] ‘what I say is the law’ was part of her tutelage, and that may have been part of the problem.”

When some attorneys have a real problem, they apparently go to this former judge to get a favor before they appear in front of Plumlee.

“Handling judges as a whole in our system can be wrought with political problems,” the attorney said. “Everybody’s got individual faults; we don’t really have the ability to grade and remove a judge.”

Plumlee is not up for re-election this year. Because she is a Democrat. and Dallas County is heavily Democratic, she could be re-elected in 2022 without a strong challenger. “If she gets past the primary, she’s going to stay a judge,” the attorney said.

As for other Family Court judges, the attorney said David Lopez has been there a while and Dennise Garcia is good.

The attorney said Plumlee could have come out of the D.A.’s office, which is how quite a few judges start their careers. He said when he started out most judges had been practicing law for 30 or 40 years, but those that can run a good campaign are getting elected younger and then stay for at least 20 years because then they get pensions.