In a baffling story, a judge at Kentucky’s Jefferson District Court expressed outrage at jail officials for not issuing a woman who appeared in her courtroom with a jumpsuit, thus forcing her to attend court without pants on. As shown in the video above, when the defense attorney and the female defendant tell this to Judge Amber Wolf, the judge is shocked. “Excuse me? This is outrageous,” she declares. The defendant tells her she is wearing what she came into the jail with on Sunday. Right away, Wolf picks up the phone and calls the jail. “I’m actually calling to talk to Director Bolton or anyone who can come to my courtroom and tell me why there is a female defendant standing in front of me with no pants on,” she says.
The rest of the video shows other parts of Wolf’s phone call, where she also inquires about the woman’s claim that she was denied hygiene products, and angrily asks what happened. “Am I in the twilight zone?” she asks at one point. According to WDRB, this is how jail officials explained what happened:
Jail officials said the woman was wearing athletic shorts, which were hidden by a long shirt. Steve Durham, a spokesman for the jail, said the woman had not been in custody long enough to be given a jail jumpsuit.
“This is pretty standard that when individuals are arrested, they remain in the clothing that they’ve been arrested in,” Durham said. “Especially for the first 72 hours.”
But Metro Corrections Deputy Director Dwayne Clark said that the defendant should have been given a jumpsuit, “dressed like she was.” After bringing the defendant clothes to cover up in, he said, “I gotta look into why she wasn’t.” You can hear him speaking to Wolf in the video, though not audibly.
The woman in question was arrested for not completing a diversion program related to a 2014 shoplifting charge. Wolf sentenced her to a $100 fine and released her with time served, saying that she should have only been jailed for one day. She also apologized, saying, “I want to extend my deepest apologies to you for the way that you’ve been treated while you’ve been in our jail. This is not normal. It is not normal, and I’ve never seen it happen.”
This experience does seem like a trying one, with a woman being denied basic dignity while in custody, and unable to do anything about it until an outside authority figure gets angry about it. It’s not surprising then that the courtroom video of Judge Wolf expressing her outrage at what happened has been making the internet rounds, not only through various media outlets, but on Facebook as well.
WDRB reports that the woman and her defense attorney also said that other inmates had been denied clothing. The Metro Connections spokesman Durham maintained that the clothing accusation was not true, and that he was looking into the hygiene products issue.