Mobile County Circuit Judge Edmond Naman has been suspended from the bench after being charged with an ethics violation after he allegedly appointed his brother-in-law to handle a number of juvenile court indigent cases over an 11-year period.

Naman was charged with violating the Alabama Canons of Judicial Ethics by the Alabama Judicial Inquiry Commission on Monday. Under state law, judges are automatically suspended with pay from the bench while the charge is pending before the Alabama Court of the Judiciary. The commission and Naman have requested an expedited hearing.

Naman’s attorneys had not responded to a request for comment prior to publication of this story.

The nine-member Alabama Court of the Judiciary has the power to discipline or remove a judge from the bench after a trial. The Judicial Inquiry Commission investigates complaints against judges and will bring them to the Court of the Judiciary if warranted.

Naman, who has served as a juvenile court judge since 2007, used his authority to appoint his brother-in-law “on numerous occasions” over a period of 11 years to indigent cases in that court, according to the judicial commission complaint.

The brother-in-law received “substantial compensation” as a result, according to the complaint. The document did not specify an amount.

The complaint states that the 13th Judicial Circuit’s juvenile court has had a lengthy practice of appointing attorneys to cover a day’s docket of cases – not to individual cases. An attorney appointed to a day’s docket would not handle the cases to their conclusion, but each case would be handled by different attorneys at the different hearings or stages of a case.

From 2008 until early in the 2019 fiscal year when Naman received notice of a complaint, he had appointed his sister’s husband to numerous dockets, the complaint says. That included appointments to the daily arraignment docket for one week each month, the disposition docket one day a month, and beginning in 2014 the juvenile “gun court” docket for about an hour once a week.

The commission’s complaint does not say who may have first raised the issue.

The canons of ethics states a judge should exercise his power of appointment only on the basis of merit “avoiding nepotism and favoritism” and that the commission has “long advised that a judge may not appoint an attorney who is related to the judge or the judge’s spouse with the fourth degree of consanguinity or affinity,” according to the commission complaint.