Michigan judge John McBain — thinking jurors blundered in convicting a woman of second-degree murder for stabbing her boyfriend twice in the heart on Valentine’s Day 2015 — punished her as harshly as if she had been found guilty of premeditated murder, a state appeals court said this week.
“You brutally murdered him in cold blood, and for that, by the power vested in me by the state of Michigan, you’re to serve 35 years to 70 years” in prison, McBain told Dawn Dixon-Bey at the 2016 hearing, drawing applause from the gallery.
The Michigan Court of Appeals struck down McBain’s sentence. The state Supreme Court declined to hear the case in 2019, kicking it back to McBain for resentencing, according to MLive.com.
In 2020, McBain again punished Dixon-Bey as if she had premeditated her boyfriend’s murder, this time giving her a sentence of 30 to 70 years, far above the 12 to 20 years for which the guidelines call.
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“I absolutely intend to sentence her at the very top end at 20 years, except that I just don’t think 20 years is an adequate sentence for this brutal, premeditated murder,” McBain said at the July 2020 resentencing, according to MLive.com. “I think I can still consider that evidence of premeditation and deliberation — even though she didn’t get convicted of it — it was evidence before the court and jury.”
No, he can’t, the appeals court ruled earlier this week. On Tuesday, the higher court once more vacated McBain’s sentence and, in a highly unusual move, ordered another judge to resentence Dixon-Bey. In doing so, the three-judge appellate panel criticized McBain’s courtroom behavior, floated the possibility of his being investigated for misconduct and suggested he is unfit to sit on the bench.
“If a trial judge is unable to follow the law as determined by a higher appellate court, the trial judge is in the wrong line of work,” the appeals court said.
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McBain’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment from The Washington Post early Friday. But a day after the 2020 resentencing, the judge told MLive.com that the appeals court is slow and suggested the appellate judges were out of touch with the demanding schedules of trial courts.
“They’re nitpicking,” McBain said.
McBain is no stranger to controversy and criticism. In 2014, he told a convicted murderer he hoped she would die in prison. In 2015, as he ordered a court officer to Taser a defendant, McBain cast off his robe, stormed down from the bench, charged the defendant and then physically helped a court officer pin him to the ground. At another 2015 hearing, as he sentenced a defendant who had broken into a police officer’s home, McBain told him he wished the owner had returned in time to catch him in the act.
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“Because you know what? You might not be going to the Department of Corrections for 10 years,” McBain said, according to the Associated Press. “You might be getting buried in some cemetery.”
In its Tuesday opinion, the state appeals court stuck to the Dixon-Bey case, focusing on two issues: McBain’s insistence on punishing her for a crime of which she had been acquitted — first-degree murder — and what it called an “interrogation” during the part of a hearing reserved for a defendant to address a judge before the sentencing.
Share this articleShareThe appellate judges were especially plain in rebuking McBain. In chastising him for defying the appeals court’s previous ruling, they reminded him of one of the foundational principles of the state’s legal system: McBain didn’t have to agree with the higher court’s decision, but he did have to obey it.
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It’s something even the prosecutor tried to tell McBain after the judge said he believed Dixon-Bey had premeditated the murder of her boyfriend.
“Your Honor, you have the right to believe that it was first degree murder. But the Michigan Supreme Court has, for better or worse, ruled that you’re not allowed to consider that in sentencing. That’s what the bottom line is.”
McBain was undeterred and did it anyway in what the appeals court called “an abuse of discretion and a willful violation.”
The appeals court also scolded McBain for “grilling instead of listening” to Dixon-Bey as she tried to address him during the sentencing hearing. Judges can ask clarifying questions at that point in the hearing, they wrote, but must not interrogate or deliver a lecture to the point of denying a defendant a meaningful opportunity to speak.
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McBain gave Dixon-Bey no such opportunity, the higher court said.
He abandoned his “role as an impartial magistrate and instead usurped the role of prosecutor,” the appellate judges wrote in their opinion, adding that McBain “plainly violated the defendant’s rights.”
One of those judges, Amy Ronayne Krause, was more blunt on Dec. 14 when the court heard oral arguments in the case. She said she had read the transcript of Dixon-Bey’s sentencing hearing. Her verdict: It was “hideous,” the AP reported.
Even as McBain has occasionally made headlines and stirred controversy, he has kept his job. According to the elections website in Jackson County, where McBain presides, he won a fourth six-year term on the bench in 2020 in at least the third election in which he ran unopposed.
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