Alabama Judge Yashiba Blanchard Suspended After 120-Page Complaint Claims She Delayed Cases to Walk Her Dogs

A newly elected Alabama judge has been removed from the bench indefinitely after a 120-page complaint accused her of deliberately delaying hearings, bullying staff, and treating her courtroom as a personal fiefdom where she answered to no one.

Jefferson County Probate Judge Yashiba Blanchard was suspended on 22 May 2026 following a formal complaint filed the day prior by Alabama's Judicial Inquiry Commission, which charged her with seven violations of the Alabama Canons of Judicial Ethics. The commission's complaint, filed as COJ#67 with the Court of the Judiciary, alleges she ran the Jefferson County Probate Court in a manner that was not only professionally reckless but caused measurable harm to vulnerable people, including involuntary-commitment patients who remained hospitalised longer than necessary because Blanchard cancelled their hearings.

Blanchard had not filed a formal response to the complaint at the time of reporting.

Seven Charges and the Pattern the Commission Alleged

The seven charges Blanchard faces, as detailed by WBRC Fox 6 which reviewed the complaint in full, cover a pattern rather than isolated incidents.

The commission charged her with a pattern and practice of failing to diligently discharge judicial duties, a pattern and practice of failing to follow the law, a pattern and practice of exhibiting bias against attorneys in her court, failure to disqualify herself from a case in which she had previously served as an attorney, harassment and retaliation against probate court staff, allowing court officials under her direction to participate in that harassment, and failure to maintain professional competence in judicial administration.

Blanchard allegedly told her own staff she was the 'ultimate authority' with 'no boss' overseeing her. According to the complaint, she did not hear a single involuntary commitment hearing until September 2025, nine months into her term. She is also alleged to have delayed court sessions to walk her dogs, a claim attributed to the complaint by multiple outlets.

She repeatedly sought special judge appointments to cover her absences, including a 'blanket order' request for the entire month of December so she could work on orders from home. The presiding circuit judge denied those requests and required specific dates and justifications.

Hospitalised Patients, Cancelled Hearings, and Families Left Waiting

The human impact detailed in the complaint is stark. Blanchard is accused of cancelling hearings hours before they were scheduled, including one involving a patient who was due to be discharged from inpatient psychiatric care. The hospital emailed Blanchard and her staff multiple times.

According to the complaint, the email read in part: 'With the cancellation and the rescheduling of her hearing to December 2, this patient will now remain hospitalised for an additional two weeks solely due to the lack of timely access to the hearing process. This not only prevents her from being home with her family for Thanksgiving, but it also generates unnecessary hospitalisation costs and creates avoidable emotional distress for the patient and her loved ones.'

The complaint further alleged that Blanchard only agreed to a hearing after a third request, at which point the patient was reportedly 'lying in bed crying and upset.' Beyond individual cases, the commission found that staff had begun routing cases to the other available judge to prevent due-process violations, that Blanchard held some probable-cause hearings outside the statutory time window, and that she misrepresented to Presiding Judge French that cancellations were rare and that affected facilities received adequate notice.

The complaint includes 24 documented examples of delayed or cancelled hearings across guardianship, estate, and commitment matters. In one, an attorney wrote to the court about a dying client: 'Just hoping we do not have a continuance because I am so worried that my client is going to die.' Staff responded, according to the complaint, that there was 'another case on this docket in the same predicament.'

Staff Reassignments, Attorney Intimidation, and an Alleged Racial Remark

A substantial portion of the complaint focuses on Blanchard's alleged treatment of court staff. She is accused of reassigning employees from the Birmingham division to the Bessemer division with little notice, a move the commission described as logistically unjustified given that, as of January 2025, Birmingham had 742 open cases against Bessemer's 172. One clerk asked to be transferred back to Birmingham because the commute made it difficult to visit her sister who was dying of cancer. Blanchard allegedly did not respond. The clerk's sister died while the clerk was stuck in Bessemer traffic trying to reach the hospital.

Chief Clerk Amanda Reid was specifically targeted, according to the complaint. Blanchard allegedly asked a new employee on their first day whether they liked Reid. When the employee said yes, Blanchard reportedly replied: 'Oh, I forgot you all like kissing white a--.' Reid was later moved out of her office, had her access to files and tools restricted, and was retaliated against for cooperating with the Judicial Inquiry Commission's investigation.

On the attorney side, the complaint alleges Blanchard filed an unsupported State Bar complaint against an attorney, issued a police report against two others that resulted in their photographs being circulated to courthouse security, and told the presiding circuit judge she did not trust those attorneys and did not want them in her courtroom. The commission characterised this as a coordinated pattern of intimidation designed to control who appeared before her.

The citizens who waited months for guardianship rulings, the patients held in hospital past discharge, and the staff members whose family members died in transit from a reassignment Blanchard could not justify; their experiences now sit at the centre of a formal judicial misconduct case that could end her tenure permanently.