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A few days ago on the 14th of August, Senator Thyme introduced a motion to the Senate to hold an inquiry hearing into potential improper conduct by Judge Ben, regarding to him (allegedly) treating the defence favourably in the cases he presided over due to concurrently also serving as a public defender, and thus not being able to ensure neutrality. According to herself, the reason for this actually was that she wanted to put to bed the accusations levied against Ben accusing him of bias for the defence for multiple months now. While she herself only wanted to start an investigation and not at all had the intention to impeach Ben, the new Senate Rules require all Senate investigations be followed by a vote deciding whether to impeach or not, something the chamber will (most likely) do tomorrow, on its last day in office.
The motion was subsequently immediately accepted by Thyme, who was concurrently also serving as Speaker of the Senate at the time. Following this, the chamber decided to appoint Saket, a senior law-enforcement official, to investigate the allegations as a special counsel for the investigation. Thyme initially wanted to appoint Lyoko, but ultimately decided against this choice, as he was close friends with the investigatee.
This being a controversial action is further exemplified by the contents of Saket’s post-investigatory report to the Senate, which redacted the names of multiple people who testified, but wished to remain anonymous. The report mainly consisted of interviews with (anonymous) jurists, who we’ll just have to assume are competent, expressing their opinion on multiple of Judge Ben’s verdicts and if they were biased towards the defence.
Summarizing the criticism levied against Ben, it seems to mostly consist of him (perhaps unintentionally) creating precedence in his judgements that would make future cases easier for public defenders, i.e. refusing to provide a clear ruling on TIDE being a terrorist organization in SD v. Peppa. Furthermore he is also being accused of treating motions entered by the defence favourably due to his personal bias, such as in SD v. UsernameSelected in which he granted an unlikely motion to dismiss.
What should be noted though is that most of these accusations are of singular-instance wrongdoings, which might have not even been intentional, a fact also admitted by special investigator Saket, who did not make a judgement in his report on whether Ben was deserving of impeachment himself, rather deciding to leave the question to the Senate.
Now, whether the Senate will impeach a Judge within its last few days in office is still an open question, with nothing having happened in the hearing yet other than Ben requesting time to obtain legal representation to defend himself before the chamber. Two Senators (Tech Support and Lucas) have already made it public that they would be voting Nay on the impeachment, whereas the rest of the Senate hasn’t commented on the matter yet.