Judge Mack Crawford, Pike County Superior Court, at his JQC hearing on Monday. (Photo: John Disney/ ALM)

The court clerk who gave Superior Court Judge Robert “Mack” Crawford more than $15,000 from the Pike County court registry in 2017 contradicted the judge's testimony Monday in an ethics hearing convened by the state judicial watchdog agency.

Pike County Superior Court Clerk Cynthia Williams testified at Crawford's ethics hearing that for eight years she talked occasionally with Crawford about locating two of his former clients to return $15,675.62  languishing in the court registry. Crawford—who was in private practice until his 2010 appointment to the Griffin Circuit Superior Court bench—deposited the money in the registry in 2002 after securing the funds from clients he represented in a suit to redeem property sold at a county tax foreclosure sale.

But Williams testified that Crawford never mentioned he had any claim to the registry funds until shortly before Christmas in 2017 when she told him she intended to forward the money to the state as unclaimed funds.

Only then did Crawford tell her that his former client Dan Mike Clark had promised him the money for legal fees, Williams testified. Crawford then gave her a handwritten note directing her to pay him the money, along with an instruction not to put the note in the case file, which had closed since 2009, she said.

When Crawford laid claim to the money, his personal bank account was overdrawn by more than $2,000, the judge acknowledged as he was grilled for more than two hours under oath Monday by Ben Easterlin, executive director of the state Judicial Qualifications Commission.

But Crawford insisted that, despite the overdraft, he had money to cover it in other accounts at First Bank of Pike in Zebulon where he said he and his family have done business for years.

Williams was one of several witnesses who testified Monday at the hearing over whether Crawford violated the state Code of Judicial Conduct when he directed Williams to pay him the unclaimed money and then deposited it in his personal bank account and spent it.

Crawford repaid the money several months later, after the Judicial Qualifications Commission received multiple ethics complaints and opened an investigation. The JQC filed ethics charges against Crawford last summer, which could, if verified, lead to his removal from the bench.

The JQC suspended the judge with pay in December after a Pike County grand jury indicted him on two felony charges—theft and violating his oath of office—that mirror the alleged ethics violations. Monday's hearing will resume March 22 when Crawford attorneys, former Georgia Gov. Roy Barnes of Marietta's The Barnes Law Group and Zebulon attorney Virgil Brown, will present their defense of the judge. Easterlin rested his presentation late Monday.

'Don't Know Why I Didn't'

Williams said that she believed Crawford's clients were entitled to the money after Griffin Circuit Superior Court Judge Tommy Hankinson closed the dormant case in 2009 and ordered the money returned to Clark and co-plaintiff Bobbie Whalen. By then, Clark had died and Whalen had left the state.

Williams testified that it was Crawford's idea, not hers, to pay him the unclaimed funds.  Crawford testified earlier Monday that paying him the money was “an idea that the two of us agreed to” and that Williams, at one point, “asked me if I wanted to take the money.”

The judge's subsequent note directing Williams to pay him also included instructions that it “cannot be filed in the case because [the] case has been closed for eight years,” she testified. The note included an addendum: “This note should be placed in the file but not recorded.”

Williams said she didn't view Crawford's note as a court order. “It's just what it is. A note,” she said. But she testified that she would not have given Crawford a check without it.

During his testimony before Williams took the stand, Crawford said he promised the clerk that, if she made the check out to him, he would be responsible for returning it to Clark's heirs.

Fulton County Superior Court Chief Judge Robert McBurney—one of three JQC members presiding over the ethics hearing—asked Williams if she believed she could have turned Crawford down when he asked for the money.

“I could have said no,” Williams replied. “I don't know why I didn't. Looking back on it, I should have. At the time, I don't think I was thinking very clearly at all.”

Williams wasn't the only witness whose testimony at times diverged from Crawford's. John Barker, president and CEO of the First Bank of Pike said that, when Crawford's personal bank account was overdrawn in December 2017, the bank had no policy in place that would have allowed it to automatically transfer funds from Crawford's other accounts, or those in his wife's or son's name, without specific instructions from the account holders.

Crawford had testified that he didn't even think his account was overdrawn when he deposited the check from the court registry, adding that, “I don't remember.” Bank records entered into evidence at the hearing showed that Crawford's personal account was overdrawn by $2,232 on Dec. 14, 2017—one day before he deposited the check—and had been overdrawn for several days.

Crawford also contended the bank “always covered it” if his account was overdrawn, “because there are a lot of other accounts with my name on it. … It wasn't written, but there was just an understanding they would move money.”

Barker acknowledged that the bank, at times, would pay checks from a customer's account, even though it held insufficient funds and bill the account holder overdraft fees. “We do it informally and on an ad-hoc basis,” he said.

In December 2017, he said Crawford's account was billed $315 in overdraft fees before he deposited the $15,675.62 check. “We paid the checks and kept going,” he said. “We didn't worry about it. It's how we did it with our other customers.”

But he said the bank had no informal agreement with Crawford to move money among his family's accounts to cover any overdraft. That would be “illegal,” he said.