When lawyers don't pay their annual bar dues on time, it means a law-license suspension.

When judges do it, the consequences are more severe, as 191st District Judge Gena Slaughter learned this month when she was publicly reprimanded for violating judicial ethics rules and the Texas Constitution.

Her law license was suspended five times since she was first elected in 2007, according to a public reprimand that the Texas Commission on Judicial Conduct released Thursday.

Related story: Dallas Judge Sanctioned for Ex Parte Communication, Delay

It's the second public reprimand the commission has slapped on Slaughter in five months. She was sanctioned in October 2019 for holding an improper ex-parte communication, and delaying her ruling in a case for more than a year.

In Texas, annual bar dues must be paid by Sept. 1 of the year. But Slaughter paid late—in 2013, 2015, 2016, 2017 and 2018, the Feb. 7 reprimand said.

When it happened first in 2013, the judge addressed the issue quickly, so that her suspension only lasted days—from Sept. 1 to Sept. 6. But as the years progressed, Slaughter's suspensions spanned longer and longer intervals. For example, in 2017, she was administratively suspended from practicing law for September and October, the reprimand stated. When she didn't pay her dues on time in 2018, her law license was suspended for about nine months—from September 2018 to June 2019.

As the judicial conduct commission investigated, and reached out to the judge in 2018 and 2019, Slaughter initially failed to respond, the reprimand said. After the commission instituted formal proceedings against her, the judge finally responded and confessed to letting her bar dues go unpaid. She stated she had decided to delegate the duty of paying her bar dues to the treasurer of her officeholder account. Slaughter also stated she only learned of the lapses in her law license in 2017.

The judge added that until the judicial conduct commission reached her in April 2019, she hadn't known that her 2018 bar dues remained unpaid. She stated she immediately attempted to pay her bar dues. However, the public reprimand noted that Slaughter's law license wasn't reinstated until the end of June 2019.

The Texas Constitution requires district judges to be licensed to practice law, the reprimand noted.

The commission found that Slaughter's conduct broke a judicial-ethics rule that requires judges to comply with the law and to act in a way that promotes public confidence in the judiciary. It found Slaughter also violated provisions in the Texas Constitution that allow sanctions against judges for willful violations of judicial canons; for willful, persistent conduct that is inconsistent with the judge's duties; and for behavior that casts public discredit on the judiciary.

Slaughter didn't immediately respond to a phone call seeking comment.

Read the public reprimand: