Fulton County's Most Controversial Hire

[00:00:00]A former judge was just hired as a prosecutor by a major American District Attorney's Office. That former judge resigned from the bench while the state's judicial misconduct watchdog was recommending that she be permanently removed. The watchdog found that she illegally jailed a witness, a 21-year-old woman who had done nothing wrong, just to, quote, send a message.

[00:00:20]It found she lied through her own misconduct proceedings. It found she gave preferential treatment to a sorority sister in a child [music] custody case. And it found she let people in child support and custody cases waiting years for rulings while their lives and families fell apart. The state's own panel said, in writing in a published report, quote, a judge that cannot be trusted to tell the truth cannot be trusted to remain in office, end quote. Two months later, the Fulton County District Attorney's Office in Atlanta, Georgia, hired her as a prosecutor. Her job now is to stand in front of juries, ask them to believe her, and put people behind bars. I'm a lawyer, and I happen to live in Fulton County, Georgia. And my take on this whole thing is simple. This is a story about an office that keeps making bad decisions. And this hire of a former judge is just the latest one. And once I walk you through who this former judge, Shermola Williams, actually is, what she actually did, and what the documented record of this office looks like, I think you'll see exactly what I mean.

[00:01:15]Shermola Williams was elected to the Fulton County Superior Court in 2020.

[00:01:18]She took the bench in January 2021 and handled primarily family law matters, divorce, child custody, child support.

[00:01:25]These are among the most emotionally charged cases in any courthouse.

[00:01:27]People's families, their finances, their relationships with their children, all of it gets decided in courtrooms like hers. She resigned on February 20th, 2026, sending a letter to the Georgia Judicial Qualifications Commission and to Governor Kemp. In that letter, she called the decision bittersweet and said that serving had been one of the greatest honors of my professional life.

[00:01:46]She wrote that she had proudly served my community with diligence, respect, honor, balance, and impartiality. The committee, which everybody calls the JQC, their findings told a very different story. Before she resigned, the state's three-judge hearing panel that spent six days across May, June, and July of 2025 hearing evidence in a formal misconduct proceeding. They issued a 66-page report in October 2025 published on the Georgia Supreme Court's website that leveled more than 30 counts of misconduct against her and recommended the ultimate sanction, removal from office. When a sitting judge gets recommended for removal in Georgia, it is very [music] rare. It means the panel looked at everything and concluded there was no lesser remedy adequate to address what they found. I want to be upfront about something before I get into the details. Williams has not been convicted of any crime. She resigned before Georgia Supreme Court could act on the JQC's recommendation.

[00:02:34]Her attorneys have disputed aspects of the findings. I'm going to tell you what the panel found, documented in their published report, and I'll be clear about what's a panel finding versus what's Williams' own admission. The most serious thing that the JQC found, what the panel itself called the most egregious of all misconduct, involved a 21-year-old woman named Molly Dennis.

[00:02:53]So, let me take you back. It's October of 2023. Molly Dennis has been subpoenaed to appear as a witness in her parents' divorce case in Williams' courtroom. She's there to testify on behalf of her mother. She has committed no crime and she's not a party to the case. She's just a witness legally compelled to be there by subpoena.

[00:03:09]During her testimony, Dennis talked about having a strained relationship with her father and, according to the JQC's findings and Dennis' own federal lawsuit, Williams repeatedly interrupted her testimony. She took over the cross-examination from the attorneys, and then, while attorneys were delivering closing arguments, Williams stopped the proceedings and told Dennis that she had admitted to 36 years in prison worth of crimes in her testimony.

[00:03:31]She then ordered deputies to take Dennis into custody to, as the JQC put it, "Show her what the cell looks Dennis was handcuffed in open court in front of everyone. She was taken to a holding cell in the Fulton County Courthouse, and she stayed there for someone between 15 and 45 minutes. When Williams finally let her out, the JQC found that Williams continued to the Dennis. Williams' own words, as documented in the JQC complaint and reported by Law and Crime were as follows. "I was a prosecutor for 10 years and let me tell you what I saw over and over again. Girls who came in there with daddy issues that never even realized they had, but that's how they ended up in certain situations." Dennis later said the experience left her afraid and humiliated. Her attorney said it left a lasting mark on a person's sense of safety and trust. "There's no getting around the fact that Molly has been affected by what we believe was clear and unjustified abuse of [music] power." When the JQC asked Williams about it, she admitted she had no legal authority to do what she did. She said she had used detention as quote "shock therapy" and acknowledged it was wrong.

[00:04:27]The JQC panel wrote quote "She broke the law in a way that is inexcusable." They also noted that this happened while Williams already knew she was under separate investigation and wrote "Either she just did not care or that was just her best behavior." Dennis filed a federal civil rights lawsuit in October of 2025 alleging violations of her fourth and 14th Amendment. Williams' response to that lawsuit was to file to have it dismissed arguing that she has absolute judicial immunity for actions that she took as a judge on the bench.

[00:04:55]She told the JQC that she had no legal authority to do it and acknowledged it was wrong. Yet, she's simultaneously arguing in federal court that she's immune from the legal consequences of doing the illegal thing that she did.

[00:05:06]Now, the federal case is still pending.

[00:05:07]The Molly Dennis incident was the worst to me, but the panel found much more.

[00:05:11]Williams gave preferential treatment to a sorority sister and Delta Sigma Theta member who happened also to be an attorney named Brandy Alexander who had a child custody case before her. When Alexander's attorney asked whether a senior judge could be assigned, Williams called Alexander directly on her personal cell phone. According to the JQC, Williams told Alexander she quote "had her back." She didn't tell the other side about this call and when confronted about it during the misconduct proceedings, the panel found she was dishonest in her account of what had happened. She lied about it and tried to cover it up. Williams also used her position to try to intervene in her uncle's contempt proceedings. She contacted an attorney at a law firm to request a delay so her uncle would have more time to file his answer. And she let domestic cases sit for years without ruling. The JQC found litigants in multiple family law cases waited 14 to 30 months for decisions despite being repeatedly asked to move the cases along. In two child support cases specifically, final orders came more than 2 and 1/2 years after the hearing.

[00:06:07]The JQC panel described what those delays meant to real people, and I want to read these directly from their published report because I think it deserves to be heard. Quote, from a man who is hungry and homeless and could not get necessary medical treatment to a mother who mightily struggled financially for almost 3 years waiting a child's ruling to a father whose entire relationship with his children for years was a single 10-minute FaceTime call per week. The consequences were significant and outsized. These parties were denied the certainty, stability, and relief that they deserve from the judicial system. Those are real people who walked into a Fulton County courtroom looking for justice and waited years for a judge just to do her job. When the JQC asked Williams hard questions about all this under oath, she was consistently, in the panel's own words, dishonest. The panel wrote, "Quote, aside from proven misconduct, what is equally, if not more distressing, is Judge Williams's sometimes outright dishonesty and other times evolving testimony during these proceedings." And their conclusion, "That given the level of untruthful testimony Judge Williams offered throughout, we are left with little option but to seek the ultimate sanction of removal. A judge that cannot be trusted to tell the truth cannot be trusted to remain in office." One more important detail you need to know. When Williams resigned in February, the JQC's authority over her did not simply end.

[00:07:21]The commission has told the Georgia Supreme Court it may still pursue sanctions against her even after her resignation, including potentially barring her from ever holding judicial office again in Georgia. The state watchdog is still actively pursuing action against her, too. Nevertheless, the Fulton County District Attorney's Office hired her anyway. The DA's office confirmed the hire to WSB-TV. Their spokesperson, Jeff DeSantis, said Williams is, and I'm quoting directly, "an accomplished attorney who previously served with distinction as a prosecutor in the Fulton County District Attorney's Office. We are fortunate that she is bringing her experience and knowledge back to our office to serve our mission of making Fulton County a safer, more just place ever." That's the entire public justification. Left out the whole judge part, didn't it? Now, Williams did work for the Fulton County DA's office before she became a judge, from 2011 until 2014. Now, during that time, Fani Willis, who is now the District Attorney of Fulton County, she was also a prosecutor in that office. The AJC confirmed that specifically. So, they were colleagues. They knew each other.

[00:08:18]They worked together. And now Fani Willis has hired Williams back to the same role. Now, I want to stress Williams has not been convicted of anything. She's entitled to work as a lawyer. And her attorneys have disputed the JQC findings throughout. The DA's office is correct that she has prior prosecutorial experience. It's true. But here's the specific problem with this specific job. A prosecutor's entire value rests on credibility. Everything a prosecutor does in the courtroom, every witness they put on the stand, every piece of evidence that they present, every argument they make to a jury, rests on the jury being able to look at that prosecutor and believe that they're being honest. The state has the burden of proof in every criminal case. And the state has to earn that conviction. And that starts with the prosecutor being someone a jury can trust, not to mention someone the citizens of the county can trust. The JQC found after a full formal hearing that Williams provided dishonest testimony throughout her own misconduct proceedings. The documented finding of the three-judge panel published on the Georgia Supreme Court's website confirms this. Yet the District Attorney has hired this person, presumably to put her in front of Fulton County juries, and just trust that those juries will believe her when there's a lot of evidence that they shouldn't? This is the decision that Fani Willis, Fulton County District Attorney, just made.

[00:09:24]Now, I want to zoom out because this is the latest bad decision in a pattern of bad decisions. And I want to back that up with documented facts. I'm going to keep the Trump RICO case brief because the moment I go deep into this, then it becomes a political video, people start leaving comments that are unhinged. So, what I'm going to say is limited entirely to the objective institutional outcomes documented in court records.

[00:09:45]The DA was disqualified from her own case by a trial court and then later the Georgia Court of Appeals, whose December 2024 ruling found an appearance of impropriety serious enough to require the entire office's removal. The Georgia Supreme Court reviewed that decision and declined to reverse it in September of 2025. The case was subsequently dismissed in November of 2025 and the defendants, including Donald Trump, are now seeking nearly $17 million in attorney's fees and a judge ruled in March 2026 that Willis's office cannot even participate in contesting that claim because they are, in the court's own words, wholly disqualified. Whatever you think about the politics of that prosecution, that is an institutional catastrophe. But the thing I want to spend more time on are the open records violations because those have nothing to do with Trump or politics at all, but are just as important on a smaller, micro level. Two separate Fulton County judges have sanctioned the DA's office for violating Georgia's Open Records Act. Separate cases, separate judges, both issued written findings. In the first case, Judge McBurney found that the DA's office told a requestor four separate times that no responsive documents exist. Four times they supposedly searched and four times they supposedly came back empty. Then a court order compelled them to really, like really look for the records and the records, they appeared. The judge found the DA's office was in fault because they didn't even show up to defend the lawsuit and ordered them to pay more than $21,000 in attorney's fees. His words were, "Non-compliance has consequences." In the second case, Judge Rachel Kraus found that the DA's office was openly hostile towards an attorney that was seeking public records. Her written ruling found the violations were, her exact words, "intentional, [music] not done in good faith, and were substantially groundless and vexatious."

[00:11:21]She ordered the office to pay more than $54,000 in attorney's fees. Two judges, two cases, both finding intentional, bad acts. When talking about bad decisions by the DA's office, I've got to give you another example, and I'm stripping this entirely of politics [music] and building an entirely on documented findings. The DA hired a special prosecutor who she had a personal relationship with. That relationship produced a disqualification ruling that unraveled the biggest case the office had ever brought and is potentially leaving Fulton County taxpayers liable for $17 million.

[00:11:53]Then two separate judges found the office violated open records law, one finding that the violations were intentional and not in good faith. My own office has experience with this pattern as well. And now the DA's office has hired as a prosecutor a former judge who the state's own watchdog recommended for removal for illegally jailing a witness, dishonest testimony during her own misconduct proceedings, and for giving preferential treatment to personal connections. Not to mention leaving vulnerable people in family court waiting years for rulings. This is someone who is still fighting a federal civil rights lawsuit and who the JQC may still sanction. For each of these, you might try or even be able to explain them individually. The DA's personal relationship with the special prosecutor, well, that was just a personal lapse in judgment. The open records violations, they were just operational failures. The Williams hire, that's just loyalty to an old colleague, which doesn't really seem like a very good excuse at all. But a DA's office is defined by their decisions, by all of their decisions across time. And when the same kinds of failures keep appearing in different forms and in different contexts, you stop explaining them away individually. The pattern is really the answer. The Fulton DA's office represents the people. Every day its prosecutors walk into courtrooms and ask juries to trust them with someone else's freedom. Victims trust this office to pursue justice. Defendants trust it, much as they can, to pursue that justice fairly. And the public trusts it to operate with integrity, at least it used to. The people of Fulton County deserve that integrity. But based on the documented record, not opinion, not politics, documented court findings, we are not getting it.