An activist group says it has collected 10,000 signatures demanding that state Supreme Court Justice David Prosser resign after fellow Justice Ann Walsh Bradley accused him of grabbing her neck in a chokehold. “Prosser took his bullying to a new level of unacceptable conduct and now he must go,” said One Wisconsin Now Executive Director Scot Ross in a statement. “There is no excuse for David Prosser’s conduct and the people of Wisconsin are demanding he resign.”
Meanwhile, women’s groups and some female elected officials are calling on the judge to at least go on leave while he is under investigation. “Somebody who has been potentially victimized in the workplace certainly deserves to be safe and not in the same workplace working alongside the person accused of assaulting them,” said Lisa Subeck, executive director of NARAL Pro-Choice Wisconsin and a member of the Madison City Council, in a press release Tuesday.
Justice Bradley alleged Prosser “put his hands around my neck in anger in a chokehold” last month while she was “demanding that he get out of my office following a disagreement about labor issues.” Two investigations of the incident are ongoing, one by the Dane County sheriff’s office and another by the Wisconsin Judicial Commission.
This is not the first time Prosser’s behavior toward the women he works with been called into question. In April, Prosser issued a public apology after e-mails released to the Journal Sentinel revealed that he had called Chief Justice Shirley Abrahamson a “bitch” and threatened “to destroy her.”
