Judge Maria L. Dantos is done. Finished. By the time you read this, she’ll be on her way to her new home in Vermont. Goodbye and good riddance to the Lehigh County Courthouse.
Not that Dantos isn’t proud of her 35-year career, starting as a public defender in 1986, then rising through the ranks at the district attorney’s office to first assistant, then taking the bench 13 years ago. She would have loved to end her time at the courthouse on a high note.
But the judge is, and always has been, a woman who speaks up.
And what she’s said, especially over the last few months, about police brutality and systemic racism in the justice system, has made some people very angry.
“I felt betrayed by people and institutions I had bled for,” Dantos said. “It had become all about me.”
Dantos, who turns 60 next week, said her retirement was on the books long before February, when her post-trial remarks about the prosecution of a Latino man who was accused of fighting with Allentown police officers turned her toxic in many courthouse circles.
But the unexpected, and she feels, unwarranted, backlash to her comments cemented her decision.
Igniting furor
John Perez’s violent arrest by Allentown police officers might have gone unnoticed, but for Dantos’ scathing words after his trial.
Moments after she dismissed the jurors who acquitted the 36-year-old Allentown man of resisting arrest and disorderly conduct, Dantos went on a 10-minute verbal tear, calling the cops’ conduct “shameful,” saying they lied on the witness stand and chiding them for fist-bumping each other in the courthouse hallway.
A transcript of the judge’s remarks was published in The Morning Call within hours of the verdict, touching off a fight between the judge and the Allentown Police Department that persists to this day.
First, the police officers’ union, Queen City FOP Lodge 10, sent a letter to President Judge Edward D. Reibman, complaining about Dantos’ remarks and demanding that she recuse herself from all Allentown cases.
Reibman denied the union’s request.
“I thought she commented on the evidence as she saw it, and that’s something a judge is entitled to do,” he said. “I know what she said was not well-received in some quarters, but I read the transcript and it did not violate judicial ethics.”
The FOP also complained to the state Judicial Conduct Board, which has not taken any action on the petition.
Dantos said she was forwarded email exchanges about the case that made her feel “personally threatened,” to the point that she contacted the state Office of Judicial District Security and considered taking legal action.
“The retribution for me personally has been severe, swift, unwarranted and unacceptable, fueled not by the truth, but by an anger at the speaker of the truth,” she said.
Despite the furor, Dantos said she does not regret a single word of her speech. But there is one maddening question she can’t shake:
“Other than coming after me, what did the Allentown Police Department do about a judge telling the chief that four of your officers committed perjury in this courtroom and conducted themselves in a manner that is inappropriate for a police officer?”
Allentown Chief of Police Glenn Granitz Jr. responded Monday that his department did not “come after” the judge, as she implied in her farewell speech at a Lehigh County Bar Association ceremony last week. Her portrait, which will hang in the courthouse, was unveiled during the packed event.
He noted that the judge’s allegations of perjury by the officers were found to be without legal basis.
“As a matter of routine, The City of Allentown, along with the Allentown Police Department, continuously monitors and reviews how incidents are handled by officers. Mayor [Ray] O’Connell and I have been and remain committed to taking the steps necessary to ensure the continued diligence of our officers in their duty to serve the community.
“We don’t agree on this particular issue, but as with anyone who devotes their entire career to public service, I wish Judge Dantos well in her retirement,” Granitz said in a statement.
FOP President Scott Snyder declined to comment for this story.
Always outspoken
Anyone who was surprised that Dantos spoke so forcefully against a perceived injustice has not spent much time in her courtroom on the second floor of the courthouse. Journalists clutch their pens and lean forward in their seats when the judge begins her remarks at a sentencing, which she usually prefaces with “I have a few things to say.”
Unrepentant defendants are routinely lambasted, but Dantos also will call out uncooperative witnesses or institutions trying to cover their tracks.
At the February sentencing of a Catholic priest who pleaded guilty to groping a teenage girl and was moved to another parish, the judge asked loudly, “We are still transferring priests that molest children?”
Gang members are told that they’re “punks” who can only feel tough with a gun in their hand and a mob at their side. Lehigh County judges’ caseloads are assigned geographically, and Dantos’ territory includes Allentown’s poorest neighborhoods. So she has presided over most of the city’s high-profile gang cases.
Gang members have never retaliated against her or made serious threats, she said. Those came from other defendants and the public.
“I sentenced a man to probation for having sex with a dog. He was clearly mentally disturbed. So many anonymous calls came in to my chambers, including a man who said ‘the judge should be raped.'”
The judge has also publicly spoken out about sexism in the legal profession, giving what she described as an “uncomfortable” speech at a bar association conference three years ago. She described being introduced to a table of cigar-smoking male lawyers at a legal function early in her career as a “new female member of the bar and an excellent lawyer.”
Dantos’ said she was stunned when one of the old men made a crack about rarely hearing the words “female” and “excellent lawyer” in the same sentence, followed by crude guffaws from the rest of the table.
Some of the same men who had laughed at her all those years ago were in the room when she gave the speech.
Sexist remarks were shocking to Dantos, an Army brat who was expected to excel academically and in sports, just like her two brothers. Her father, Col. Evangelos Dantos, was an avid handball player and would dress her like a boy and stick a baseball cap on her head so she could get into men-only clubs to watch him play the sport.
“As long as you could run fast, catch a ball and tackle, you could play with boys in their arena,” Dantos’ father told her. “To this day I see the world, especially the professional world, as gender neutral.”
The judge said she’s thrilled to see young women lawyers enter her courtroom now in slacks and flat shoes, without makeup, signs of change in the long male-dominated profession that for too long emphasized a woman’s looks over her courtroom prowess.
‘The rock for everyone’
When she was a prosecutor, Dantos was a fierce advocate for victims, said Lehigh County Judge Kelly L. Banach, who was hired along with Dantos by then-District Attorney William H. Platt. Speaking at the Bar Association ceremony, Banach described Dantos’ office as always bustling with police officers and younger lawyers seeking her counsel.
“She was their teacher,” Banach said. “She just had this magnetism about her. Everyone was drawn to her.”
A life-sized poster of Albert Einstein hung on the back of Dantos’ office door. The judge said she admires the physicist’s theories on life and people. On the poster was this quote: “Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds.”
Dantos never lost a case, Banach noted, a detail the judge herself does not like to discuss. At the end of each murder trial, Dantos went alone to the victim’s grave and laid a bouquet of flowers. It was a ritual that gave her closure, she said.
“It was always my goal to be the rock for everyone for every case. At the end? It was for me and the victim. I had spoken for them when they could not speak for themselves. I tried a lot of cases to empty courtrooms for victims few cared about. I cared about them even when I was the only one,” she said.
The judge also formed lasting relationships with her clients in the Public Defender’s Office. She still has a thick stack of letters from the first man she represented, Joseph “Sunny” Bauer, a heroin addict who spent much of his life in jail for retail theft and other petty crimes.
Dantos described Bauer as a gentle soul who never hurt anyone. She visited him as he lay dying in a hospital and spoke at his funeral. She hired another defendant to work in her courtroom as a crier.
Dantos was appointed to the bench to fill a vacancy in 2007, and was elected later that year. She found the work intellectually stimulating and mostly fulfilling, but she missed being an advocate.
She recalled one trial where, from her elevated position above the witness stand, she was the only one in the packed courtroom who could see the 12-year-old witness’ trembling knuckles turn white as she testified about being raped.
“All I wanted to do was go down there and hug her, tell her that she was doing great, that she should tell her story. But I was the judge, so I couldn’t.”
Dantos has two sons, Mike, 25, and Leo, 22. In 2013, at age 53, she hiked to the summit of Mount Kilimanjaro with Mike, then 18, and commemorated the achievement with a tattoo.
The emancipation
Though the controversy over her comments after the Perez trial have made her last six months on the job less comfortable, Dantos said it’s also given her more freedom to discuss topics like systemic racism in the criminal justice system. A close friend of hers calls it “The emancipation of Maria Dantos.”
To make her point, Dantos poses a question to white friends: “How often have you been pulled over for driving away from a curb without using your turn signal?”
The judge says most white people would be surprised at how often the police narrative in the arrest of a young black or brown man begins with that offense. The next sentence on the report usually states that the arresting officer smelled marijuana. Handling these cases has left Dantos increasingly frustrated.
Unable to change the system, Dantos says she’s getting out and making room for the next generation. As she made her final speech in the courthouse last week at the Bar Association ceremony, she urged others to do the same.
“When I started to feel complicit in the flaws in the system that I represent, I could no longer be silent. To quote my man Einstein, if I were to remain silent, I would be guilty of complicity.”
Morning Call reporter Laurie Mason Schroeder can be reached at 610-820-6506 or lmason@mcall.com.
