Eroding Trust, One Dismissal at a Time
A watchdog that won’t look is not a watchdog.
The Minnesota Board on Judicial Standards (BJS) describes its mission in public-trust terms: to “promote and preserve public confidence in the independence, integrity, and impartiality of our judicial system by enforcing the Judicial Code.”
But in our experience—after years of detailed complaints about Judge Kevin M. Miller—BJS did not investigate, did not meaningfully engage the record, and did not take disciplinary action. Instead, it repeatedly dismissed our submissions with near-identical language that reads like a template: we can’t act; we aren’t an appellate court; your complaint is about legal rulings; you’ve provided no new information; we’re dismissing again; and, by the way, we may stop responding due to budget.
That pattern matters—because it’s not just a rejection of our complaints. It is a governance choice: to treat thoroughly documented allegations of judicial misconduct as if they were nothing more than dissatisfaction with outcomes.
The page-count contrast tells the story.
Here is what we submitted to BJS over time—complaints, supplements, and exhibits—measured in pages:
- April 22, 2024: Complaint (438 pages) + Exhibits (304 pages) = 742 pages
- June 10, 2024: Response reminding BJS of its responsibilities = 6 pages
- July 15, 2024: New complaint (3 pages) + Exhibits (62 pages) = 65 pages
- April 2025 (multiple submissions): 17 + 9 + 32 + 18 + 9 + 62 = 147 pages
- October 2025: Complaint (23 pages) + Exhibits (62 pages) = 85 pages
- October 2025 supplements: 2 + 3 + 5 = 10 pages
- November 5, 2025: Reconsideration letter = 3 pages
Total pages submitted: 1,058 pages.
Now compare that to BJS’s written responses to us:
- May 23, 2024: dismissal letter = 1 page
- June 20, 2024: dismissal letter = 1 page
- July 17, 2024: dismissal letter = 1 page
- May 20, 2025: dismissal letter = 1 page
- October 31, 2025: dismissal letter = 1 page + 1 paragraph
Total response length: 5 pages + 1 paragraph.
And as of February 28, 2026, we have received no written response to our November 5, 2025 reconsideration letter. That silence is part of the record—and it reinforces what the form letters already suggest: the Board’s default posture is dismissal, not engagement.
That is a ratio of roughly 211 pages of documented submissions for every 1 page of BJS response (1,058 to 5, plus a single paragraph). And the “response” was not a substantive analysis of evidence—it was, over and over, a jurisdictional escape hatch.
The “not an appellate court” line has become a shield, not a boundary.
BJS repeatedly told us it “generally does not have jurisdiction to review a judge’s legal rulings,” and “does not function as an appellate court.”
That principle makes sense as far as it goes. BJS shouldn’t relitigate every disappointed litigant’s case.
But BJS’s own 2024 Annual Report draws a sharper line than its form letters suggest. The Board says its “primary function is to receive, investigate, and evaluate complaints of judicial misconduct,” and that if a complaint provides a reasonable basis to believe there might be a disciplinary violation, the Board may direct an investigation.
Our complaints did not ask BJS to reverse orders. We asked BJS to do what it exists to do: determine whether documented conduct appears to violate the Minnesota Code of Judicial Conduct—especially when the allegations go to impartiality, disclosure, conflicts, and extra-record behavior (including issues surrounding a law clerk conflict and the handling of it).
Instead, BJS treated the label “legal ruling” as a universal solvent—dissolving the need to grapple with facts, context, or patterns.
The Board’s own statistics raise an uncomfortable question.
BJS reports that in 2024 it received 987 complaints—the most in its history—and that it summarily dismissed 934.
Read that again. In a year of record complaint volume, the Board’s dominant action was summary dismissal.
And the Annual Report’s own breakdown makes the imbalance even clearer. BJS writes: “Of the 987 complaints received in 2024, the Board summarily dismissed 934, reviewed 49 at board meetings,* authorized investigations of 26, issued discipline against 5 judges, and filed a Formal Complaint against 1 judge.” Even allowing for an internal pipeline (review → investigation → discipline), the headline reality is hard to escape: about 94.6% of complaints were summarily dismissed, while only 26 (about 2.6%) led to authorized investigations, 5 (about 0.5%) resulted in discipline, and 1 (about 0.1%) produced a Formal Complaint.
(as reported in the Annual Report)
The 2024 Annual Report explains that summary dismissals can be approved with review by “the Executive Secretary, subject to the approval of a single Board member,” specifically to avoid “inefficiency” of full Board review.
That might be defensible for truly frivolous submissions. But when a complainant submits hundreds of pages—and then submits additional complaints with new information, new exhibits, and analyses—the credibility of a “no reasonable belief” conclusion depends on one thing:
BJS’s letters do not answer that. They don’t identify disputed points. They don’t address the central evidence. They don’t meaningfully distinguish one supplement from another. They don’t explain what was reviewed, what was checked, and what was rejected.
Instead, they repeat the same core assertions: “no new information,” “no basis for a reasonable belief,” and “we cannot take action on legal rulings.”
The Board’s statistics raise one question. Its own private discipline summaries raise another.
Private Cautions, Public Silence.
On February 3, 2026, BJS released a private-discipline summary showing that in File 2025-36 the Board cautioned a judge that conducting an independent investigation could violate Rule 2.9(C) of the Minnesota Code of Judicial Conduct.
That single entry matters because it confirms—plainly—that independent fact-gathering is not some obscure, academic concern. It is a recognized ethical boundary, serious enough to warrant formal Board action, even if only in private.
And it raises a question the public cannot answer—because the system is structured to prevent the public from answering it.
We cannot tell who the judge was. We cannot tell what the underlying facts were. We cannot tell how the Board evaluated the evidence. And we cannot compare that private caution to other complaints alleging the same category of misconduct—especially when those complaints are dismissed with a one-page form letter and the public is told, repeatedly, that the matter is just “legal rulings.”
If a disciplinary body can privately caution judges about Rule 2.9(C), it should also be able to explain—clearly and specifically—why records-based allegations of independent investigation are dismissed when brought by ordinary Minnesotans. Otherwise, the public is left with an accountability system that acts in private, dismisses in public, and never shows its work.
“Due to limited budget, we may be unable to respond.”
Multiple BJS letters include a line that is as revealing as it is alarming: “Due to the Board’s limited budget, we may be unable to respond to future complaints…”
This isn’t just about manners. It’s about accountability.
If the enforcement body for judicial ethics can stop responding—after repeatedly dismissing—then the public’s only remaining “remedy” is to trust that the system is self-correcting. But trust is not a substitute for oversight. And trust is not maintained by silence.
They have time for polished Instagram videos. Just not for investigations.
What makes the Board’s “limited budget” refrain even harder to take is that, during the same period, BJS found the time—and resources—to produce polished Instagram videos featuring its top officials speaking confidently about oversight, accountability, and enforcing the Code of Judicial Conduct.
In those videos, the Board’s public message is clear: we protect judicial integrity; we investigate complaints; public trust matters. But when Minnesotans submit detailed, records-based misconduct complaints, the private reality looks very different: summary dismissals, repetitive form-letter language, and no meaningful engagement with the evidence.
At this point, perhaps the Board should do something simple: watch its own videos—and then measure its actual practices against the responsibilities it publicly describes. Because if the Board can explain oversight to the public in an Instagram reel, it can explain—specifically—why it refuses to investigate when the allegations go to impartiality, conflicts, and extra-record conduct.
Why the form-letter pattern corrodes public confidence.
The Annual Report quotes the judicial-ethics ideal: “Judges… must respect and honor the judicial office as a public trust and strive to maintain and enhance confidence in the legal system.”
Here is the hard truth: a disciplinary system cannot “preserve public confidence” while operating in a way that is indistinguishable from automatic dismissal—especially when complainants submit voluminous documentation and keep getting the same template back.
When the response to 1,058 pages of correspondence and exhibits is five pages plus a single paragraph of repeated dismissal language, the message to the public is not “we investigated and found no violation.”
The message is: don’t bother.
And that message doesn’t just harm individual complainants. It trains the public to assume that judicial-ethics enforcement is performative—strong enough to publish mission statements, too weak to confront documented patterns.
A system that depends on public trust should not also depend on public inattention.
We have documented our allegations and the paper trail of BJS’s repeated dismissals.
Now the question is no longer only about Judge Miller.
It is about whether Minnesota’s judicial-discipline process functions as a real accountability mechanism—or as a procedural cul-de-sac where even the most detailed complaints can be waved away as “legal rulings,” without meaningful engagement.
If BJS believes our record truly provides “no basis for a reasonable belief,” then it should be able to explain why—clearly, specifically, and in a way that the public can audit. That is what accountability looks like.
What we received instead looks like something else entirely: a form-letter machine attached to a government agency whose own statistics show that summary dismissal is not the exception—it is the norm.
And that is how public trust erodes: not with one scandal, but with a thousand quiet dismissals.
This article was prepared with the assistance of artificial intelligence.
More on Minnesota judicial ethics and court reform: justice-denied.org.
