Not long after taking the bench for the afternoon docket, Baltimore County District Judge Bruce S. Lamdin noticed a woman leaving the courtroom with a crying baby.

"If she only knew how much I hate kids," the judge said, "she would not have brought that kid in here today."

He later asked a Pennsylvania man caught speeding why every resident of that state "drives like a fool."

"What is it up there? Is it in the water?" Lamdin asked. "You know, I get on [Interstate] 83 every day, going back and forth to work, and you all go flying by me. ... What's the big rush to get back to Pennsylvania? It's an ugly state."

Those comments - along with disparaging remarks about drug treatment programs and the Baltimore City criminal justice system, a joke that the county's Circuit Court judges spend their afternoons sipping cocktails rather than working, and profanity not normally heard from the bench - led to charges that Lamdin had violated Maryland's judicial code of conduct.

Last week, the state's highest court ordered the judge to show why he should not be suspended or otherwise sanctioned for his conduct.

It is the first time the Maryland Court of Appeals has scheduled a hearing in such a case since 1984, when the high court removed a judge from office for forging court documents, according to Gary J. Kolb, an attorney and the executive secretary of the state panel that investigates complaints about judges.

Lamdin, 59, did not respond to requests for an interview, and his lawyer declined to comment.

But in letters to the commission, in legal filings from his attorney and during a one-hour public hearing before the panel in June, the judge admitted violating the canons of the judicial code of conduct. He has sought the guidance of three judges who have been mentoring him since June 2006. And he explained that his courtroom commentary is often intended to ease tense moments with humor or to get through to the types of people he represented as a criminal defense attorney in language they can understand.

"I now realize how my comments could be viewed as discourteous, undignified and therefore sanctionable," Lamdin wrote in one letter. "In an attempt to reach criminal defendants with my comments, I talked in language I knew they understood. The comments were not mean-spirited, but I realized I went over the line."

A Baltimore native, Lamdin attended City College, Hampden-Sydney College in Richmond, Va., and the University of Maryland School of Law before following his father into the legal profession. I. Sewell Lamdin served as chief judge of Baltimore's now-defunct municipal court and then as a District Court judge. After his retirement in 1983, he joined his son in a private practice that focused largely on criminal defense work.

Attorneys and judges who have known Lamdin during his 30-year career as a lawyer - as well as those who have appeared before him since his 2002 appointment to the bench - describe him as a hard worker with a dry wit who genuinely cares about both the victims and perpetrators of crime.

"He is such a breath of fresh air," said Robert W. MacMeekin, a defense attorney who wrote to Lamdin in July 2006 about his handling of a woman accused of drunken driving. "He's a real human being, and the people in court in front of him feel like they're in front of somebody who's like them."

In the letter - sent four months before the Maryland Commission on Judicial Disabilities charged Lamdin with making "sanctionable" comments in court - MacMeekin encouraged the judge to continue his approach to the cases he hears.

"I know that a day in your court is a compelling one and that from time to time, you may face challenges because you say what you mean," the attorney wrote. "If there ever comes a time [when] doing the right thing as you see it puts your robe in jeopardy, you have somebody at this end who will help cover your back."

Criminal defense attorney David B. Irwin has known Lamdin professionally since they both worked as prosecutors in the mid-1970s in the Baltimore County state's attorney's office.

"He's a very good judge, and he has a good heart," he said of Lamdin. "It just sometimes comes out of his mouth wrong."

Like others interviewed, Irwin said that the judge has noticeably toned down his courtroom commentary.

"It's not as much fun to be in front of him, and he's not as funny as he used to be," he said. "But it's a serious job, and I understand the commission's point that you have to have the appearance of judiciousness."

The commission that brought charges against Lamdin is a little-known panel that does much of its work in secret. During the past 12 years, the judicial disabilities commission has received an average of 111 written complaints per year about the state's district, circuit, appeals and orphans court judges.

Neither the complaints nor the subsequent investigations, however, become public unless the panel's investigative counsel decides to file charges against a judge. The vast majority of complaints are dismissed each year, either because the allegations were unsubstantiated or because a judge's actions were not deemed sanctionable, according to the panel's most recent annual report.

The investigation into Lamdin's conduct began in November 2005 when a Reisterstown man filed a formal complaint about the judge's handling of traffic cases on Sept. 2, 2005. It was on that afternoon that the judge joked about his disdain for children and chided the Pennsylvania driver about his state's motorists.

After receiving the complaint, the commission ordered audio recordings of several weeks' worth of hearings from Lamdin's courtroom. The commission charged Lamdin last year with 20 instances of sanctionable conduct between September 2005 and May 2006 and recommended in August that he be suspended without pay for 30 days - one of the toughest sanctions the panel has suggested in years.

According to court transcripts, Lamdin joked that one defendant couldn't seem to keep from stepping in piles of excrement - but not in those terms - and asked an attorney whether another defendant had gotten "his head out of where he had it inserted earlier today." He spoke disparagingly of correctional officers who work in the state's prisons and Baltimore's detention center. He used a slang term for oral sex while sentencing a woman on prostitution charges. And he joked that the county's Circuit Court judges don't hear jury trials in the afternoon because they don't want to "overtax themselves."

The commission's investigative counsel decided not to pursue charges involving six of the 20 cases, and the judge, in return, agreed that his comments in the remaining cases violated the code of conduct.

Lamdin's attorney, Alvin I. Frederick, asked commission members at the June hearing to consider the changes Lamdin has made in recent months, the "baiting" he has experienced in court since the charges were made public and his own explanations for comments that the panel characterized as profane, crass, undignified, sarcastic and disparaging.

"What he was trying to do ... was to give some shock therapy, if you will, to people who are about to fall into the cesspool of life and try to avoid them falling in," Frederick said, according to a transcript.

But one commission member, Montgomery County Circuit Judge Robert A. Greenberg, noted that two-thirds of the people to whom Lamdin's discourteous comments were directed "seem to involve cases that have nothing to do with those types of individuals."

The case now rests with the Court of Appeals, which is scheduled to hear from Lamdin at a hearing in November.

On a recent morning in Towson, Lamdin quickly worked through a series of criminal and traffic cases, offering a comment here and there that elicited chuckles from many of the defendants, attorneys and others in the audience.

After listening to one man's account of having too little money to pay a traffic fine, the judge remarked, "So you're busted, disgusted and can't be trusted."

Lamdin offered the man probation before judgment if he agreed to pay $257.50 in fines and fees within four hours. And with that, he allowed the 21-year-old man to avoid a conviction on his record.

jennifer.mcmenamin @baltsun.com