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Northwest North Carolina Judge Suspended

WFDD FILE PHOTO

A Northwest North Carolina district court judge has been suspended following a decision by the state Supreme Court.

Under the state's Judicial Code of Ethics, judges are allowed to serve as executors, but only for family members. 

The justices determined Brooks violated that rule when he handled the estates of two family friends. Their order from last week also says he failed to report nearly $90,000 in the estates' commissions he received at the time.

Brooks accepted responsibility for his actions at a commission meeting last September and apologized. The Judicial Standards Commission had recommended that Brooks be censured, but the court went further, imposing a 90-day suspension without pay. 

Brooks is a judge in the 23rd Judicial District, which includes Yadkin, Wilkes, Ashe and Allegheny counties.

Paul Garber is a Winston-Salem native and an award-winning reporter who began his journalism career with an internship at The High Point Enterprise in 1993. He has previously worked at The Augusta (Ga.) Chronicle, The St. Louis Post-Dispatch, The News and Record of Greensboro and the Winston-Salem Journal, where he was the newspaper's first full-time multimedia reporter. He won the statewide Media and the Law award in 2000 and has also been recognized for his business, investigative and multimedia reporting. Paul earned a BA from Wake Forest University and has a Master's of Liberal Arts degree from Johns Hopkins University and a Master's of Journalism and Mass Communication from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He lives in Lewisville.

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