A California judicial panel publicly reprimanded Sonoma County Superior Court Judge James Bertoli for political misconduct over his opposition to a highly controversial effort by county school officials to rename Sebastopol’s Analy High School in 2021.

Bertoli, Analy’s alumnus, former baseball coach and longtime announcer of his sports games, emerged as an outspoken and sometimes caustic critic of the West Sonoma County High School Board’s effort to change the school’s name to Western County High School.

In a decision released Oct. 30, the California Commission on Judicial Performance ruled that through Facebook posts, letters and comments to The Press Democrat, attending rallies and giving speeches, the judge had engaged in inappropriate political activities and “inappropriate conduct on social media that degraded the judiciary.” office.”

Bertoli, whose last day on the bench is Thursday before a long-planned retirement, disputes violating any judicial ethics. He provided The Press Democrat with a copy of the statement he made in a private hearing with the commission in which he argued that he had investigated what actions he could ethically take on the issue as a judge, and had avoided any political speech or positions that could create the impression that he could not litigate fairly.

“It has not been proven or even assumed that I could not do my job as a family law judge impartially because I did not want the name of my high school changed,” Bertoli wrote. He added that when the rallies he attended became political — the furor over the name change turned into an ultimately unsuccessful attempt to recall school board members — he would distance himself from the crowd.

Bertoli informed the presiding judge of the Sonoma County Superior Court, his supervisor, that he would oppose the name change but would not participate in any election activity, and there were no objections, he wrote. The current presiding judge, Shelly Averill, declined to comment to The Press Democrat on Thursday.

But the judicial commission highlighted a series of posts Bertoli made on Facebook in which he criticized the school board and the district’s then-superintendent, Toni Beal, who ultimately lost her job during the uproar.

“Judge Bertoli used Facebook accounts to make derogatory comments about public officials, engage in rhetoric that inflamed community passions, make profane comments, and speak derisively about those who disagreed with him,” the commission concluded.

Bertoli cannot appeal the commission’s decision, his attorney, James Murphy of San Francisco, told The Press Democrat. But Bertoli has the option of filing a lawsuit in federal court alleging that his freedom of speech was restricted, which the judge is weighing, Murphy said.

Murphy described the dispute over the name change as “a matter of community interest,” not political speech. “At what point does a judge in California feel like, because of this decision, they can’t rule on anything?” he said.

In his statement, Bertoli described himself as a person immensely passionate about high school, citing a family history with Analy that goes back five generations. “For almost 40 years I was known as ‘The Voice of the Tigers,’” he wrote, “announcing football and, for a time, basketball at home games.”

The committee found that in Facebook posts, Bertoli suggested that the school board was being deliberately vague about the times and locations of its meetings, in an effort to limit public criticism of the name change. He described one board member’s comments as “short-sighted, unanalytical and self-aggrandizing” and in another post wrote of the board: “This may be politically incorrect given the origin of the word, but what a group of morons!”

The committee argued that it brought the weight of its judicial role to the public debate when it wrote in another post that in “my profession, rushing to a result without deliberation tends to get it overturned by the Court of Appeal.”

When a Facebook commenter accused him of “bullying and threatening” to get his way, Bertoli responded with “haters have to hate, brother,” according to the commission report.

Murphy and Bertoli argued that the Facebook account was personal and that Bertoli did not identify himself as a judge, although in a small city like Sebastopol his position was well known. Facebook friends were quick to refer to him by the honorific title “Judge” in comment exchanges, the commission noted.

Murphy, however, argued that the judge could not control people invoking his title in dialogue he described as “kind of a funny repartee.”

It was not the first discipline in Bertoli’s long judicial career. The commission wrote that this time its decision to issue a public notice was influenced by a 2021 letter warning Bertoli not to tie his judgeship to his country music band. Court and disaster. In that case, the commission scolded Bertoli for a photograph that described the musician as Judge Jimmy Bertoli and for promoting Court ‘n’ Disaster material as “your standard courthouse band.”

By thus marketing his band, which describes its sound as Rocky Tonk and has 1,300 followers on Facebook, Bertoli had “abused the prestige of the judicial office,” the commission concluded.

You can contact staff writer Andrew Graham at 707-526-8667 or [email protected]. Follow him on X (Twitter) @AndrewGraham88