Joe Brown (judge) Biography, Age, Height, Wife, Net Worth and Family (2024)

Brown is an Independent candidate for the 2023 Memphis mayoral election.

In August 2015, Brown served five days in the Shelby County Jail after having been held in contempt of court in March 2014. Brown apparently raised his voice and interrupted a magistrate judge while representing a woman seeking child support in Shelby County Juvenile Court. Brown claimed that the sentence was excessive, and that he should have only been fined; Dan Michael, the Shelby County Juvenile Court chief magistrate that found Brown in contempt, responded that "This is not Hollywood. This is the real thing and as an officer of the court he should have known better."

According to press accounts, Brown became combative and irate after Horne refused to discuss details of the case that were not on the schedule. Brown was sentenced to five days in jail, but was later released on his own recognizance. Brown surrendered to the Shelby County Sheriff on August 27, 2015, to serve his five-day sentence at the Shelby County Corrections Facility in Memphis. In audio obtained by WREG and an available transcript on eonline.com, Brown can be heard arguing that the judge didn't have the authority to sit on the bench.

Brown was warned that he would be held in contempt before these comments. Judge Horne began increasing the quantity of days Brown could be held in contempt after Brown continued disrupting the court. Judge Brown's lawyer filed an appeal, but the appeal was refused. Judge Horne did have the authority to hold him in contempt. He was released from protective custody at the Shelby County Corrections Facility the morning of September 1, 2015. After his release, he compared himself to notable civil rights activists who spent significant time imprisoned for their activism like Martin Luther King Jr., Nelson Mandela, and Stokely Carmichael. Some in the community took offense to this assertion since the incident took place during Brown's Shelby County district attorney campaign and Brown brought his own lawyer with him during the 2014 incident, causing many to wonder if it was a ploy for publicity.

In March 2014, Brown won the Democratic primary for the position of Shelby County district attorney. He lost the general election to Republican incumbent Amy Weirich by 65% to 35%, after making comments about her sexuality.

In March 2014, Brown was arrested in Memphis, Tennessee, and charged with five counts of contempt of court and getting "verbally abusive" during a child support case overseen by Magistrate Harold Horne. Brown, who retains his law license, was reviewing a child support matter as a favor to an acquaintance.

After graduating from law school, Brown moved to Memphis, Tennessee to work as an attorney for the Legal Services Corporation. Brown later worked for the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. By 1978, Brown became the first African-American prosecutor in Memphis, and he later directed the Memphis public defender's office. He would later open his own law practice before being elected as a judge on the State Criminal Court of Shelby County, Tennessee in 1990. While on the bench he was known for his sometimes unusual sentences, such as, sentencing a child molester to confess to his church congregation and ordering a drug trafficker to apologize in a newspaper letter.

Joseph Blakeney Brown Jr. (born July 5, 1947), known as Judge Joe Brown, is a former American lawyer and television personality. He is a former Shelby County, Tennessee Criminal Court judge and a former arbiter of the arbitration-based reality court show Judge Joe Brown.