Former Chief Magistrate Bryant Cochran and Angela Garmley. Garmley’s accusations against Cochran initiated a state investigation that led to the judge’s resignation.Now that a former Murray County, Ga., judge is staring at prison time, his accuser is going after his pocketbook.
Attorneys for Angela Garmley filed a motion in U.S. District Court on Thursday asking a federal judge to reconsider a civil lawsuit against Bryant Cochran, who was convicted last month of framing Garmley for a possession of methamphetamine arrest after she accused him of sexual harassment.
U.S. District Court Judge Harold Murphy dismissed a lawsuit against Cochran last February, saying that the evidence wasn’t strong enough to prove that Cochran framed Garmley while he was Murray County’s magistrate. Murphy said any theory that Cochran was behind an illegal arrest was not plausible.
But nine months later, a jury in a criminal case convicted Cochran of six federal crimes, convinced he ordered someone else in town to plant drugs on Garmley’s car. Cochran is due back in U.S. District Court on Feb. 20 for a sentencing hearing.
“It would be a strange contortion of the law for Cochran to stand in one courtroom of the United States District Court and have it declared ‘not plausible’ he committed these acts, yet stand in another courtroom in the same courthouse and have it be declared beyond a reasonable doubt that he violated the plaintiff’s rights,” attorney Stuart James wrote in his motion Thursday.