ANCHORAGE, Alaska — The Alaska Commission on Judicial Conduct has recommended a Nome judge be reprimanded for behavior including using offensive accents to impersonate people from other ethnic groups, and keeping a courtroom of attorneys waiting for an hour while he watched a sports game.

The recommendation came after a brief hearing last Friday in which members of the commission, which is charged with investigating allegations of misconduct in Alaska’s judiciary, agreed with a special prosecutor that Nome Superior Court Judge Romano DiBenedetto had broken judicial ethics canon and undermined public trust in his position.

DiBenedetto was placed on paid administrative leave on March 23, 2025, according to the Alaska Court System. Since then, the Nome area has been without a regular judge for nearly a year.

The Alaska Supreme Court will determine what happens next for DiBenedetto. Sanctions can range from reprimand or censure to retirement, suspension or removal from office.

In a statement, DiBenedetto’s attorney John Cashion wrote that the judge “cooperated with the Commission on Judicial Conduct throughout the entirety of the proceedings, worked cooperatively with the Commission’s Special Counsel, and stipulated to the findings of fact advanced to the Alaska Supreme Court.”

“At this point, the matter is in the hands of the Alaska Supreme Court, and we will not have any further comment until they have evaluated the agreed upon recommendation for discipline,” Cashion wrote.

The state is paying DiBenedetto his full salary of $259,729.08 while he is on administrative leave, according to a spokesperson for the Alaska Court System. He is not working while on leave.

While DiBenedetto has been on leave, other judges from the Second Judicial District, primarily David Roghair of Utqiaġvik, have been handling Nome’s busy docket, according to the Alaska Court System. The state has also spent $13,377 on bringing three temporary judges to Nome.

DiBenedetto, 57, admitted to some of the violations, including to being close to an hour late to a hearing in Unalakleet that happened after normal working hours because he was watching a sporting event on TV, and then the person driving him to the courthouse briefly got lost. On that day, Jan. 8, 2024, the College Football Playoff National Championship game pitting the University of Michigan against the University of Washington was happening.

“None of the parties involved in the hearing believe that Judge DiBenedetto’s delay caused harm to the case or their clients, and the trial proceeded as scheduled the following day,” a stipulation of facts signed by DiBenedetto and the special prosecutor said.

In other cases, DiBenedetto regularly rescheduled court hearings happening on Thursdays “to accommodate his travel schedule.”

“While Judge DiBenedetto covered time-sensitive hearings and was available to staff while he was traveling, his pattern of traveling out of town and continuing hearings on short notice created an appearance that his personal travel needs took precedence over the requirements of the court,” violating judicial ethics canons, the filings said.

In affidavits, multiple court staffers recounted times when DiBenedetto impersonated the patterns of speech of ethnic groups including Alaska Native people.

One court employee said that he had observed DiBenedetto “imitating a stereotype of a Native Alaskan accent while describing his everyday interactions with Native Alaskans in the community.”

“When imitating people with this exaggerated accent, Judge DiBenedetto did not repeat statements actually made by the other person but instead used language that would indicate that the person was of lower intelligence,” the court employee wrote in an affidavit. “I cannot say with confidence how many times I observed this type of behavior because it was frequent.”

Another clerk wrote that she too had heard DiBenedetto’s “impersonations” and had become so uncomfortable when the judge imitated the testimony of a police officer “as an exaggerated stereotype of an Asian accent that carried a negative connotation against Asian people” multiple times in front of multiple people that she had to step out of the room.

In a July letter, Kawerak Inc. President and CEO Melanie Bahnke wrote that DiBenedetto should be removed from the bench. The Bering Strait region is about 75% Alaska Native, she wrote, and bears a painful history of eroded trust between residents, law enforcement and the judicial system.

Among them, as Bahnke wrote: In 2003, Nome teenager Sonya Ivanoff was murdered by a local police officer; in recent years, inadequacies in the investigation of a sexual assault case led to the city paying a settlement; and the city’s high rates of missing and murdered Indigenous people have attracted national attention.

“Judge DiBenedetto’s racist conduct has continued to perpetuate the notion that the criminal and justice systems are designed to work against minority populations in the Second Judicial District, where there is no room for even the slightest perception of continued racial bias or incompetence,” wrote Bahnke, who previously served on the Alaska Commission on Judicial Conduct.

On Wednesday, Bahnke said she was disappointed to see the commission recommend DiBenedetto be reprimanded rather than removed.

“This is just a continuation of a long history of people in Nome in the justice system betraying the trust of the people they serve,” she said.

The special counsel’s recommendation for discipline also found that DiBenedetto hadn’t faced previous disciplinary proceedings, that he acknowledged his violations of the Alaska Code of Judicial Conduct and that he “did not act with actual malice, prejudice or bias.”

“Even if he didn’t do this with malice, that doesn’t excuse ignorance,” Bahnke said.

The practical effects are major, she said: Having a patched-together schedule of substitute judges only means more delays in a system already plagued with long timelines.

“Whether it’s those accused of crimes or victims of crimes, there should be an analysis of that impact,” Bahnke said.

DiBenedetto is the second Nome judge in a row to face reprimand.

In 2016 Nome’s last full-time judge, Timothy Dooley, received a public censure from the Alaska Supreme Court for comments he made while on the bench, including saying, “Has anything good ever come out of drinking other than sex with a pretty girl?” on the record at a 2013 criminal sentencing.

Dooley later went on medical leave and then resigned. The position was vacant for nearly two years until Gov. Bill Walker appointed DiBenedetto, at the time a Fairbanks magistrate judge, to the job.

At his installation in 2017, the Nome Nugget wrote, DiBenedetto talked about his own background: Raised in Chicago, summers in Italy with his grandparents, college at the University of Notre Dame and law school at Northwestern School of Law. A TV show about the Iditarod had sparked his interest in Alaska, the newspaper reported.

DiBenedetto, according to the story, talked about his desire to meet the people of Nome and “to learn about this place.”

It is not clear when the Alaska Supreme Court will decide on discipline for DiBenedetto.

_____

©2026 Anchorage Daily News. Visit at adn.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.