Why Maryland Removed Chief Judge Vickie Gipson

CASE FILE AT A GLANCE
Judge	Vickie Gipson
Court	Chief Judge, Orphans’ Court for Anne Arundel County
County	Anne Arundel County, Maryland
CJD Numbers	2024-051, -053, -054, -069 and -109
Status	Removed from office by order of the Supreme Court of Maryland, effective immediately
Commission Recommendation Issued	May 14, 2026 (unanimous vote)
Removal Ordered	October 5, 2026, argued and decided the same day; per curiam order in JD No. 2, September Term 2025, signed by Senior Justice Shirley M. Watts; opinion to follow
Recommended By	Commission on Judicial Disabilities, chaired by Judge Anne K. Albright

The Order and How Fast It Came

The Supreme Court of Maryland heard argument on Monday, October 5, 2026, and removed her that afternoon. The clerk time-stamped the order at 4:09 p.m. the same day. It is a per curiam order in JD No. 2, September Term 2025, signed by Senior Justice Shirley M. Watts, and it removes her from office effective immediately, expressly reserving the Court’s reasons “to be stated in an opinion later to be filed.” That is the identical sequence the Court used with Knapp, whose order came the day of his argument and whose full opinion followed on July 17, 2026.

The speed is interesting and the second time this court has moved this way on this feud. A court weighing a lesser sanction takes longer than an afternoon. Gipson had filed formal exceptions to the Commission’s findings and asked for something short of removal, the Commission had responded to those exceptions, and the Court considered both along with the record before ruling. She did not get it.

Two justices sat it out. The order notes that neither Chief Justice Matthew Fader nor Justice Killough participated, with Senior Justices Glenn T. Harrell and Robert N. McDonald specially assigned in their places. The order does not say why, and this file will not guess, but it is worth noting alongside a Commission finding set out below: that Gipson contacted Chief Justice Fader directly about her conflict with Knapp while it was unfolding.

The Commission referred its findings, conclusions, and recommendation to the Court under Maryland Rule 18-435(c). The Court took the matter up under Rule 18-437, which lets it impose the recommended disposition or any other disposition permitted by law. The removal power itself comes from Article IV, section 4B(b)(1) of the Maryland Constitution, which allows removal after a hearing on a finding of misconduct in office, persistent failure to perform the duties of the office, or conduct prejudicial to the proper administration of justice. The Court found the misconduct here egregious and removal appropriate.

One thing the order pointedly does not do is say which violations it sustained. It recites the nine Maryland Rules the Commission determined she violated, then concludes only that she “committed one or more” of them. That phrasing is why the forthcoming opinion matters: as it stands, the order supports removal without telling the reader which findings carried it.

What the Commission Found

Gipson was first elected to the Anne Arundel County Orphans’ Court in November 2018. She was re-elected in November 2022 alongside two new colleagues, Marc Knapp and David Duba, and was designated Chief Judge by the Governor of Maryland the following summer. The Commission’s findings, reached by clear and convincing evidence after a hearing that stretched from August 2025 to December 2025, are organized into five categories.

A Colleague Who Rarely Showed Up and Was Excused

Judge Duba was a full-time high school teacher when he took office, and the Orphans’ Court is required by Maryland law to sit at least two full business days a week, from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. Rather than require Duba to comply, Gipson approved a schedule that let him work court hours in the afternoon around his teaching job, then let him arrive around 11 a.m. once school was in session. Between December 2022 and June 2023, the court sat fifty-two times; Duba was absent for thirty-six of those sessions. Court staff testified the accommodation backed up the docket by three to four months. The Commission found Gipson never reported Duba’s failure to perform his duties, and instead moved contested hearings to the afternoon so she would not have to sit with only Knapp in the morning.

Silencing a Colleague’s Dissent

The Commission also found Gipson took steps to blunt Knapp’s ability to function as an equal member of a three-judge panel. In one instance, after Knapp told her he intended to write a dissent, Gipson delayed circulating the majority opinion for weeks and then attempted to have it signed and filed before Knapp could finish his dissent; he intercepted the signed copy in the clerk’s office in time to attach his dissent before it went out. She followed up with a directive that the court would issue only orders rather than opinions going forward, telling Knapp he could not dissent from an order the way he could from an opinion, and later sent a written directive requiring her approval before any judge’s decision could be printed or filed. Knapp continued drafting memoranda of dissent afterward but was not certain they ever reached the parties or the record. Gipson also changed rulings issued by Knapp and Duba in cases where she had not presided, conduct the Commission found exceeded her administrative authority as chief judge.

From an Email Warning to a Peace Order

The conflict became public in the spring of 2024. On April 18, Gipson emailed a court-wide guideline threatening “further action” without additional warning if judges argued in open court, then filed her first complaint against Knapp with the Commission less than an hour later. After a subsequent email exchange in which Knapp responded to a request for decorum by asking Gipson “how about for generally acting like assholes,” Gipson filed a second complaint and arranged for a security guard to sit in chambers, telling the Commission a guard and another person thought Knapp might be intoxicated, a claim the guard’s own incident report did not support.

Over the following two weeks, Gipson sent a stream of emails to the Commission, the Judiciary’s Threat Management Center, and the county sheriff, at one point describing Knapp as someone who “may have a mental disability,” and requesting that his access to the courthouse’s rear entrance be restricted so that only he would need to pass through a metal detector. Judiciary officials repeatedly told her they lacked the authority to suspend a sitting judge and directed her to the sheriff or the Commission. On May 16, 2024, when Knapp chose to work in the courtroom between hearings rather than in chambers, Gipson called the police; officers who responded found no assault and no criminal conduct, and Gipson herself confirmed to the responding officer that Knapp had only pointed and yelled. Investigators from the county’s own Homeland Security and Intelligence Unit later concluded the matter was an employee conflict, not a threat.

On May 19, 2024, Gipson filed for a peace order against Knapp and separately filed a criminal Application for Statement of Charges alleging stalking, signing each page with her Chief Judge title. A temporary peace order was granted, but the underlying case was dismissed in July 2024 after it expired procedurally; Gipson immediately filed a second peace order petition alleging the same conduct, and that one was denied outright in August 2024 after a full hearing, with the court finding she could not meet her burden of proof. The criminal stalking charge was never prosecuted.

Talking to the Press About a Pending Case

Throughout the peace order proceedings, Gipson spoke repeatedly with reporters from the Baltimore Banner and the Baltimore Sun/Capital Gazette about her conflict with Knapp and about complaints she had filed with the Commission, including telling one reporter “I’m going to cry” after her first peace order case was dismissed and stating publicly that she did not feel Orphans’ Court judges’ safety was anyone’s responsibility. She also contacted Supreme Court of Maryland Chief Justice Matthew Fader directly about the conflict. The Commission found these contacts, made while she repeatedly identified herself by her judicial title, both breached the confidentiality Maryland law requires for matters before the Commission and improperly leveraged the prestige of her office to advance her side of a personal dispute.

Fighting the Process Itself

The Commission’s fifth category concerned Gipson’s conduct toward the disciplinary process itself. Despite repeated written instructions to direct all communication to Investigative Counsel, Gipson continued copying the Commission’s Chair and Executive Counsel on substantive matters for months. She missed discovery deadlines, did not fully comply with an order compelling her to produce documents, did not appear for the first day of her own hearing in August 2025 (having scheduled a conflicting event), and sought to postpone her hearing until after Knapp’s case was resolved, a request the Commission denied.

One filing drew particular scrutiny. In a reply brief filed the day before her hearing resumed, Gipson’s filing cited three cases as legal support: “J.M. v. W.T., 160 Md. App. 173,” “Kirkland v. State, 171 Md. App. 770,” and “Feaster v. Feaster, 359 Md. 106.” The Commission found none of the three citations corresponded to an actual reported Maryland decision. The volume and page numbers Gipson cited in fact belong to entirely different, unrelated cases, and the Commission noted the errors were consistent with citations pulled from an unreliable or automatically generated source rather than an official case reporter.

The Discipline Ladder (Maryland)

Maryland’s Commission on Judicial Disabilities can privately reprimand a judge on its own, but every public sanction, from a public reprimand up through suspension and removal, requires the Commission to refer the matter to the Supreme Court of Maryland, which decides. A removal recommendation like the one against Gipson is the Commission’s strongest possible referral; the Court can still impose something less severe, as Knapp’s attorney argued unsuccessfully in his case.

Not Her First Time Before the Commission

Gipson had an earlier disciplinary history before her conflict with Knapp began. In September 2021, she entered a Conditional Diversion Agreement with the Commission after it found she may have failed to perform judicial duties, failed to timely file tax returns and pay outstanding tax obligations, endorsed a political candidate and a business on her personal social media page (which also carried a cover photo supporting her own campaign for the bench), used court resources to apply for a political position, attempted to sell jewelry and insurance to court personnel, failed to timely file required financial disclosure statements for 2018 and 2019, and showed a lack of candor in her responses to Investigative Counsel. She completed the terms of that agreement in September 2022, two months before winning re-election.

Gipson’s Defense: A Claim of Disparate Treatment

Gipson has consistently argued that she is being treated unfairly. In a July 28, 2025 filing opposing the Commission’s process, she wrote that “what is at stake is not just missed deadlines or misunderstood rules, but the Commission’s inexplicable decision to prosecute the victim of violence while delaying charges against the aggressor, Judge Marc Knapp, who is white and male,” arguing this resulted in her, “the Black woman who reported the threats,” facing a public hearing before Knapp did. That argument, and a related framing that she was being retaliated against for raising workplace-violence concerns, has also been picked up by some local commentary questioning whether she has been treated consistently with Knapp. It is worth being clear about what this is: Gipson’s own contention, made in her own court filing and repeated by some sympathetic commentary, not a finding by the Commission or any court. The Commission’s unanimous findings do not address the argument in the portions of the record reviewed for this file, and its recommendation of removal came after, not despite, considering that Knapp was the “primary aggressor” in their personal conflict; the Commission concluded that did not excuse Gipson’s own conduct, particularly her handling of the disciplinary process itself.

The Rules She Broke

Rule	What It Requires
Md. Rule 18-101.1	A judge shall comply with the law, including the Maryland Code of Judicial Conduct.
Md. Rule 18-101.2	A judge shall act at all times in a manner that promotes public confidence in the independence, integrity, and impartiality of the judiciary, and shall avoid impropriety and the appearance of impropriety.
Md. Rule 18-101.3	A judge shall not abuse the prestige of judicial office to advance the personal or economic interests of the judge or others, or allow others to do so.
Md. Rule 18-102.5(a) and (b)	A judge shall perform judicial and administrative duties competently and diligently, and shall cooperate with other judges and court officials in the administration of court business.
Md. Rule 18-102.8(a) and (b)	A judge shall require order and decorum in proceedings, and shall be patient, dignified, and courteous to those with whom the judge deals in an official capacity.
Md. Rule 18-102.12	A judge shall require court staff, court officials, and others subject to the judge’s direction and control to act consistently with the judge’s own obligations under the Code.
Md. Rule 18-102.15(a) and (b)	A judge who receives information indicating a substantial likelihood that another judge has committed a violation shall take appropriate action, and shall inform the appropriate authority of a substantial violation.
Md. Rule 18-102.16(a)	A judge shall cooperate and be candid and honest with judicial and lawyer disciplinary agencies.

These are the rules the Commission determined she violated, recited in the Court’s order. The Court concluded she committed one or more of them without specifying which, so treat the list as the Commission’s findings rather than as a list the Supreme Court individually adopted.

How This Compares to Knapp’s Case

Knapp and Gipson were investigated over the same conflict, and the Commission recommended removing both. Knapp’s case moved first: the Supreme Court of Maryland removed him from the bench on June 4, 2026, the same day it heard argument, calling his conduct egregious. Full coverage of that case, including the Commission’s rationale and the specific misconduct that sealed his removal, is in Case File No. 23. Gipson’s case took longer: her hearing was delayed twice at her own request, and the Commission did not issue its recommendation until nearly a year after Knapp’s. Her argument was heard on October 5, 2026, and the Court removed her the same day. Earlier reporting had pointed to a September 9 hearing date; the Court’s own October argument calendar and the order itself both put the argument on October 5.

The symmetry is worth pausing on, because it answers a question the series does not often get to answer. The Commission found Knapp was the primary aggressor in the personal conflict between them, and said so. Both judges were still removed. What that says about how Maryland weighed these cases is that provocation was treated as context rather than excuse. Gipson’s removal did not rest on who started the feud. It rested on what she did with the powers of a chief judge once she was in one, and on how she handled the disciplinary process that followed.

The arithmetic on this court is now remarkable. Three judges were elected to the Anne Arundel County Orphans’ Court in November 2022. Duba resigned in November 2024, Knapp was removed in June 2026, and Gipson was removed in October 2026. None of the three remain on the bench.

Where Things Stand Now

Gipson is off the bench as of October 5, 2026. She had not sought reelection this year, so only a few months of her term remained, which makes the removal less consequential for her tenure than for the record it leaves: a removal order rather than a quiet exit. The Court’s full opinion has not issued, and it is worth reading when it does, because the order says removal was warranted without saying which of the violations the Court actually sustained. Knapp’s opinion followed his removal order by about six weeks, which is a reasonable guide to the timing here. The Gavel of Shame will update this file when the opinion is filed.

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Sources

PRIMARY SOURCE

• Supreme Court of Maryland, Per Curiam Order, In the Matter of the Honorable Vickie Gipson, Judge of the Orphans’ Court for Anne Arundel County, JD No. 2, September Term 2025, argued and filed October 5, 2026. mdcourts.gov
• Supreme Court of Maryland, Argument Schedule, October 2026, listing JD No. 2 for Monday, October 5, 2026. courts.state.md.us
• Maryland Commission on Judicial Disabilities, Findings of Fact, Conclusions of Law, Order and Recommendation, In the Matter of the Hon. Vickie Gipson, CJD 2024-051 et al., issued May 14, 2026. courts.state.md.us

NEWS COVERAGE

• Maryland Matters: Maryland Supreme Court removes Anne Arundel Orphans’ Court judge from bench (Oct. 5, 2026), reporting the order and the conduct the Court acted on. marylandmatters.org
• The Daily Record: Commission recommends Anne Arundel Orphans’ Court Judge Vickie Gipson’s removal (May 14, 2026). thedailyrecord.com
• The Daily Record: Suspension, not removal, recommended for MD judge (December 5, 2025). thedailyrecord.com
• AbusiveDiscretion.com: Maryland Judge Vickie Gipson Skips Disciplinary Hearing Over Misconduct Allegations (August 2025). abusivediscretion.com
• Maryland Matters: State Supreme Court removed Anne Arundel Orphans’ Court judge for “egregious misconduct” (July 20, 2026), which reported a Sept. 9 hearing date for Gipson; the argument was in fact heard October 5. marylandmatters.org
• The Daily Record: MD Supreme Court had “no trouble” deciding to remove Anne Arundel Judge Marc Knapp (July 20, 2026), which reported a Sept. 9 Supreme Court hearing for Gipson per Maryland Judiciary Case Search; the argument was in fact heard October 5. thedailyrecord.com
• Report Annapolis: Questions of Disparate Treatment Emerge Following Recommendation to Remove Chief Judge Vickie Gipson from Orphans’ Court Bench (May 16, 2026). reportannapolis.com

REFERENCE

• Maryland Commission on Judicial Disabilities: Public Actions of the Commission. courts.state.md.us

This post summarizes public judicial-discipline records and news reporting for general informational purposes as of publication. It is not legal advice. The Supreme Court of Maryland has ordered Gipson’s removal; its full opinion explaining that decision had not issued as of publication, and the four-page order does not identify which of the charged violations the Court sustained.