HARTFORD, Conn. — The Connecticut Supreme Court has summoned a Superior Court judge to explain why she has been absent from the bench for more than two years while collecting more than $350,000 in salary.
Superior Court Judge Alice Bruno is to appear before the state’s Supreme Court on April 5 “to show cause why this Court should not commence proceedings to either suspend or remove Judge Bruno from her judicial office for potential violations of the Code of Judicial Conduct,” the court’s chief clerk wrote in an order dated Thursday.
Bruno, who has not been to work since November 2019, will have to show “why her failure to perform judicial functions for at least the last two years” does not violate conduct rules that include promoting confidence in the judiciary and “competence, diligence and cooperation,” the order says.
Hartford Courant columnist Kevin Rennie wrote about Bruno in two columns late last year, describing her years-long chronic absence from the bench through a series of emails obtained through FOI.
Two months after Bruno stopped showing up for work at Waterbury court, Deputy Chief Court Administrator Judge Elizabeth A. Bozzuto told her in an email, “It has come to the attention of this office that you have failed to render decisions in a number of cases that you presided over in Bridgeport and Hartford … Your failure to track these cases and render decisions on them is unfair to the bar, the litigants and your colleagues on the bench.”
Bruno’s lawyer, Jacques J. Parenteau, has said that “following emergency hospitalization for a cardiac procedure in November 2019, Judge Bruno has been on a leave of absence to address several health issues.”
Parenteau wrote in an email Friday that he could not comment on the show cause order, but “I can say that the issue of Judge Bruno’s absence was misrepresented in press reports by Kevin Rennie’s article when he failed, or refused to publish, that I told him Judge Bruno has been seeking an accommodation supported by medical reports since October 2020.”
Rennie did write in his December column, “Bruno’s lawyer wrote last month that his client is seeking an accommodation for her undisclosed health condition.”
“I can say,” Parenteau continued, “that Judge Bruno filed a 120-paragraph disability discrimination complaint with the Connecticut Commission on Human Rights & Opportunities in December 2021 because the Judicial Branch refused to accommodate her disability.
“Judge Bruno further claims that she has been retaliated against for seeking a reasonable accommodation,” he wrote, and “continues to seek an accommodation that would allow her to return to work.”
Rennie noted in his column that Bruno was a lawyer in private practice before becoming in 2012 the first woman to serve as the executive director of the Connecticut Bar Association. She left the CBA the following year. She then assisted in her family’s New Britain restaurant. In 2014, she worked as Special Counsel to Secretary of the State Denise Merrill.
