A Spanish judge is accused of berating officers who stopped her at a drunk-driving checkpoint, officials said Wednesday.
She eventually was found to exceed the blood-alcohol limit despite the apparent attempt to avoid being breathalyzed, the officials said.
Maria Silvia Lopez Mejia, an investigating magistrate in Barcelona, paid a fine for the alcohol offense but now faces separate disciplinary proceedings for the way she treated the police in the incident late last year, an official with the Superior Court of Catalonia said on customary condition of anonymity.
Lopez Mejia was stopped at a checkpoint in the pre-dawn hours of Oct. 9 in San Cugat del Valles, near Barcelona. "I am on my way home from work and very tired. Let me through," she told officers manning the checkpoint, according to a police memo quoted by the newspaper El Mundo.
The judge later flew into a rage, demanding the badge numbers of the officers and threatening to be tougher on police in general in cases that come through her courtroom.
"For you people, I often bend the rules but from now on I am not going to believe all your stories," Lopez Mejia said, according to the memo.
The General Council of the Judiciary, a watchdog body that oversees the Spanish court system, said Wednesday it has asked the court in Catalonia to rule on whether the judge treated the police disrespectfully. If found guilty she can be given a warning or fined 300 euros.
