A Warren Judge Was Charged With “Super Drunk” Driving. He’s Still on the Bench.

Chief Judge John Chmura faces a high-BAC OWI charge months after allegedly rear-ending a public bus. He is still hearing cases. Michigan has no rule that says he shouldn’t be.

Here is what stands out first about this case: a chief judge told police he was a judge before he told them anything else, and it did not change what the breathalyzer said.

The Crash

Just before 11:30 p.m. on March 25, 2026, a vehicle rear-ended a SMART bus near Van Dyke Avenue and Triangle Drive in Sterling Heights. Two passengers were treated at the scene for minor injuries. The driver was John Chmura, chief judge of Warren’s 37th District Court since 2008 and a judge on that bench since 1996.

Sterling Heights police body-camera footage, later obtained through a public records request and released in early June, shows Chmura identifying himself to officers as a judge with the 37th District Court before struggling through field sobriety tests. He was reportedly unable to complete a backward count from 87 to 78 or recite the alphabet from C to N. He initially declined a preliminary breath test, was arrested, and then agreed to one. Asked how much he had had to drink, he told officers, “I don’t know. Evidently too much.” A blood draw at a hospital later put his blood alcohol content at 0.196, more than twice Michigan’s 0.08 legal limit for driving.

A Conflict Built Into the Docket

The delay between the March arrest and the June charge traces back to an institutional conflict that had nothing to do with the facts of the crash. Chmura hears cases the Macomb County Prosecutor’s Office brings. Letting that same office decide whether to charge him would have created exactly the appearance problem Michigan’s conflict rules exist to prevent.

In early May, the Macomb County Prosecutor’s Office announced it had referred the warrant request to the Prosecuting Attorneys Coordinating Council for reassignment. The office’s statement said the referral was “necessary to avoid any appearance of impropriety,” and that maintaining public confidence in the judicial process required it. The council assigned the matter to the St. Clair County Prosecutor’s Office, which brought the charge that led to the June 10 arraignment.

The mechanism worked as designed, on this particular question. What it did not resolve is the larger one: who decides whether a judge facing a pending criminal charge should keep hearing anyone else’s cases while it plays out.

The Arraignment, and What Comes After

At the June 10 arraignment, Chmura pleaded not guilty and was released on a $5,000 personal bond. Bond conditions require him to submit to alcohol monitoring via Soberlink twice a day, in the morning and evening, and prohibit any use of alcohol or controlled substances. A pretrial hearing was set for July 15. Michigan’s high-BAC law carries a maximum of 180 days in jail, fines between $200 and $700, up to 360 hours of community service, and a mandatory one-year license suspension on conviction.

Chmura’s attorney, David Kramer, has declined to discuss the specifics of the case and has described his client in general terms as a respected jurist. Clutch Justice has not located a public account of what happened at or after the July 15 pretrial hearing. The gap is noted here rather than filled in.

Still on the Bench

The most consequential fact in this case may be the least reported one. As of the most recent confirmed account, from late June, the 37th District Court’s administrator said Chmura remained on the bench. He is not hearing OWI cases himself, an obvious and narrow accommodation given the charge he faces. He is, as far as the public record shows, hearing everything else.

Michigan has no statutory mechanism that automatically suspends a sitting judge upon arraignment on a criminal charge, even a charge involving the exact conduct that charge criminalizes. The decision to keep a chief judge on the bench while he awaits trial on a drunk-driving charge is not, procedurally, anyone’s decision at all. It is simply what happens by default when no rule says otherwise.

Not Chmura’s First Time Before the Commission

This is not Chmura’s first encounter with judicial discipline machinery. In April 1998, the Michigan Judicial Tenure Commission filed a complaint alleging that Chmura’s campaign literature violated Canon 7(B)(1)(d) of the Code of Judicial Conduct, the rule governing what judicial candidates can say about themselves and their opponents. The case, In re Chmura, went to the Michigan Supreme Court twice. In its first ruling, the court held the canon as written was unconstitutional and narrowed it to prohibit only knowing or reckless falsehoods. On remand, the JTC reapplied the narrowed standard to Chmura’s fliers.

The case is still cited today in Michigan judicial ethics practice, not for what it found about Chmura specifically, but for the constitutional standard it produced. That history does not bear on the current OWI charge. It does establish that Chmura has been through a formal JTC proceeding before and understands, better than most judges, how that process works.

The Ludington Comparison

Chmura is not the only Michigan district judge to face a super-drunk driving charge in recent memory. Another Michigan judge, identified in coverage as Ludington, was arrested on a similar high-BAC charge and, according to reporting, took a plea deal resulting in six months of probation. The parallel is instructive less for the outcome than for the pattern: two sitting judges, two high-BAC charges, two cases that moved through the criminal system with limited public accounting for what happened to their judicial duties in the meantime.

What Michigan’s Binary System Doesn’t Do

Michigan’s approach to judicial fitness is essentially binary. A judge is licensed to sit, or a judge has been removed through a JTC proceeding that can take months or years. There is no established interim step for a judge facing an active criminal charge involving the exact impairment the charge describes, no structured temporary reassignment, no independent capacity review triggered by the arraignment itself. What exists instead is whatever the judge’s own court administration decides to do, reported after the fact, if reported at all.

That gap is not unique to Chmura. It is the same structural absence that runs through Michigan’s other recent judicial fitness cases: a system that reacts to documentation once it becomes public, rather than one built to flag the problem the moment it becomes a matter of record. A bench recusal from one case type is not evidence the system is working. It is evidence that someone made a narrow, sensible call in the absence of any broader rule telling them what else to do.

Chmura’s pretrial history in this case remains, as of this writing, incompletely documented in public reporting. Clutch Justice will update this record as the docket develops.