There are a lot of judges in the US, very few voters pay any attention to them and just re-elect whoever, many aren't elected in the first place, and there are rarely any standards for who is or is not eligible to sit on the bench. Many counties and small towns are very corrupt (in a captured-by-a-family-or-two-and-their-pals kind of way) with the result that lots of local officials are at best terrible at their jobs, and at worst are actively breaking the law. All kinds of bad conduct happens at that level, most of it never making the news at all.