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There are various options open to professional people when they find their work disrupted by the ring of a mobile phone. They can do as the actor Richard Griffiths famously did during a performance at the National Theatre: stop the show and order the offending party to leave at once.
But if they are a judge. Ah, then the choices become truly interesting.
Take the case of Judge Robert Restaino, who was hearing a routine session of domestic-violence offenders in a court in Niagara Falls City in upstate New York. The proceedings were interrupted by 10 or 11 rings of a phone and the noise, it seems, really got under his skin.
"Everyone is going to jail, every single person is going to jail in this courtroom unless I get that instrument now," he bellowed at the court. He wasn't joking.
Over the next two hours on that day in March 2005 the judge entered what a state commission on judicial conduct yesterday concluded was a period of "inexplicable madness". He began by ordering the doors of the court locked, and set the officers to searching for the phone.
When that failed to find the offending item he ordered each of the defendants present in the room up to his bench and in turn asked them if they knew whose phone it was. "When each in turn said they had no idea, he sent each in turn to jail. All 46 of them.
When a defendant protested the judge's actions were not fair to those who didn't possess the phone, Mr Restaino replied: "I know it isn't."
Court transcripts show that when another told him "This ain't right", the judge shot back: "You're right, it ain't right. Ain't right at all."
The judge's actions caused pandemonium. Extra officers had to be drafted into the court to control the crowd, and booking officers at the city jail were at full stretch. "We were playing Twister in here," one said at the time.
Fourteen of the defendants who could not post bail were shackled in irons and sent to the county jail.
The judge cooled off and later that afternoon released all 46. But the resentment he caused lingered.
A woman called Connie, who had to go to jail to bail out her husband that afternoon, told the Niagara Gazette: "Most of the people in there are there for anger management courses.
"Do you think that is really going to help them keep their anger intact? It sure didn't keep mine."
The "two hours of viral lunacy", as one member of the commission described it, has probably cost Restaino his job. The commission ruled that he should be removed from his $114,000 (£55,000) job for "an egregious and unprecedented abuse of judicial power". Restaino now has 30 days to appeal.
His lawyer pointed out that until that moment he had served 11 years as a judge without any disciplinary issues. "With the exception of two hours, his record is spotless."
"Collective Punishment"
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