ABOUT THIS EPISODE
She's been Cumberland and Monroe County's district judge for seventeen years this month — appointed in her early thirties, elected ever since — and this conversation moves between two things at once: what the job actually looks like day to day, and what it's cost her to hold a courtroom's worth of other people's worst days with a straight face.Judge Castillo walks through the arc from WKU undergrad to University of Louisville law school, two years as assistant county attorney in Cumberland County, a stint in private defense practice, and then the judgeship — a path she says she picked out loud at age eight and never really wavered from. She and Joseph get into how seventeen years on the bench changed her from someone who saw cases in black and white to someone who's learned that almost nobody ends up in front of a judge starting from the same place. The case she names as the turning point: an 18-year-old charged alongside both parents for manufacturing methamphetamine, and the moment she realized the kid had been raised into it.The back half is drug court — the felony-diversion program she's run for over a decade, where participants spend up to two years under supervision (drug testing, mandatory employment, counseling, GED requirements) instead of prison. She breaks down the five-phase structure, the honest recidivism numbers, and why she thinks the people who stay sober are the ones who stop treating recovery as something they finish. They also get into what it's like to be a public figure who legally can't defend herself when rumors spread, why she still thinks Zoom court lost something real during COVID that in-person hearings never will, and — because it's Average Joseph — exactly what you should and shouldn't say to a judge if you're the one standing in front of the bench.Off the bench: growing up a UK fan in a family of UofL diehards, tennis over football, and why she agreed to root for the Falcons just for this episode.Got a guest you want to hear from, or a question for a future episode? Drop it in the comments — Joseph reads all of them.🎙️ Subscribe for new episodes of the Average Joseph Podcast, recorded in Tompkinsville, KY.#AverageJosephPodcast #MonroeCountyKY #DrugCourt #DistrictJudge #KentuckyCourts #CriminalJustice #Tompkinsville
