A whimsical judge was dismissed from the bench by the Virginia Supreme Court on Friday, making him only the second magistrate to be booted out of the service for judicial misconduct.

It was the end of the line for Juvenile and Domestic Relations Court Judge James Michael Shull of Gate City who hogged the limelight when he decided a custody case by flipping a coin and making a mentally-disturbed litigant drop her pants in open court.

"Unless our citizens can trust that judges will fairly resolve the disputes brought before our courts, and treat all litigants with dignity, our courts will lose the public's respect and confidence upon which our legal system depends," said the Virginia Supreme Court, in a decision penned by Justice Barbara Milano Keenan.

Shull could have received a mere censure but the justices, noting his misbehavior in the past, meted the stiffest penalty.

The judge also appeared before the Judicial Inquiry and Review Commission in 2004 for allegedly advising a woman to marry her abusive boyfriend and calling a teenager a "wuss" and a "mama's boy." The commission let him escape with just a slap on the wrist.

But the commission did not let him off easy the second time around.

It lodged a complaint the Supreme Court after Shull tossed a coin to determine which parent would have visitation with a child on Christmas and ordered a woman to drop her pants to see the stab wound in her leg. The woman sought a protective order against her partner.

The judge admitted to both incidents but insisted that in the custody battle, he merely wanted the parents to come to an agreement.

"A judge's act of tossing a coin in a courtroom to decide a legal issue pending before the court suggests that courts do not decide cases on their merits but instead subject litigants to games of chance in serious matters without regard to the evidence or applicable law," the court said.

It noted the judge also violated ethical standards when he went to his chambers to call a hospital on the woman's stab wound in the absence of the litigants.

Shull is only the second judge kicked out of the Virginia judiciary since the commission was established in 1971.