SACRAMENTO - The Third District Court of Appeal has offered some blunt advice for a Sacramento County Superior Court judge: Before you issue a ruling, let a trial finish.

In a decision (.pdf) published Friday, a three-justice panel ordered new proceedings in the divorce of a Sacramento-area couple whose original 2006 trial ended abruptly when Judge Peter McBrien left the bench just as a lawyer was questioning - in mid-sentence - a witness.

McBrien did not return - he said he had to handle an emergency protective order request - but did send word that he would decide the case on additional declarations and closing briefs limited to three pages.

"This method of conducting a trial cannot be condoned in a California courtroom," Justice M. Kathleen Butz wrote in the unanimous decision.

McBrien's walkout and subsequent ruling so infuriated the husband in the case, Ulf Johan Carlsson, that he has launched a recall drive against the judge. Carlsson and other McBrien critics have until late August to gather almost 30,000 signatures to qualify the measure for the ballot.

"We'll get him," Carlsson said Friday.

The court's public information office said McBrien had no comment.

From the start of the trial, the appellate panel said, McBrien seemed irritated with Carlsson, and his attorney, Sharon Huddle. McBrien threatened to declare a mistrial if the proceedings weren't finished by noon of the second day. When Huddle warned that a witness from Orange County might not make the deadline, McBrien responded, "All I'm telling you is if it's not completed by noon, it's a mistrial."

On what turned out to be the trial's final day, Huddle asked the judge for a break to use the rest room. "You know, you're approaching a mistrial," McBrien responded.

The judge and attorney also had a testy exchange over McBrien's demand that Carlsson, a state worker, produce conflict-of-interest documents that state employees are required to file. When Huddle questioned why the judge wanted papers unrelated to the divorce, McBrien said they might expose Carlsson to "potential penalties far beyond what we're talking about today."

Carlsson has accused the judge of sending the papers, which did not disclose his interest in rental property, to his employer, the Department of General Services, which fired him. In previous media accounts, McBrien declined to discuss Carlsson's specific accusations.

McBrien ruled against Carlsson on almost every issue, even ordering him to pay child support to his wife before the custody issue was resolved.

"Although we have found no case like this one, in which the trial judge literally walked out of the courtroom in mid-trial, our courts have consistently applied the rule of automatic reversal where a party is prevented from having his or her full day in court," Butz wrote.

Carlsson said he filed a complaint with the Commission on Judicial Performance, which is no stranger to McBrien. The commission publicly admonished (.pdf) the judge in 2002 for having mature oak trees on a neighboring public nature preserve cut down to improve the view of a river near his home. McBrien pleaded no contest to a misdemeanor charge related to the tree-cutting and was placed on probation.