Judge Silver

Judge Silver
Chief Judge Silver (painted by Carlos Ezquerra)
Publication information
Publisher	Rebellion Developments
First appearance	2000 AD prog 457 (1986)
Created by	John Wagner, Alan Grant and Cliff Robinson
In-story information
Full name	Thomas Silver

Chief Judge Thomas Silver was chief judge (2108 to 2112) of the fictional city of Mega-City One in the Judge Dredd comic strip.

He began his career as a street judge, serving during the Atomic War and the Second American Civil War. To his later shame, in the early 2070s he was one of the many judges who agreed with Morton Judd's ideas of genetically altering the citizens to be more docile. In 2096 he was wounded in action and compelled to retire from active service. He became principal lecturer in Applied Violence at the Academy of Law, teaching the next generation of Mega-City judges. (While the strip never explicitly said so, as a tutor he would have been part of the Academy's resistance to the insane Chief Judge Cal, and later seen action when the Academy was attacked during the Apocalypse War.)

In 2108 Chief Judge McGruder resigned and left the city on the Long Walk. One of her final acts as chief judge was to appoint Silver to the Council of Five, the city's highest legislature. The Council unanimously chose Silver for the highest office.

Silver quickly proved to be the most right-wing, hardline chief judge the city had ever seen. In 2111, when the corrupt "STAR Judges" military platoon committed an act of deliberate genocide against the Quayaan species, Silver had the team killed for their crimes and then hushed it up, deciding to exploit the situation: the team were 'martyrs', the Quayaan killed in a legitimate act of war, and the planet was rightful spoils of war. (Beforehand, Silver had been attempting a peace deal with the planet.)

In 2109 he ordered a crack-down on the Democracy movement (a loose affiliation of organisations dedicated to democratic reform ever since the Justice Department usurped the elected government of the United States in 2070), putting Judge Dredd in personal charge of a secret campaign to smear the protest groups' leaders and to sabotage their efforts at peaceful demonstration. Undercover judges placed among the protesters turned a peaceful protest march into a violent riot, giving Dredd the excuse he needed to attack the march with riot squads and make mass arrests. Silver used the ensuing massacre as an example of the dangers of democracy and the need for the iron rule of the judges. Armed with this excuse to tighten control, he took every opportunity to do so.