No, it's not. It's sympathy. Empathy involves a bit of imagination that most people lack.

edit:

"Empathy is the capacity to understand or feel what another being (a human or non-human animal) is experiencing from within the other being's frame of reference, i.e., the capacity to place oneself in another's position."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empathy

It's just the way that these words happen to be defined in English. They stand for different, but related concepts.

You don't know the judges experience, or life, which makes your point impossible to prove.

Why are you being so combative?

It's because he's better at empathy than us. :)

Your argument is with English, not me.

Our argument is with your specific views on the meaning of words.

Other sources[1] define empathy as "feeling what another person feels" and sympathy as "having compassion for a person without necessarily feeling what they feel". In that case, the judge is clearly empathizing with the defendant, and not merely sympathizing.

[1] http://grammarist.com/usage/empathy-sympathy/

Can you see any dramatic irony here?

People use words in a variety of ways - communication: a search for a language that is also yours!

Their username may contain a hint...

Ascribing my disagreement to "combativeness" is both combative and presumptive. I've said exactly what I meant, and why.

is the act of describing something as combative itself a combative thing?

It is.

does this mean people are "inable" to call something combative when it's combative?

Trolling is a art.

No, if anything the shared experience makes the judge more able to be empathetic. Most people would only be able to sympathize.

Empathy doesn't exclude shared experience.