Lawyers continued to argue Tuesday over a defense attorney’s scheme to allow an illegal immigrant escape federal authorities by leaving a Massachusetts courtroom out the back door and whether or not the judge overseeing the case was part of the plan.

The case stems from a 2018 incident in which Shelley Joseph, a district court judge, is accused of colluding with the immigrant’s attorney and a court officer to allow him escape out a back door of the courthouse after a hearing on charges that included drug possession. An Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer had been waiting outside the courtroom to detain the defendant, Jose Medina-Perez.

Tuesday’s proceedings before the state Commission for Judicial Conduct included testimony from the former Assistant District Attorney prosecuting Median-Perez’s non-immigration related Newton court appearance in 2018.

Former ADA Shannon McDermott told the court that Joseph and defense attorney David Jellinek’s part in the ordeal represented a “misguided attempt to do what they thought was right.”

McDermott said she did not know why she was asked to join a sidebar during Medina-Perez’s hearing in 2018, but that when she joined the conversation she was concerned when Joseph and Jellinek moved to take it off the record.

McDermott says she can’t remember the exact details of the conversation, but that she made it clear that the DA played no part in immigration matters. Jellinek, she said on Tuesday, communicated something along the lines of that he had a plan in place to help Medina-Perez escape.

“The conversation made me uncomfortable,” McDermott said.

After Medina-Perez was cleared of state charges and ordered released on his own recognizance, McDermott testified that she remembers leaving the court and meeting ICE agents in the lobby to wait for him to exit the courtroom doors.

McDermott said she was not left with the impression that the wanted man would be allowed to leave by the back door. Instead, she said she eventually realized that’s what had happened when she saw Jellinek leave the court without his client.

When the defense attorney was approaching her, she testified that she told him “I know what you did and that was not the right thing to do.”

According to McDermott, Jellinek just smiled and walked by. During his testimony during the first day of the hearing, Jellinek also recalled that an interaction of that sort had occurred.

Elizabeth Mulvey, an attorney for Joseph, said the judge was unaware of a plan by Medina-Perez’s defense attorney to help him leave the court through a door normally used for transporting prisoners.

“What Judge Joseph was actually doing was trying to give David Jellinek more time to figure out if this was the guy [wanted by ICE],” Mulvey said.

In allowing Jellinek and Medina-Perez to use the lock-up, McDermott acknowledged that Joseph  could have just been providing space for the defense attorney to speak with his client.

The Chief Clerk of the Newton District Court and the Spanish-language interpreter assigned to Medina-Perez’s case also both also testified Tuesday, though neither was able to speak as to the contents of the off-the-record sidebar conversation at the center of the judicial misconduct hearing.

The hearing resumes on Wednesday at 9 a.m.