Associate Justice Rhonda Wood of Conway is the first-year member of the Arkansas Supreme Court who does Twitter and says justices needn't be so aloof.
This former high scorer on the state bar exam is so willing to talk that she has now taken me up on an interview request I made mostly on a lark months ago. She did so to address what she considers widespread misapprehensions, mostly on procedural matters, that do a disservice to the court and justice and herself.
Wood said in that interview Monday afternoon that the current state Supreme Court did not vote, as rumored in mid-June, on the full substance of the appeal of Circuit Judge Chris Piazza's ruling on same-sex marriage. She said the court voted at that time only on the state-specific part of Piazza's ruling.
That was Piazza's finding that the voters of the state could not vote to enact a state constitutional amendment that violated any basic right bestowed elsewhere in the state Constitution.
It was obvious in mid-June, Wood said, that the U.S. Supreme Court would rule momentarily on the main issue. When it did, she supported a unanimous or near-unanimous decision of the state court to toss the whole state case including that narrow state part ready for ruling.
That narrow part had been inadequately briefed, Wood said. She said it will inevitably come up again in a fuller context and greater focus.
Wood, a former law school teacher and assistant dean in Little Rock, said she walked into her first conference in her first week as a justice in January to find that there were eight justices in the room.
The Arkansas Supreme Court has seven members.
On the speaker phone from Harrison for that opening conference was retired judge Robert McCorkindale, whom Gov. Mike Beebe had appointed the preceding October as a special justice to fill a vacancy for the same-sex case. Wood subsequently had been elected without opposition to the seat that McCorkindale had been filling on the gay-marriage case by special appointment.
Wood said she really didn't want or need to sit on the gay-marriage case, but believed from her reading that the law required it. She said some of the other justices were entrenched in the proposition that McCorkindale should go away and that she should hear the case anew.
Wood wasn't there last fall and wouldn't speculate, but it is generally suspected that the court sitting at that time had voted either 5-2 or 4-3 to overturn the state's ban on same-sex marriage, with McCorkindale in the majority. It is further widely rumored that Justice Jo Hart said she wanted to dissent, but then purposely never got around to writing that dissent before the term ended, leaving the case undecided.
The theory is that Hart and Justices Courtney Goodson and Karen Baker argued for Wood's hearing the case either to delay it further or to fashion a new majority to reverse the ruling. That assumes that Wood would vote to overturn Piazza. But Wood told me nobody could possibly know how she would vote.
Wood said she offered at that contentious first-week conference in January to leave the room and accept whatever decision the justices would make about which of the competing justices would hear the same-sex case--if, that is, McCorkindale would hang up the phone and accept the decision as well. She said he declined.
Wood wound up on the case by a late May ruling of a Supreme Court heavy with self-disqualifications and special appointees by Gov. Asa Hutchinson.
McCorkindale subsequently told me by phone that he didn't remember things quite as Wood did, but that it was true he wanted to stay on the case. He said that was the law and commonly accepted practice.
He said Wood plainly wanted on the case. And he said the precedent Wood cited to the contrary was from 1846, before the implementation of the current state constitution, and applied to a "justice pro tem," meaning one appointed for general temporary service, not to a specific case.
Wood told me the widespread notion that she's part of a four-woman clique with Hart, Goodson and Baker is false and belied by statistics she had her staff compile.
She said the four justices voting most commonly together in the majority this year have been Hart, Goodson, Baker and a male, Robin Wynne.
Justices aren't supposed to talk about their conferences, as Wood has done here. But this court has been famously beset by factions and uncommon enmity.
Wood told me somebody on the court has been making leaks of private communications, for which she has no respect.
She added: "I will be a pariah. But I'm already not seen as being on either team. There is an unwritten understanding that justices don't talk about votes in conference, and let the opinions speak for the decisions. But that is in regard to cases and not administrative issues, and, given the leaks, I feel strongly that the truth needs to be heard."
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John Brummett's column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Email him at [email protected]. Read his blog at brummett.arkansasonline.com, or his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.
Editorial on 07/23/2015