This current Arkansas Supreme Court is a fine mess, I tell you.
One of the latest dustups is that certain justices appear to have wrested administrative control from Chief Justice Jim Hannah.
They have divvied up salary money freed by sending an employee packing and not replacing her. The vacated job was in communications.
A majority of justices thought bad publicity for the court was the fault not of the court, but of the poor employee who fielded media inquiries.
Then the justices used that money on extraordinary raises for their own administrative aides and law clerks.
It's unsound budget policy, being one-time money. There is no guarantee the Legislature will re-appropriate money for a position no longer existing.
Actually, there seems to be a burning interest in higher pay on this court. Months ago two justices--Jo Hart and Karen Baker, widely suspected of helping to stall the same-sex marriage case--complained publicly to the commission proposing to raise their associate justice pay from $149,589 to $166,500. They said the raise was insufficient. The commission paid them no mind.
The other latest dustup is a modest buzz set off in this space Thursday.
I wrote about interviewing first-year Associate Justice Rhonda Wood of Conway on the kinds of matters most lawyers and court observers expect to be kept private by unwritten rules of supposedly lofty justice.
Justices never elaborate on cases beyond their written opinions. The privacy of their decision-making must remain sacrosanct.
So we are not to engage personally these robed eminences. We must bow like Wayne and Garth before Aerosmith, declaring "we're not worthy."
That's until you get to know them.
Trust me--we're worthy.
So let me explain why Rhonda Wood granted me that on-the-record interview.
First, it's her style. She is open and chatty. She uses Twitter and Facebook.
She says there's no reason not to talk about the administrative process of the court, by which she means the way the court does what it does, not how it rules on legal questions.
Indeed, Wood says, there is a compelling need for transparency on administrative matters when, as now, procedural misinformation abounds.
Here is her story: She stepped into a Supreme Court in January that had failed for some reason in the preceding term to issue a timely ruling on the same-sex marriage case that it had professed to "expedite." Then, at her first conference, a dispute arose over whether she or the special justice appointed to the case from the preceding fall should hear the still-pending matter.
She thought she should hear the case, but offered to accept the decision of the six other justices. The special justice wouldn't agree. Thus the matter lingered until May and June.
So word went out that justices were stalling for obvious political reasons--hoping the U.S. Supreme Court would take them off the hook.
The further charge was that Wood was in league with three other women justices--Hart, Baker and Courtney Goodson, politically ambitious wife of a politically wired and hyperactive class-action legal mogul from Texarkana--to facilitate this delay.
But she never was, Wood insists. She has tables showing she doesn't typically vote with those three.
Then she frequently beheld reports in this newspaper or on a blog that appeared to come from unattributed leaks of private court communications, presumably by or through her colleagues.
Wood told me she had no respect for all that anonymous leaking.
Then she looked up one day to see two of her colleagues--Chief Justice Hannah and Associate Justice Paul Danielson--making public release of their letters accusing other justices of "machinations" and "whole cloth" creations to delay the same-sex marriage case.
She disclosed that the court had decided in June to rule only on a narrow element of the same-sex marriage appeal--a pure state element--and abandoned even that after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled. But she didn't say which way the narrow state ruling went, because that would be inappropriate, crossing the line from process to an actual case.
I understand what she did. I find no substantive fault with it. I admire it.
But I observe her naïve political miscalculation.
The lingering narrative of her interview predictably is not based on anything she said, but on her saying anything at all. But any idea that Wood is more injudicious than the rest is nonsense.
The most injudicious action of all was that of the court in delaying and denying justice for months for political reasons. Whining publicly about an 11 percent raise was not judicious. And she was not directly critical of any other justices, unlike the public letters of Hannah and Danielson.
But I disagree with Wood that anonymous leaking to the press is not to be respected. Sometimes a person can accomplish more by getting credible and worthwhile information publicized without the burden of its attachment to the motives of the provider.
The ironic fact is that Wood would have been better off leaking anonymously rather than standing admirably for what she said.
But let us not lose sight that the messiness of this Supreme Court is pervasive, transcending any single judge's misdeed or misstep.
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 07/28/2015