You might think that the Justice Building west of the Capitol housing the offices of state Supreme Court justices and Court of Appeals judges would be a no-drama workplace.
You might expect it to be devoid of the kind of pettiness over pay and work-distribution common in more pedestrian environments.
You would think such a thing only if you harbored a naïve and romanticized notion of the grace and sophistication of people who walk around in fancy robes commanding us to rise when they enter the room to settle our oh-so-common disputes.
Let's check in on the latest Justice Building developments where we'll find the common human frailties of the everyday sidewalk.
On Tuesday, Chief Justice Dan Kemp of the Arkansas Supreme Court asked the independent commission setting constitutional-officer salaries for 11 percent raises for Supreme Court justices and 2 percent raises for Arkansas Court of Appeals judges.
That 2 percent raise recommended for the peon judges is more like what the rest of you will get if you're lucky.
Kemp's point seemed to be that we don't have a big enough pay margin between the highest esteemed jurists and the more pedestrian underling judges. The hierarchical remuneration differential is insufficient, you might say.
He also said "partially, yes," when asked if the pay raises were being sought because the Supreme Court justices recently had to consider seven death row appeals in 11 days--a record pace among state courts for deciding whether people live or die.
But that was Asa Hutchinson's one-time doing, one hopes. The justices want what would amount to overtime pay.
No justice or judge toiling in the Justice Building is hurting for money. These justices and judges are not having to wear those fancy robes to bed for lack of pajama cash.
And their workloads? They're not all that bad in the summer, which the jurists and justices take off.
Currently the Supreme Court chief justice gets $180,000 a year and the six associate justices get $166,910. Those represent nice raises from two years ago. But that $166,910 is less than what counterparts get in neighboring Louisiana ($168,900) and Missouri ($172,017).
So the proposal is to blow right past them, to $199,800 for the chief justice and $184,815 for the associate justices. Those black robes in adjoining states would be soiled by the Arkansas dust in which they'd be left.
Speaking of being left in the dust, Court of Appeals judges would go, by Kemp's request, from a mere $161,500 to $164,770. Their pay is close to that of Supreme Court justices now, which is the issue, which is to say the resentment.
Speaking of resentment, let us turn to the matter of work distribution.
On Wednesday, the day after the Supreme Court asked for the stupendous raise, the Court of Appeals issued an opinion making a ruling in a post-conviction relief petition filed by a prisoner. But before getting to that, the Court of Appeals felt obliged to explain in that written opinion how it came to be considering such a matter in the first place.
It explained--I'd more accurately say complained--that the Supreme Court had dumped on it all self-styled prisoner petitions arguing ineffective counsel and not involving death cases. It complained that the Supreme Court had done so in a mere small-print footnote to a per curium order.
And it complained that the Supreme Court had acted without explanation and without providing additional staff while it retained for itself a five-person office that had previously coordinated those prisoner petitions that it was handing off.
The Court of Appeals thinks it's being burdened with labor-intensive cases, considering that prisoner appeals aren't professionally done with legal citations like regular appeals. It is peeved that the relevant research staff is being retained by the workload-reducing Supreme Court.
The Supreme Court thinks the Court of Appeals does less, and lesser, work. The Supreme Court insists those five employees have been doing much more than handling the matters handed off to the Court of Appeals. The Supreme Court thinks Court of Appeals judges ought to be embarrassed about whining over having to read maybe two dozen circuit court hearing transcripts on prison petitions.
On Thursday, the Supreme Court called in Rita Gruber, chief judge of the Court of Appeals, for a woodshedding. Then the high court put out a news release saying the Court of Appeals didn't know what it was talking about.
All of this should give you confidence if you have legal matters arising to these lofty courts, one arrogant and the other whining, one taking its potshot in an order and the other in a news release.
One man's solution: The Supreme Court accepts its current pay and the Court of Appeals buckles down to do the new work the Supreme Court has assigned it.
------------v------------
John Brummett, whose column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, was inducted into the Arkansas Writers' Hall of Fame in 2014. Email him at [email protected]. Read his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.
Editorial on 05/21/2017