Arkansas Blog

There's plenty of smoke in the air already. This witch hunt has gone on long enough. Griffen has had these charges hanging over his head long enough.

Pee or get off the pot! If Griffen is the devil, the Judicial Discipline and Disability Commission is coming off looking like skunks.

Their charges are flimsy enough without pulling all the shenanigans....are there no honest men left on the face of the earth?

Max, AT, thank you for this thread.
It seems this is the only place in this state where an issue like this gets reported in its entirety. Sad state of affairs for Ark media.

Judge Griffen has decided-ruled on over 2000 case and has never been reversed.

LWood

I seriously doubt any Arkansas COUNTY JUDGES will be reading this but in case an assistant does here goes:
You folks have an organization that is politcally potent. In the years to come your county roads will suffer major damages due to heavy use. While 90% of our Ark COUNTY JUDGES are Demos it's an opportune time to meet with Gov. Beebe and discuss and plan for taxing this extraction so that FUNDS
will be available when it comes time to repair the bridges, run-off, erosion ditches and COUNTY ROADS in your respective County.

If memory serves me correctly Texas and Okla drillers and pumpers, and wildcatters will be here with little or no regard for the damages they will inflict on your COUNTIES.

After they make their billions from the Fayetteville Shale extractions the wildcatters, drillers will pack up and leave, dissolve their corporations and form a new one. There will be no way to hold them accountable.

JUDGES know that getting Quorum Courts to act, the Sheriff to act for road protection takes weeks, months, and sometimes years. NOW is the time to act. Sit down with our very amicable Gov. Beebe and get something rolling so we the average taxpayers need not foot the bill for the damages of Okla and Tex drillers.
Thanks.
Larry Woodall

This is a shameless, pointless pursuit started by Jim Badami-- whose obsession with Judge Griffen was positively Freudian-- and continued by David Stewart. It's time somebody-- perhaps the Judiciart Committee -- hauled Stewart and his lackeys up to the Capitol to explain how they spend the taxpayers' dollars. I've always been curious what Griffen must have done to give Badami such a hardon for him, but apparenly Stewart has one, too. A committee meeting, attended by interested parties like the ACLU and the Legislative Black Caucus, might shed a little light on why Judge Griffen warrants such persecution.

Anybody got any papers?

April 16, 2007
Sidebar
When a Judge Offers an Opinion Away From the Bench
By ADAM LIPTAK
LITTLE ROCK, Ark.

Judge Wendell L. Griffen sits on the state appeals court here, and he likes to give a lively speech now and then. That may cost him his job.

When Judge Griffen finds himself behind a lectern, he does not wrap himself in the tapestry of platitudes that is the typical judge's luncheon talk. He has more concrete and urgent things on his mind, like the war in Iraq.

"Everything I know about right and wrong," he said about the war last year, "everything my parents told me about truth and lies, everything I understand about God, tells me that this is wrong."

The state's Judicial Discipline and Disability Commission says that speech and a handful of others may have violated canons of judicial ethics, and it is pursuing charges that could end in Judge Griffen's suspension or removal from the bench. Last month, the commission voted to hold a hearing in the matter, saying there is probable cause to believe that Judge Griffen had damaged public confidence in the integrity and impartiality of the judiciary.

In an interview, James A. Badami, the commission's executive director, elaborated. "If you are a staunch Republican and a Bush supporter and have to come before this judge," Mr. Badami said, sounding exasperated, "and this judge has now said some terrible things about Bush and the Bush administration - and now those people are having to appear before him?"

Judges have fewer First Amendment rights than the rest of us. But the law on what they may say has been in turmoil for the last five years, ever since the United States Supreme Court said that candidates for elected judicial offices were free to say where they stood on disputed legal and political questions.

The reasoning in that decision, Republican Party of Minnesota v. White, may well protect Judge Griffen, who is up for re-election next year. And if voters are unhappy with what he has said or with the fact that he has spoken out at all, they can certainly vote against him.

Judge Griffen, in an interview in his chambers here, questioned whether the job of policing his speech should be left to a disciplinary commission.

"What we're really talking about is orthodoxy, not ethics," he said. "Orthodoxy about what we consider seemly for judges. Judges are supposed to be seen and not heard. Judges are supposed to be, if not mystical, mysterious."

Judge Griffen is courteous and deliberate, but he has a way of infuriating people. "It's not that His Honor Wendell Griffen is a disgrace to the Arkansas judiciary but that he doesn't seem aware that he's a member of it," The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, the local daily, wrote in an editorial in 2005 after the judge questioned the administration's response to Hurricane Katrina in a speech to the National Baptist Convention U.S.A.

"Judicial temperament is a quality most noticeable when it is absent," the editorial continued, "as it is when Judge Griffen decides it's time to do a little race hustling."

Judge Griffen is black, an ordained minister and the child of poor laborers in Delight, Ark. He first attended an integrated school in 10th grade. He is 54 now, and he has seen a lot.

He has served on the court since 1996, and he loves his work. "It's like being paid to eat ice cream," he said.

But Judge Griffen also wants to speak his mind. He acknowledges some limits. He said he would not discuss pending or impending lawsuits, impugn the judicial system, or make partisan endorsements. "That's to be distinguished from public-policy-type statements," he said.

Arkansas and the 38 other states that elect judges have made some tradeoffs, as Justice Sandra Day O'Connor recognized in her concurrence in the White decision. "If the state has a problem with judicial impartiality," she wrote, "it is largely one the state brought upon itself by continuing the practice of popularly electing judges."

But Arkansas seems to want to have it both ways. It insists that there are no politics in a political process. "Right now," Judge Griffen said, "we conduct judicial elections like student council elections."

And the disciplinary authorities act like school principals terrified of even the hint of controversy. One of the charges against Judge Griffen, for instance, is that he expressed dismay at intolerance.

At a deposition in February, Mr. Badami, the commission's executive director, was asked whether "judges act improperly if they express their opinion disfavoring anti-homosexual animus."

"In a public setting, yes," he answered.

By the end of a long interview the other day, Judge Griffen seemed weary. But he said the charges against him had not made him reconsider his attitude toward talking in public.

"The best ships," he said, "are the ones that stand up to the wind."
NY Times, April 16, 2007

Fight for liberty! Sign the petition demanding the charges be dropped against Wendell Griffen now, before it's too late for a fair judiciary in Ark. NO Tim Griffin stunts in our backyard!

http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/supportjudgewendellgriffen/signatures.html

The Commission's staff seems to have convinced itself that it must silence Judge Griffen lest he make a mockery of the state rules concerning judicial conduct.

Yet, it is the staff itself that mocks justice and the rule of law, by allowing the Commission to become the willing pawn of those who care not a whit about the appearance of impartiality -- but simply despise Judge Griffen because of the *content* of his statements.

Re: James A. Badami's "Freudian obsession" with Judge Griffen: might this have anything at all to do with Badami's views re: homosexuality?

He is, after all, a member of the board of the Thomas More Society, a number of whose chapters have weighed in against same-sex marriage in terms that sound eerily like those used by the esteemed senator from Louisiana, David Vitter.

In fact, I find that Vitter's name appears in "The Saint Thomas More List" of the One Nation Under God website (no, I am not making this up). The list states,

"Among the saints, the Church venerates many men and women who served God through their generous commitment to politics and government. Among these, Saint Thomas More, who was proclaimed Patron of Statesmen and Politicians, gave witness by his martyrdom to "the inalienable dignity of the human conscience".

We pay tribute to the following legislators who fulfill their duties faithfully in the spirit of the Gospel. Please let them know you appreciate their courage and conviction."

Maybe Judge Griffen has run afoul of the Hon. James Badami because the Judge has dared to suggest that God may view gay humans differently than Vitter and the St. Thomas More Society do. Griffen speaks as a representative of the black church--in a voice that right-wing Republicans do not want "the" black church to assume.

In doing so, he has dared to break with some African-American judges in Arkansas who, to their ever-lasting shame, are perfectly willing to toe the homophobic line and receive Badami's approval, no matter how many ethical lines they transgress in exercising judicial power and privilege.

For my money, Wendell Griffen is a man of high honor and integrity, and Arkansas needs to be proud of him.

So who's going to file the FOI
complaint? Anybody?

Bold and Blue, can you tell me how to file an FOI complaint? Or how to get information about doing so? Thanks.