Under the big top

AHutchinson created the cir- cus, but Wendell Griffen and Bart Hester emerged as the zanier acts.

Griffen was on the left side of the big top and Hester the right.

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A pastor and circuit judge in Pu- laski County, Griffen is an admirable man of great passion and moral commitment. He treasures the exercise of free expression of that passion in the public square. He says sitting as a judge should deprive him of no constitutional right.

He is fully entitled to all of it—passion, commitment, public demonstration.

But, by that demonstration, he makes a mockery of our precious and already challenged system of justice. He defies the vital and arduously achieved principles of judicial detachment and fair, studied judicial temperament.

In the public square, his behavior amounts to an unfettered commitment to passion. But, when blended with his robed presence on a judge’s bench, his behavior can reveal bias, or at least its unrelenting and equally erosive appearance.

A judge should not, especially in one day, and especially with that day being Friday:

● Demonstrate against the death penalty at the Governor’s Mansion gate by lying supine on a cot made to look like a lethally injected inmate’s gurney, and …

● Grant a temporary restraining order on a pharmaceutical company’s complaint that presumes to stop an assembly line of hurry-up lethal injections scheduled by the abovereferenced governor in his production of the circus.

The issue with Griffen is public behavior that plainly reveals pre-existing opinions while he otherwise bears a public responsibility to the law to consider matters objectively.

The solution is clear: He must cling to his right to express himself in the public square. It’s the judging he should give up.

No one else can feel his passion or exercise for him his right of expression. But there are scores of local lawyers who can do his judging without inviting the losing side to perceive bias.

The problem is not with Griffen’s judging, which is fine. He probably made the right judicial decision Friday, even as he fatally compromised it.

New allegations from a pharmaceutical company that the state misrepresented itself to secure a drug the company didn’t want used for killing— that’s a decent-enough new argument to qualify as a reason to hold off on imminent executions using that drug until the allegation can be fully aired.

U.S. District Judge Kristine Baker issued a somewhat similar decision— but a broader and more credible one— the next day.

Judge Baker performed her somber assignment without befouling it with extracurriculars. She spent the week holding weed-deep hearings into the night, then writing a 101-page, highly detailed ruling.

Overturned or not, Baker’s ruling demonstrates that responsible and exhaustive deliberation is a more appropriate judicial antecedent than personal spectacle-making.

Now to Bart Hester, the Koch brothers’ personal state senator from Cave Springs in northwestern Arkansas.

What happened was that some of the Legislature’s less-restrained professed “Christian” conservatives—Bob Ballinger, Jason Rapert, most prominently—were on Twitter Friday night invoking Griffen’s impeachment, based on their anger over his action and the temporary delay in executions.

That prompted me to remark on social media that, views on capital punishment aside, I simply could not fathom a publicly expressed itch by elected officials to get the killing started.

Hester chimed in to say he’d been waiting 20 years for these victims’ families to get the satisfaction of these executions and that waiting 20 years was no “itch.”

But it most certainly was. Hester had thoroughly confirmed that he was itching, and that the itch was getting worse, and that he’d just about had it with any more delays in getting his chronic itch scratched.

I replied that maybe the Legislature could meet in special session to institute firing squads and that legislators themselves could provide the teams of shooters.

Hester replied: “It’s being discussed. My top 10 alternatives don’t seem to pass the initial cruelty test.”

Beyond confirming legislative consideration of firing squads, Hester essentially boasted that, if he had his way, we’d be cruel in the way we kill.

Advocating cruelty and unconstitutionality once were no-nos. Now they are matters of social-media braggadocio and political grandstanding.

This “itch” is all about giving victims’ families “closure,” which is euphemistic for revenge. That desire is more than understandable among grieving loved ones. But a loved one acting on that revenge to kill the accused perpetrator would himself be guilty of a crime.

Yet our reigning policymakers in Arkansas advocate as virtuous that the state embrace that vengeance to carry out the crime.

By his circus, Asa invited the world’s attention to a place where one of the judges and one of the legislators—at the very least—would be better kept under wraps.