Piazza to retire after long time on bench

Everything anyone needs to know about retiring Pulaski County Circuit judge Chris Piazza can be found in the last four lines of a ruling he wrote six years ago, longtime friend Tippie McCullough says.

The passage capped Piazza’s 13-page decision that struck down state prohibitions, some in the form of voter- approved laws, on same-sex marriage.

“It’s been over forty years since Mildred Loving was given the right to marry the person of her choice. The hatred and fears have long since vanished and she and her husband lived full lives together; so it will be for the same-sex couples,” Piazza wrote. “It is time to let that beacon of freedom shine brighter on all our brothers and sisters. We will be stronger for it.”

The new year will see Piazza closing the curtain

on 46 years of public service. For the most of the past 43 years, he has been center stage in the public eye, first as a prosecutor for 13 years, including three terms as the elected prosecutor for Perry and Pulaski counties before winning his judge’s position in 1990.

Along the way, he earned a reputation as a reformer, with then- Gov. Bill Clinton appointing Piazza in 1987 to lead a panel to draft legislation to overhaul state ethics laws and campaign-finance disclosure regulations.

As judge, he might be bestknown for presiding over the capital-murder trial of Curtis Vance, the Marianna man who fatally beat 26-year-old TV anchor Anne Pressly after raping her while she slept during a break-in at her Little Rock home in 2008. Vance was sentenced to life in prison in November 2009 following a week-long trial.

But it’s the 67 words in that “magnificent decision” that capture the essence of Piazza because they show his grounding in the law, his devotion to people and his optimism for the future, all bound together with his poet’s touch, said McCullough, a Democratic state representative from Little Rock.

The 1967 Mildred Loving decision by the U.S. Supreme Court struck down bans on interracial marriages statewide. The high court cited Loving repeatedly in its 2015 ruling recognizing the marriage rights of same-sex couples.

Piazza’s ruling said marriage is a right just as strong and important as the right to own guns, vote or practice religion.

He had made other difficult decisions before. In 2010, he found another voter-approved law, a ban on adoptions by unmarried cohabitating couples, violated state constitutional privacy protections. The Arkansas Supreme Court agreed with him the following year. The law was passed to get around a judicially imposed ban on regulations that had prohibited gay couples from adopting.

But his May 2014 decision was one of the few rulings he has written himself. Generally, like many judges, he has the prevailing lawyer in a lawsuit submit an order for him to sign.

McCullough, one of Arkansas’ few openly gay leaders, said she’s practically memorized those words. She and her wife, prosecutor Barbara Mariani, had been married about seven months when Piazza reached his decision after about 10 months of litigation. They had been wed in New Mexico, one of 17 states that already allowed such unions.

“It meant so much,” she said of Piazza’s ruling. “It was so important for us to be recognized by our home state … that this could happen for our family and friends.”

McCullough, 57, said she’d have been confident in any decision Piazza made because she knows his commitment to upholding the law.

“Knowing what’s in his heart … he’s always going to follow the law,” she said.

A federal judge found Arkansas’ prohibitions unconstitutional in November 2014, but an appeal of Piazza’s ruling went nowhere. Despite a promise to expedite its review, the Arkansas Supreme Court never took up the issue and dismissed the case 13 months later on the same day the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the marriage ban nationally.

“He brings a humanity to the bench” that’s unique, defense attorney Tim Boozer said. “He believes in second chances.”

Boozer, 53, has had a frontrow seat to the past 19 years of Piazza’s tenure as the lead public defender in his court. An attorney for about 30 years, Boozer says he has appeared before the judge more times than any other lawyer.

Boozer said Piazza sees himself as a servant of the public and that he recognizes and acknowledges the humanity of the defendants who appear before him like no one else Boozer has seen. Piazza is firm but unflappable on the bench, always patient and respectful, regularly letting his clients speak out — even vent — and truly listens to what they have to say, Boozer said.

“He’s steady,” the attorney said. “He doesn’t hold it against them.”

Boozer said over the past months, his clients, almost to a man, have used their court appearances to wish the judge well, even the defendants he’s sent to prison before.

For Pulaski County Prosecutor Larry Jegley, Piazza’s departure from the courthouse means a mentor, confidant and long-time friend will no longer be just next door, a few steps away from Jegley’s office, for quick visits and occasional consultations.

“He was one of the very first people I went to talk to when I decided I was going to run for prosecutor back in 1996,” Jegley, 62, said. “He never crossed any lines with the prosecutor’s office, but he was just always someone I could go to and just bounce things off of him.”

Their lives have intersected repeatedly over the years. Piazza was the North Little Rock Police Department’s first legal adviser in 1975. Jegley was its second, taking Piazza’s place when Piazza went to work for the prosecutor’s office under Lee Munson.

“He’s a lawyer’s lawyer. I think the courthouse is going to be diminished without him,” Jegley said. “He is steady as a rock. As a judge, I never saw him get him impatient. I never saw him exhibit bias to any party or attorney. He was always — even if he was gutting your case with a necessary wise ruling — respectful.”

Piazza’s courtroom also has been an effective classroom for new prosecutors who’ve been assigned there, Jegley said.

“Everyone I’ve sent there has come out a better lawyer … because of the way he helps guide young lawyers and gives them advice,” he said.

As a prosecutor, Piazza had great instincts about how to present a case to a jury, Jegley said, recalling Piazza’s closing argument in the October 1982 murder trial of Mary Lee Orsini, who received a life sentence for arranging the 1982 shooting death of Alice McArthur.

Alice McArthur was the wife of Orsini’s attorney, Bill McArthur. Authorities said Orsini wanted her dead so she could pursue a relationship with McArthur.

Alice McArthur had survived a car-bombing at the family home about five weeks before she was shot to death at the house by two men, one of them posing as a flower deliveryman and acting on Orsini’s orders.

In closing arguments, Orsini’s lawyer used a chalkboard to emphasize his presentation to the jury. Piazza began his final remarks by wiping that board clean, Jegley said.

“He gets up, looks at the board, looks at the jury. He pulls his suit coat off and he uses his suit coat to erase everything [the defense] had put on the board and told the jury they needed to forget about that,” Jegley said. “It was just one of those moments, and I’m sure it wasn’t planned.”

Piazza tried many notable cases as an elected prosecutor, winning a theft conviction on Steve Clark, the state’s longest-serving attorney general, for misusing his state-issued credit card, and unsuccessfully pursuing an arson charge against state Supreme Court Justice John Purtle despite convicting two of Purtle’s associates.

But the Orsini case was his most notorious trial, its every twist and turn reported statewide in Little Rock’s daily newspapers and broadcast on the TV news.

Piazza was a deputy prosecutor under Wilbur “Dub” Bentley when he tried Orsini for the McArthur slaying. Orsini denied the accusations for years, up until shortly before her 2003 death in prison when she confessed, both to arranging McArthur’s death and to fatally shooting her own husband, Ron Orsini months before McArthur’s death.

She had been convicted of first-degree murder for Ron Orsini’s death but the conviction was overturned in 1985 by the Arkansas Supreme Court.

Piazza was the perfect prosecutor, both to present the complex case to a jury and to navigate the political storm that the proceedings generated, said political columnist Gene Lyons, 77.

“What she had done, [Piazza] had to make it comprehensible to the jury. He did that with great insight and kept it simple for everyone to understand,” Lyons said. “What she did was sow confusion and misrule.”

According to Lyons, who published Widow’s Web, the definitive account of the Orsini case,i n 1993, Piazza had deep understanding of the evidence against Orsini and matched that knowledge with the confidence of the stand-out football player and baseball player he had been in high school and college.

With two competing newspapers in Little Rock and TV news on the rise, reporters fought to print or broadcast every last detail to the public, creating a three-year storm of publicity, which was further aggravated by Tommy Robinson, the sheriff who relentlessly pursued Bill McArthur for his wife’s murder.

Robinson, who later was elected to Congress in the state’s 2nd District, continually interjected himself into the case, Lyons said, pitting the sheriff’s office against Little Rock police and prosecutors.

Lyons said the public spotlight that fell on Piazza certainly catapulted him to the prosecutor’s office and likely contributed to his successful election as judge.

In all of his years in the courtroom, Piazza said he has never lost faith in the American jury system with its emphasis on the importance of a fair trial conducted with proper legal representation.

“I think the jury trial is so important to who we are. It’s rooted in our history and our Constitution.” he said, describing how he outlined the procedure to prospective jurors. “I tell them that they can never make a wrong decision. As long as you have that opportunity — and it’s done properly — you can’t second-guess it later.”

Piazza is one of five Pulaski County Circuit judges retiring this year because of a state law that requires judges who are elected to office after they turn 70 to forfeit their retirement benefits, which can amount to 80 percent of their annual salary. Piazza reached that milestone three years ago, so he declined to run for reelection. Voters chose Casey Tucker, 48, of Little Rock to replace him.

Piazza said he would not have chosen to retire now and has no definitive plans for the future, beyond walking his dog.

He said he never had any interest in pursuing private practice, inspired in part by a conversation he once had with late Dale Bumpers, the attorney who went on to be governor and senator and had endorsed a career of service over self.

“He told me … public service was the best profession you can have,” Piazza said. “Maybe it’s naive to believe that, but I believe that public service is something that’s so beneficial to all of us.”

Piazza